The highest Dutch tax bracket is 50%, but that only applies to income over 75K EUR. Also, VAT doesn't apply to rent, and it's reduced for food. Housing and food are most household's largest expenses. So the 21% sales tax can be deceptive.
Taxation as a % of the Dutch GDP is 38%. That is to say, taxes take 38% of all the wealth produced in the Netherlands.
For some comparison purposes, the number in the USA is 27%, Japan 31%, Canada 33%, Germany 37%, Finland 42%.
The US does not have uniform tax rates. Taxation as a % of GDP in some of the higher-taxed US states comes in around 35% - quite close to the Dutch number.
It would appear that the typical middle class Dutch family probably pays about 30 - 50% of their income to taxation. The very wealthy might be coming up on 60% or so.
This is not necessarily a good metric for high income right? Companies pay less taxes for sure then a high earning couple.
Oof. In a modern society, with modern technology, why does the government demand ownership of 30-50% of the value that people generate? That's an enormous amount of free labor.
To make it even clearer, it only applies to the part of income that is over 75K. So if you are earning 76K, the highest tax bracket only applies to that last thousand.
Edit to cover your edit: it's certainly not free labour, I happily pay my taxes because I believe I'm getting quiet something in return.
https://taxfoundation.org/data/all/federal/summary-latest-fe...
> The estimated total pay for a Software Engineer is $140,779 per year in the United States area, with an average salary of $118,761 per year. These numbers represent the median, which is the midpoint of the ranges from our proprietary Total Pay Estimate model and based on salaries collected from our users. The estimated additional pay is $22,017 per year. Additional pay could include cash bonus, commission, tips, and profit sharing. The "Most Likely Range" represents values that exist within the 25th and 75th percentile of all pay data available for this role
But nope, we just get "sell more weapons to Israel and Ukraine", and more class warfare.
[1]: https://www.propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trov...
If there's no way in hell you can sure back up that claim with sources? I personally cannot think of a single country with what I would consider to be a somewhat efficient society that has a significantly lower tax rate. On the contrary, as established upthread, in the US which many Americans pride themselves on being low tax, the effective tax rate is not far off, and American society is drastically less efficient or comfortable than e.g. Dutch one.
If you stop to think about it, there are only 3 possibilities: 1) Taxes are perfectly calibrated to exactly what they need to be. 2) Taxes are less than they need to be. 3) Taxes are more than they need to be.
Perfect calibration is nearly impossible. So that leaves 2 and 3. Which do you think is more likely of a corruption-prone organization that takes income through the implicit threat of physical violence?
The proof is there and it's called the annual budget of the country. As far as I know it's public information, not that anyone ever bothers to look at it (and rightfully so - we are paying via taxes people to look at it, and another group of people to control it).
Now that we have the question, how to we decide the answer? I think there are several possibilities, but one that comes to mind is happiness. A subjective and flawed metric to be sure, but a metric all the same.
Thankfully, we do not have to resign ourselves to thought experiments with no opportunity for real data collection, as in "Would the average US citizen be happier or less happy if taxes were 10% lower?" We don't even have to settle for logical exercises such as you pose here: "What is more likely, that corruption inevitably makes more government worse than less government, or vice versa?"
Instead, we can examine the beautifully diverse set of data-rich, large scale experiments known as sovereign nations to find how well taxation correlates to happiness.
And voila, your criticism of the article is an argument in favor of the article.
I never criticized the article, which is about social safety net and child happiness. I'm criticizing the claimed taxation level required to have nice things.
Wasteful/not wasteful is mostly orthogonal to high/low. If high taxes, in a wasteful system, results in happy people, then that means you can get the same result for less. Meaning people get the same benefits, while keeping more income. Or more benefits, for the same taxes.
People seem to think that high taxes correlated to happiness is evidence of a non-wasteful government, but it's not. Happiness is not the only metric that matters. If it was, then being happy with corruption would be a virtue.