Ed Huntress wrote:
"Zayonc" wrote in message
...

Ed Huntress wrote:

You've left out VAT. Annual average consumption per person in France is
$24,600. The nominal VAT is 19.6% (33% for luxury goods; 5.5% for food).
So
that's close to another $5k per year for the French, on top of income tax
and other taxes.

Then do not forget state/sales taxes - here in California it's not
funny.
And then local taxes.


They don't even come close to the VATs in Europe and parts of Asia. Several
of those are over 20%. And there are other small taxes that one doesn't hear
much about.

OK, I have near to 10% of CA tax on all the income and additionally
8.25% on some of the consumption and 1% for property tax (for CA
prices!).
I would guess that it is close enough to 20% on consumption.

"Zayonc" wrote in message
...
Ed Huntress wrote:
"Zayonc" wrote in message
...

Ed Huntress wrote:

You've left out VAT. Annual average consumption per person in France is
$24,600. The nominal VAT is 19.6% (33% for luxury goods; 5.5% for food).
So
that's close to another $5k per year for the French, on top of income
tax
and other taxes.

Then do not forget state/sales taxes - here in California it's not
funny.
And then local taxes.


They don't even come close to the VATs in Europe and parts of Asia.
Several
of those are over 20%. And there are other small taxes that one doesn't
hear
much about.

OK, I have near to 10% of CA tax on all the income and additionally
8.25% on some of the consumption and 1% for property tax (for CA
prices!).
I would guess that it is close enough to 20% on consumption.

It sounds like you're high. California's income tax works out to 1.4% for a
family with two dependents and a $50,000 net income; 4.8% if you have a
$100,000 net income.

Still, California's total state taxes run higher than those for the country
as a whole. For 2005, the last year for which complete figures are
available, it was just over $4,000 per capita. That made California 13th in
the nation in state taxes overall.

Comparing taxes is very tricky business. For a fast and accurate cut of
comparisons between countries, most people rely on the OECD. But there are
economists who say that OECD figures understate Europe's taxes. There is
some discrepancy about what constitutes a "tax." In Europe, they do a better
job than our politicians do of disguising taxes as something else. For
example, OECD reports that France taxes its average citizen at a rate of
12.5% in "indirect" taxes, which don't show up on some "taxation of income"
reports.

As I said, there aren't big differences in overall taxes among developed
nations, but the US has consistently been one of the two lowest in the
entire OECD list (around 25 developed countries).

France, like Sweden and some other OECD countries, is still laboring under a
legacy of inefficient bureaucracies. Sweden has twice as many people on the
government payroll as the average OECD country; France, I think, is almost
as high. Both countries are modernizing and privatizing, but it's a slow
process.

Meantime, their unemployment rates are 'way understated (my son just wrote a
paper about this subject in regard to Sweden, and I was surprised at how far
out of whack the official figures are), their public payrolls are still
high, and the result is a somewhat heavier tax burden than ours. But from
that point on, the argument turns to which things we actually pay for in
other ways, that have to be compared to taxed, state-based services in
Europe. I think the bottom line is that we pay somewhat less in the US, but
that some people would feel better about it if some of our services were
guaranteed and if the burden was leveled more across the population, as
college education and healthcare are in France.

--
Ed Huntress