Taxes compared: Think your taxes are bad?

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Believe it or not, Americans enjoy some of the lowest income tax rates in the world. Today of all days, it might not seem so.

"When you look at the overall tax burden, the U.S. is quite low," said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban Institute in Washington, D.C., and former director of the office of research for the Internal Revenue Service.

For a family with one wage-earner and two children, only Iceland and Ireland have a lower income tax burden than the U.S., according to the most recent data for 2005.

Full report at MSN Money

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Yes, but you'll notice that those countries which have a significantly higher tax rate are also the countries which actually provide some benefits for their citizens, e.g. universal health care and retirement benefits on which a senior citizen can actually survive.

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Here's a pie chart of where federal tax dollars go.

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Of the $100000.00 you paid in taxes:

$29968.20 goes to the military
$18602.90 goes to pay the interest on the debt
$20273.80 goes to health care
$6581.60 goes to income security
$3670.10 goes to education
$3437.60 goes to benefits for veterans
$2688.70 goes to nutrition spending
$2143.70 goes to housing
$1724.70 goes to environmental protection
$937.00 goes to job training
$10515.00 goes to all other expenses

Source:
National Priorities Project
http://nationalpriorities.org/auxiliary/interactivetaxchart/taxchart.html

Be interesting to compare our pie chart to other countries.

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That pie chart makes me realize medicare probably isn't the fastest growing expenditure in govt. The interest on the debt is.

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And it will get worse.

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I was curious what our taxes in the US would be if it included univerisal health. The US spends 16% of GDP for health care. Assume GDP is equal to income and add the 16% to our tax rate to compare to the rest of the world.

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The time my head jerked up on mention of taxes was from a friend who was a post doc from Norway. Whoooooo.
On the other hand, there were various bennies.

That was a long time ago, don't know about Norway's taxes now. Or mine, whine.

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That table is the tax burden of, like - average wage-earners? Cause I'd guess the numbers would vary big time depending how much you earn..

Not surprised to see my newly adopted country second only to Belgium and Germany...

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parados wrote:

I was curious what our taxes in the US would be if it included univerisal health. The US spends 16% of GDP for health care. Assume GDP is equal to income and add the 16% to our tax rate to compare to the rest of the world.

Look at Oz's taxes..and we provide universal health care...and our conservative government lies, and saya we are ridiculously highly taxed, cos they want to get rid of it.

I would happily pay higher taxes to keep education, health care etc of high quality.

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Okay, I'll pipe up as dummy, how do you check some country after Japan on that site?

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2 columns osso..

I didn't see it right away either..

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parados wrote:

I was curious what our taxes in the US would be if it included univerisal health. The US spends 16% of GDP for health care. Assume GDP is equal to income and add the 16% to our tax rate to compare to the rest of the world.

Ireland and Iceland both have Univerisal Health Care and their tax rates are still pretty low in comparison to the other countries listed.

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Ireland and Iceland are only one letter different from each other. No wonder they have low tax rates. That's it. I propose we change our name to Imeland. That should lower our tax rates.

Imeland - 3 syllables - i - me -land

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xingu wrote:

Here's a pie chart of where federal tax dollars go.

Quote:

Of the $100000.00 you paid in taxes:

$29968.20 goes to the military
$18602.90 goes to pay the interest on the debt
$20273.80 goes to health care
$6581.60 goes to income security
$3670.10 goes to education
$3437.60 goes to benefits for veterans
$2688.70 goes to nutrition spending
$2143.70 goes to housing
$1724.70 goes to environmental protection
$937.00 goes to job training
$10515.00 goes to all other expenses

Source:
National Priorities Project
http://nationalpriorities.org/auxiliary/interactivetaxchart/taxchart.html

Be interesting to compare our pie chart to other countries.

The number on this chart that scares me is the amount spent on interest debt. It's at an 18% rate now, and a lot of that debt needs to be retired, or renegotiated at rates that have gone up 4-5%. That's just interest, forget paying back the money.

Now we have that fracking Bush running up a half a trillion more debt per year on top of that. It won't take long for that number to hit a 25% rate that we have to pay JUST FOR INTEREST!! These twits that think it's OK to keep adding to the debt like this have lost their fracking minds!!

Add that to the 33-34% were flushing down the toilet for the military and the veterans, and Bush is well on his way to bankrupting the crap out of us. Our kids are going to be paying on this adventure for their entire adult lifes!

Anon

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Taxes compared: Think your taxes are bad?

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