Is President Bush proposing too big a tax cut – especially for the rich?
Here’s how the US compares with its peers By David R. Francis | Staff writer of The Christian Science Monitor Looking at their pay slips, Americans may believe Uncle Sam takes too big a chunk. “Americans carry a heavy burden of taxes,” President Bush declared in the speech outlining his tax cut package Tuesday. By international standards, though, Americans are relatively lightly taxed. When the revenues from all federal, state, and local taxes are added up, they amount to about 29.6 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), the nation’s total output of goods and services. Among 30 member nations of the Organization of Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), a club of mostly rich countries based in Paris, only Japan, South Korea, and Mexico have a lower overall burden. The Bush tax cuts of 2001 and, perhaps, this year could reduce the overall US tax burden close to the level of Japan (27.1 percent of GDP) or South Korea (26.1 percent), but not to Mexico’s 18.5 percent. In a world of
