Hacker News Reader

Hacker News

Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

s1artibartfast

That is federal. Add in states and cities and US government revenue is more than 40% of GDP [1].

When you consider actual dollars, not % gdp, Americans pay MORE in actual dollars than many European countries.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/3/37/Federal%...

France gdp/capita is around 43,658.98 USD. 47% is $20.5k/capita.

US gdp/capita is around 66,000 USD. 40% tax revenue is $26.5k/capita.

The US government brings in 30% more tax revenue per resident than the French government.

The differences in social benefits between France and the US are not due to lower taxes in the US. They are due to inefficient spending and systemic economic differences.

View on HN

I have no idea where you data comes from, but the OECD tax data (the one I quoted) includes all levels of government, property taxes and sales tax/VAT.

"This indicator relates to government as a whole (all government levels) and is measured in percentage both of GDP and of total taxation."

https://data.oecd.org/tax/tax-revenue.htm

The OECD data has the US at 34% and France at 45%.

And the idea that "the US pays more taxes doesn't even pass the sniff test. You only need to look at income tax rates, VAT, etc and anyone can tell that's not true at all.

Even using your numbers from OECD, US taxes revenues per capita are still higher than France in real dollars ($22k vs 20k)! The US Government doesn't have a revenue problem, it has an efficiency and cost control problem.

For example, The US government healthcare spending per capita is 2.5X (250%) that of France- ($10.5K vs $4K per person), and France gets a universal national health insurance for that price, and the US gets medicare and medicaid. [1,2] Yes- you read that right, and it is still true if you adjust for PPP.

The same phenomenon holds true across almost every aspect of US government spending.

Look at infrastructure. The cost to build subways and light rail in the US is 2-7 times higher than in Europe. [3]

Look at defense. US spends ~300% as much as France, which is actually higher than most western European countries.[4]

From a purely numerical sense, the US can't overcome an efficiency problem by raising taxes and throwing more money at it.

1 https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=SHA

2 https://www.cms.gov/data-research/statistics-trends-and-repo....

3 https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2018/01/subways-and-light-rail....

4 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_military_....

No, you're completely ignoring the facts that @refurb is stating. The US govt is also extremely inefficient, true, but taxes in the US are far less than in Europe, on average.

I simply dont think that is true on a factual basis. The US taxes as a % of GDP is a few percent behind Europe, but GDP is higher in the US.

The US government pulls in more dollars of revenue per resident than most European countries.

the OECD data refub provided matches up with my claim. Do you have other data?

You can validate this with the opposite approach. Looking at government spending [1] The US government spends 31.5k per person. Germany spends 31.8k per person and France spends 32.3k per person. Deficit spending is a few percent higher in the US, but pretty similar. Switzerland, Ireland, and the UK are all in the mid 20's.

The idea that the US governments is underfunded or that taxes are vastly lower are pervasive myths.

It is based on a bait and switch looking at %GDP instead of dollars paid to the government, as if the cost of government services like roads or insulin are naturally proportional to GDP.

The entire concept of higher GDP implies you should be able to have more purchasing power, goods, and services with higher GDP.

Ok, but my had nothing to do with all that, just that the tax burden as a percentage of income is much lower in the US than many European countries.

I never said anything about how the money is used.

Yes, and I'm saying that the US tax "burden" as a percent of GDP is a misleading way of looking at it.

When it comes to real people and real "burden", what matters how much you have to hand over, and how hard you have to work for it. In this context, Americans pay more than most Europeans to their governments, and work far more hours.

This relates to upthread discussion:

>"If Americans knew what Europeans get for their tax dollars, they (Americans) would riot in the streets"... It's really insane to see Americans pay the same tax as Europeans (and Canadians, and Australians) but get so, so much less for that money.

And of the responses claiming that Americans pay less, and generally implying that Americans have it easy with respect to taxes.

In this context, Americans pay more than most Europeans to their governments, and work far more hours.

I disagree. Americans work more hours (not a lot more, but more) and make more money per hour and overall.

So when they have to hand over money for taxes, they hand over much less, as a percentage of hours worked. So they end up keeping more in the end.

That sounds like a lower tax burden to me.

And the upthread comment just isn’t true. Americans pay less tax overall and spend fewer work hours paying that tax. So of course they don’t get the same benefits as Europeans. That’s the trade off.

If Americans had to pay European tax rates they’d see a huge increase in tax burden., even the middle class. We’re talking a 50% increase in taxes. That’s very significant.

So if you asked Americans “do you want European level of benefits?” almost all would say yes. If you asked them if they wanted to pay much higher tax rates in exchange? A lot would say “no”.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com