@cubed @boag At least for Sweden I know the effective tax is even higher than that. Way back we had an income tax of roughly 30% and an employer's tax of a couple of percent which were both displayed on your paycheck since they were both direct taxation on your wages. Then the politicians got the great idea of making an income tax hike by removing the necessity of reporting the employer's tax on your paycheck and then massively increased it to where it's over 30% in a lot of principalities now, and seeing how intelligent the average voter is when it comes to putting 1 + 1 together the stealth hike was a great success.
So first your employer pays an income tax on your labor at 30% meaning you have 70% left, then you pay on average (depending on where you live) 30% on that amount meaning you have roughly 50% left. Then when you spend the money you have left there's a 25% consumption tax here giving you 37.5% left, more for some wares like gas which price is 70% tax (highest in the world I believe), alcohol and then you have to pay television taxes, car taxes and you name it. So all together I'd say that the average person working full-time in Sweden pays roughly 2/3 of his income in taxes, and the marginal tax being a little lower than that is most likely due to including retirees and people living on welfare in the statistics. There's no question about that the amount of taxes we pay are outrageously high, the question is about what we who are productive in the economy actually get back from that 2/3rds taxation.
I can't speak for all the other countries either but at least for Sweden Boag's assertion isn't inaccurate, since what I assume to be a large amount of lobbyism the large companies/industries pay little to no effective taxes while the smaller ones are bogged down by taxes and regulations, where as several foreign ministers of finance have pointed out that if Sweden was located in South America instead of Europe it would be hounded as a tax haven for American conglomerates. For instance I know that Volvo and Ikea in Sweden pays zero net tax, and I assume it's a similiar story for most companies that size.
Another weird mixture is how we have some of the highest income taxes in the world while having some of the lowest capital taxes in the world. As an example someone earning 10k$ a month pays roughly 50% of his salary in income tax in Sweden while someone who makes 10k$ a month in an investors' savings account pay roughly 5% if even that.
Lastly I'd like to point out that there are no capitalist countries today nor are there only any pure socialist ones, but the vast majority (if not all) of countries in the world are mixed economies. Even the most liberal economies like how the US and Hong Kong were in the past had some semblance of governance and taxation, while all the communist/socialist countries we've had throughout history have collapsed before they managed to reach a 100% socialized economy. So to say that this or that country is capitalist or socialist isn't very correct, it's all a matter of degrees and which direction you want to head towards.
