High-Tax Countries Make More People Pay Taxes - Bloomberg

High-Tax Countries Make More People Pay Taxes - Bloomberg



The clearest differentiator between the U.S. and the high-tax countries, though, may be taxes on goods and services. All the OECD countries but the U.S. have a value-added levy that taxes goods and services at every stage of production. 



...Lots of economists like consumption taxes because they don’t discourage work and investment. The taxes do, however, tend toward regressivity.



...How about taxing wealth directly? There are so few outright wealth taxes in the world (France had one but ditched it as of last year) that the OECD instead tracks taxes on property, which includes taxes on net wealth but also taxes on real estate, gifts and inheritances, and financial and capital transactions.



...U.S. property taxes are mostly taxes on real estate. At 4 percent of GDP, they aren’t huge, but in some high-tax localities, they really add up. These are wealth taxes that, as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Noah Smith pointed out last month, weigh more heavily on the middle class than the rich, because “rich people hold most of their wealth in stocks instead of houses.” Still, they are wealth taxes, and they’re higher in the U.S. than in all but two OECD countries, and much higher than in the high-tax Nordic countries.