The United States Is a Low-Tax Country, Cont.

One of our recent top ten tax charts showed that the United States is near the bottom of the international spectrum in total general government receipts as a share of the national economy.   This is the OECD’s most comprehensive measure of government revenues and includes not only direct taxes but also license and user fees, royalties collected from extracting oil and other resources on public lands, and other revenue sources.

If one looks just at tax revenues, the story is largely the same:  measured as a share of the economy, the United States (including both the federal government and the states) collects less in taxes than nearly any other developed country, as this graph shows.