Wait, when was the Massachusetts state tax rate 6%?
IIRC hat’s at least approximately correct for the late teens, and I think it hadn’t changed much for some time. (That’s the state income tax I’m talking about, just to be clear, and not ignoring the inevitable deductions that came with it.)
It was 5.95% from 1990 to 1999, then started dropping. Voters in 2000 approved Question 4, which would have dropped the rate to five percent over three years, but instead state legislators approved a law making reduction incumbent upon the state hitting revenue targets. The rate was 5.85% in 2000, 5.6 in 2001, 5.3% between 2002 and 2011, 5.25% 2012-13, 5.2% 2014, 5.15% in 2015, 5.1% in 2016-2018, 5.05% in 2019, and has been an even five percent since 2020. Source: Top State Tax Rates
Uh-oh, he’s using facts!
I offered my number as Here is the minimum
That source reports Denmark’s tax rate is 12-27%, while PWC reports it at over 50%. Quite a disparity there.
Folks, thanks to all for delving into this mess. You’ve adduced a substantial amount of well-documented information on an unavoidably complex situation, and I think we now have at least a reasonably good feel for the answer.
It’s unfortunate that digging out the data is so fraught with varieties of sources, some hard-to-find and some dubious, given that people ideally would be voting on the basis of facts like these.
If the OP is equating average tax burden with average individual tax rate, dividing government income by earnings will give a different answer than averaging all the individual tax rates. If my pretend country comprises three people, A, B, and C, making $100, $100, and $100,000 who pay $10, $10, and $40,000, respectively, my knee-jerk reaction is to say the mean burden is 20% and the median burden 10%, as opposed to the 39.9% we get by just dividing the sums. But I don’t know that there’s any single right way to look at this.
| A | B | C | |
|---|---|---|---|
| income | $100 | $100 | $100,000 |
| tax | $10 | $10 | $40,000 |
| rate/burden | 10% | 10% | 40% |
Why would that be ideal?
It seems to me that the ideal tax rate for one country isn’t dependent on what other countries are doing. A lot of circumstances might vary between the countries.
Seems to me the issue is more a combination of 1) what services you think the government should be providing 2) how much these are plausibly likely to cost 3) how the expenses should be apportioned. And 2) is affected by just how those services are to be provided, of course.
Part of the problem is that very few people have the time to have a fully educated opinion about all of that, and tend, instead of recognizing their unavoidable ignorance, instead to think a) that the only services that need to be provided are the ones they themselves are using directly and obviously, and sometimes not even those (I know people who routinely drive across multiple states who say roads should be privately funded) and b) that those services can be provided for a whole lot less money than they actually can, in part because c) they have little or no idea what work and resources are required to actually provide them.