[humanrebar]

> You're comparing income tax with sales tax.

For the purposes of personal budgeting, I don't see why the comparison is unfair. I'm trying to discuss taxation levels, not tax schemes as such.

> US has a 30% tax burden

That's more on point. That's also low. It doesn't include state and local income taxes. It also ignores other kinds of taxes like property and sales taxes. The U.S. has state-level taxes, which complicate things but they definitely affect the individual taxpayer.

[nagrom]

Your original comment was questioning why a 24% VAT is considered to be outstandingly high. It's the highest rate of VAT in the EU, and broadly speaking taxes in the EU are already higher than in nations of equivalent technological and economic development. So, it's not an unreasonable feeling that a 24% VAT rate is high.

That 30% tax burden for the US is from the same wikipedia page as the European tax burdens. I am assuming that the methodologies used to arrive at the figures are broadly comparable.