we spend twenty four percent of our GDP on taxes. the average OECD country spends 33 percent. most think that means our taxes are low. not exactly. our healthcare system is 18 percent our GDP, and half of that is already from taxes, the rest from the private sector. so, given every other developed country has universal healthcare, if you added the private sector healthcare onto our taxes, we would be matching the rest of the developed world. so why can they afford to have more social services? 1. our healthcare costs twice as much as the rest of the developed world 2. our military is bigger than the next ten biggest countries combined 3. we've been borrowing against social security for decades, and now it's starting to become time to pay all that back.
so if we did raise taxes on people, we might be getting more services, but we'd also be paying more than the rest of the world, all due to us having bad accounting.
so it's accurate to say we pay less in taxes, but that misses the larger context.
