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From what I've read, US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs, you just get less for it. Property prices are the main thing that seems much worse in Europe, but that doesn't have anything to do with taxes.

Donating my income is besides the point, as it's the top income brackets that really need to be taxed. I would and do happily vote for higher taxes on myself when the option is available.



> US tax burden is pretty similar to Europe if you include health insurance costs

The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020 [1]; France and Italy did about 25%, Germany 11.5%. (Switzerland and "communist" China clock in below 10%.)

There is sufficient variation in tax policy across the EU, let alone Europe, to make broad-based comparisons meaningless.

[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/GC.TAX.TOTL.GD.ZS?most_... a more-expansive definition from the Fed raises this to 16% [a]

[a] https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S


There is no way German tax as part of GDP is just 11.5% Maybe just some subset of taxes

Overall it's 38%: https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-germany.pdf

For the US you're missing some taxes, too because the overall is somewhere near 30%, 10 percentage points lower than Germany. I think your US link does not include state and local taxes etc


> The U.S. collected 10% of its GDP in taxes in 2020

This is incorrect (despite the citation).

Federal tax collection in 2020 was about 16% of GDP

https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/FYFRGDA188S

The OECD reports "The tax-to-GDP ratio in the United States has decreased from 28.3% in 2000 to 24.5% in 2019."

https://www.oecd.org/tax/revenue-statistics-united-states.pd...

For comparison, the weighted average in other OECD countries is about 34%.




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