This is interesting to me. I do care what other countries do because all anyone around here can talk about is how high other countries taxes are in comparison to ours. I'd love to see an accurate picture of what that actually looks like. I've done minimal research and have found some of the EU countries to be as high as 45%. Here it's only that if you are in the top tier of taxes.
Am I correct? Is there more to it? Does it scale in other countries like it does here?
Taxes in Europe are generally much higher than in the US, but it varies by country so Google and Bing are your friends. Germany's income taxes, for example, top out at about 58%, if you include all of their add-ons and whatever. Also, Germany has a 19% VAT, which we don't have either, but Germans don't have sales taxes. I'm pretty sure all Europeans pay more for fuel than we do. South Korea and Israel also have higher tax structures, but taxes cover things in all of these countries that American taxes don't, and these countries are more comparable to US states in population and economic size than the US as a whole. (California's economy is larger than France's, for example.)
I'm not interested in what these other countries pay because they're not comparable to the US in so many ways, and their economic policies are not anything I'd want us to copy. While the EU as a whole is currently about on par with the US GDP, maybe a touch larger, at current growth rates that won't be true next year, and certainly won't be once Great Britain exits as planned.
I really don't care about what goes on elsewhere. I'd just rather fix the tax structure in the US and make it more simple and equitable. And I like flat, simple taxes that deter loopholes, avoidance strategies, and avenues for cheating. I'm fine with progressive tax rates, but not so we get a tax structure like we have, where the top 10% pays over 80% of the taxes, and the top 0.01% pays less as a percentage than wage earners because they can afford avoidance strategies.