Apples-to-Apples

This article has been trending on The Economist and I'm wondering why. The Economist's brief write-up summarizes a KPMG study on the average effective tax rates across 93 countries. The U.S. is shown near the bottom of the chart. My guess is that people looked at the study or chart and concluded the U.S. is a low-tax government relative to other industrialized nations.

However, this study is not an apples-to-apples comparison.

Why? Because each of the 93 countries have different constitutional structures, levels of government, taxes, etc. Unlike Sweden, Belgium, Greece and Denmark, the U.S. has 50 different state governments that collect income taxes. Additionally, all of these countries have different corporate taxes (FYI, America has a ~42% corporate tax rate when you include state and local income taxes), death taxes, sales taxes, etc. Belgium's corporate tax rate is ~19%, therefore common sense tells me Belgium's politicians have more "dry-powder" to justify a 48% income tax.

The Economist's popular chart cannot be used to compare America's tax culture to other countries. It would be interesting to see a similar study that normalizes for the 93 different tax cultures...something like the average effective income tax rate collected by all levels of government across 93 countries.