THE US: A LOW-TAX NATION
The US is a low-tax country: total US taxes represented 26.6% of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) in 2021. The average for OECD nations (developed) was 34.1%. Taxes were in excess of 40% in Denmark, France, Belgium and Italy.
Basically, the majority of US voters seem to want to buy goods and services for themselves rather than pay for public goods such as education, subsidized housing, public transportation, social services. There is one exception to this: the military. Both parties love to throw money at the military, more than the armed services even request.
So we have a country armed to the teeth but having significant decay within. One has to shake one’s head when one hears that there are people who want to shut the government down to force it to cut already meager levels of Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and other social spending.
(Sources: The New York Times, 1/20 and 1/23/23 and OECD Center for Tax Policy and Administration, 2022)