@Theaetetus,
Our tax rates are somewhat higher than in the United States, at least on federal income taxes. Of course, buried in those tax levies is the funding the central government sends to the provinces to support healthcare. While healthcare services are a provincial function, the central government has a mandate to ensure uniformity of services across the country.
Comparing tax rates is a real apples'n oranges exercise. Norway, for example, has a standard tax rate of roughly (I recall) 50%. But what it returns to its citizens for that is eye-opening. The fact is they're content with it because they're pleased with the way it's spent and what it does for them.
Those sons of Vikings have such silly ideas. For example, Norway is oil rich. Yet it sets most of its oil riches aside - for
future generations! They believe it wouldn't be fair to all those little Vikings yet unborn to lavish it on themselves today.
Unfortunately today tax rates have become grossly misleading. That, in part, is because some countries are amassing so much debt in long-term instruments, forestalling the day of reckoning. Your Comptroller-General from the Bush era spent the past few years telling anyone who would listen that America sits astride a debt bomb where the central government's debts and unfunded obligations (Medicaire, Social Security) represented an average debt of $480,000 per household. Remember, that was
before the current economic crisis and trillion-dollar bailouts. That number also doesn't include state, municipal, corporate and individual indebtedness.
So how each nation chooses to handle its debts is also a factor in weighing relative tax levels. Until this global meltdown my government had, for many years, been running budget surpluses, paying down our overall indebtedness at a decent rate. That, too, was reflected in our tax rates. We were generally happy working toward the day where our government might be debt free.
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