Friday Question

A question for discussion, since I think liberals often don’t own up to it. Assume you had total control over all things budgetary in the United States. How high would taxes be as a share of GDP? Back pre-recession we got up to a combined state/federal/local spending total of 37 percent of GDP. I take my guide from the Nordic trailblazers and say that you can get taxes up close to 50 percent of GDP if you’re willing to adopt a not-so-progressive rate structure but I wouldn’t want to try going any higher than that unless some smaller country does it first.