All of the amenities that people like in America come from their local governments - police, roads, emergency services, courts, you name it. The surprising thing is that the local governments usually levy only a small fraction of the tax burden. Most of an American's tax goes to the federal government, where nobody knows what happens to it. It's stirred around, and a lot of it comes back to the local governments in the form of strings-attached funding that is used as an end-run around the individual state's rights to govern themselves. When the strings-attached money circles back to the local governments, they swear fealty to the federal government (which is what they're being paid to do) and then re-brand it as local services. That's why the average American sees a tiny fraction of their tax going to the local entity that does all the work, and a big fraction of their tax going to the federal system that only interacts with them when they haven't sent enough money.

American here. I have no problem paying taxes. I just hate to see my tax dollars mismanaged. Baltimore MD has been in the news lately, largely as people have focused on a certain public official's tweets. Baltimore receives a huge amount of taxpayer dollars, federal, state, and local. Its per pupil school spending is by far the highest in the state. The percentage of public secondary school students who demonstrate proficiency in mathematics is less than 1%. 2 of its last 3 city mayors have resigned due to corruption charges. I consider this mismanagement.

Middleclass Americans' income taxes are around or above 20%. Americans generally are opposed to taxes because there is a perception (rightly or wrongly) that our government is inefficient (due to some combination of corruption and incompetence), and we should sort that out before increasing taxes on programs with a (perceived) high probability of mismanagement.

> Obviously I can't speak for the general population, but as for my close proximity: My colleagues think taxes are good too. No brain drain here.

I think that's the critical difference--Norwegians believe they are getting value out of their taxes and Americans do not.

EDIT: Obviously this is a generalization of groups; not all Americans think the government is inefficient. Hopefully we can forego the predictable and pointless digression into "well not all Americans are that way!"

Take a look at what the American government budget is spent on: https://www.nationalpriorities.org/budget-basics/federal-bud... (scroll down to "Total Federal Spending 2015"). The three largest parts of the spending pie, constituting over two thirds of government spending, are "Social Security, Unemployment and Labor", "Medicare and Health", and "Military". Less than 20% goes to education/infrastructure. Many conservative Americans oppose welfare and socialised medicine, and similarly many liberal Americans oppose high military spending (which makes up over half of "Discretionary Spending"), so it's easy to see why they think their taxes are being wasted. There are countries like Singapore that have extremely good infrastructure and schooling with government spending under 20% of GDP, because they spend only on infrastructure, not welfare, so high spending isn't a prerequisite for good infrastructure.

Less than 20% of Federal spending goes to education and infrastructure because the States pay for most education and infrastructure, it is misleading to only use Federal numbers for services provided primarily by States.

The US spends more on K-12 education alone than on the military.

> I think anything below 20% in taxes simply means a country's public functions will suffer.

Honestly, the biggest difference between nations isn't so much in income/payroll taxes, but in the VAT. The US simply doesn't have one at the federal level, and state sales taxes are typically in the neighbourhood of 6% (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sales_taxes_in_the_United_Stat...).

I don’t know what that graph is showing but it’s not the sales tax I pay at the register. In Illinois it’s usually 9-11% if I recall correctly. I’m in Chicago, so maybe the local sales tax is much higher than the state average?

I believe that the problem in most countries is that rich people have successfully brainwashed the population into thinking that is bad to support their own people with schools, health care, cultural programs, etc. On the other hand, they successfully brainwashed the masses into believing the socialism for the rich is necessary: for example, you will see people crying on the newspapers because the rich are paying "too much" in taxes, when in fact they never payed so little.