Belgians Pay the Highest Taxes
According to a report by the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Belgians pay more than 50% than their income in taxes. Thus, they have the largest tax burden world-wide.
I guess I’d also brew up some 8% beer if my government would be taxing me that much.
#1 - Permalink David Payne March 13th, 2008 at 4:16 pmIt’s difficult to know the overall relevance of this data as it is limited to “Figures of the average worker single without children”. Unless you know how many workers in total there are in Belgium, how many are married, whether co-habiting people are included as married or not, and how many single workers have children you cannot judge the overall context as to whether 55% taxation is outrageous or not.
If there are only three workers that are single without children and they are all stockbrokers then they will probably pay over the odds in taxation (in fact only one of the three needs to be a high paying taxpayer at 80% whilst the others pay 42.5% to give an average of 55%). If these three workers are in a pool of 1 million workers of the married, co-habiting, single with and without children kind all of which pay only 33% tax then this statistic bears little impact (or clear insight) into the status of taxation in Belgium.
#2 - Permalink David Payne March 15th, 2008 at 2:50 pmFor your reading pleasure:
http://www.invest.belgium.be/en/intelligent-tax-system