How High-Tax Countries Tax

There are nations on this earth that tax their citizens far more heavily than the U.S. does. The top spots on the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development’s rankings of tax revenue as a percentage of gross domestic product in 2017 were held by France (46.2 percent), Denmark (46 percent), Belgium (44.6 percent), Sweden (44 percent) and Finland (43.3 percent). The U.S. tax burden was 27.1 percent of GDP, ranking it 31st among the 36 members of the OECD, the club of the world’s affluent democracies. That 27.1 percent includes state and local taxes; it doesn’t factor in the big tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2017.

I have trotted out these OECD tax statistics several times over the past few years, mainly just because I like trotting out statistics but also to temper Trump’s repeated claims that U.S. taxes are inordinately high. Lately, though, a lot of the talk about taxes has been coming from Democratic politicians hoping to raise them to fund programs that they favor, with the increases in most cases targeted at the very wealthy. Which makes this an opportune time, I think, to review how the countries that raise lots more money from taxes than the U.S. go about raising it.