Taxes per Person
Some pundits, reflecting on the looming U.S. budget deficits, claim that Americans are vastly undertaxed compared with other major nations. I was wondering, to what extent is that true?
The most common metric for answering this question is taxes as a percentage of GDP. However, high tax rates tend to depress GDP. Looking at taxes as a percentage of GDP may mislead us into thinking we can increase tax revenue more than we actually can. For some purposes, a better statistic may be taxes per person, which we can compute using this piece of advanced mathematics:
Taxes/GDP x GDP/Person = Taxes/Person
Here are the results for some of the largest developed nations:
France
.461 x 33,744 = 15,556
Germany
.406 x 34,219 = 13,893
UK
.390 x 35,165 = 13,714
US
.282 x 46,443 = 13,097
Canada
.334 x 38,290 = 12,789
Italy
.426 x 29,290 = 12,478
Spain
.373 x 29,527 = 11,014
Japan
.274 x 32,817 = 8,992
The bottom line: The United States is indeed a low-tax country as judged by taxes as a percentage of GDP, but as judged by taxes per person, the United States is in the middle of the pack.
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