Jonah Goldberg, Quarter Slave (Conceptually).
Fivethirtyeight.com posts a reply to Jonah Goldberg’s latest attempt to establish false equivalence between taxes and slavery from the op-ed pages of USA Today. Goldberg wants to tell us we’re slaves to teh gubbermint until “Tax Freedom Day”, which is sometime this week. Overblown rhetoric aside, the real question is: Are we really overtaxed? Not so much. Only 4 other industrialized democracies have a lower total tax burden. We come in with a total tax burden of 28% of GDP. The OECD* average is 35.9% with a range of 20.6% (Mexico) to 49.1% (Denmark and Sweden). Sadly you can’t fight truthiness with facts. People like Goldberg just know in their gut that we’re overtaxed. Any proof to the contrary must be nothing more than librul sophistry designed to enslave us in a socialist-islamofacsist-totalitarian-Marxist dystopian hell.
Could we do something better with our tax policy in the US? Absolutely. We could reverse the trend to regressive taxes as instituted in the Bush Era tax cuts. We have not and most likely will not. We lack the political will to restore fiscal sanity to the federal government. There ain’t no constituency for tough choices in America.
*For the non-policy wonks out there, OECD is the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development. It’s an organization of 30 industrial democracies that collects and distributes a large amount of cross-national econometric and demographic data. It’s a treasure trove of data and very useful in comparing things like effective tax rates among many other things.
