When I at one point considered moving to the US, I did the numbers for UK and Norway, because I'm from Norway and live in the UK, and while Norway certainly came out higher in terms of tax than some US states, comparing with places I might be prepared to consider, like California, the difference was small enough it'd be more than eaten up by health insurance before considering the other costs of a reduced welfare system (e.g. needing a far bigger cushion in case of unemployment, far higher childcare costs etc.)

Your mileage will of course vary a lot depending on specifics, and especially which US states you compare with.

Yes, it is remarkably hard to come up with a US tax rate, because in single-payer healthcare countries your healthcare is covered. Here, how much do you pay? I couldn't even begin to guesstimate.

While you could probably find cheaper places to live in the US than California, and therefore find much more agreeable tax rates, it's not that easy. Culture varies a lot in the US. I love the South, but a some folks would rather drink poison than live there.

And you can't forget property taxes. These vary at the county or city level and can be quite significant. And, just for fun, they generally pay for the public schools, which depending on where you are may be abysmally awful, so now your "tax rate" includes stumping for private school, which could be the equivalent to a year's salary in some Nordic countries.

Health care in the US is effectively a corporate tax and should be labelled as such.

If you want to compare the real costs and benefits of starting a business you need to compare like for like, which includes all national, state, and privatised taxes and other indirect costs.

When you include those the reality-based answer is that the US fares relatively poorly.

Which is why the US has a more aggressive VC sector. Whether by accident or design start-ups are forced to look for outside funding far earlier, and bootstrapping is far harder.

The result is more of a monoculture that chases unicorns and less of a vibrant sector of independent small and medium businesses, some of which will grow into unicorns naturally.

For a full picture factor in outgoings for world class health and education per person (and other benefits that are free | much cheaper than US); these are very low cost for individuals and offset higher taxes by offering better value for money.

If this is indeed the case, shouldn't there be an influx of skilled professional and entrepreneur immigrants into all of these nordic welfare states?

Something doesn't quite add up, as there's appears to be a constant shortage of such talent.

Sweden actually is one of the favourite destinations for immigrants.

Perhaps high skilled ones would prefer a country with better climate ... :-)

"World class" health and education brings you some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world[1]. Doubling Canada's rate and adding a bit more really screams world class.

You do pay out the ass for it though so good job making someone rich I guess? Shame about all the dead babies though[2].

[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/283221/per-capita-health... [1] https://www.healthsystemtracker.org/chart-collection/quality... [2] https://www.americashealthrankings.org/learn/reports/2019-an...

> "World class" health and education brings you some of the worst maternal mortality rates in the developed world ...

Just to be clear, I was referring to the Nordic countries, Australia, better performing OECD countries, etc and not referring to the US.

Your links bear out my position, that US "free market | low taxes" approach doesn't deliver good outcomes for the masses.

Indeed! Forgive me, I misinterpreted your earlier post to be claiming that the "low cost" of US healthcare offsets the "high taxes" of comparable countries.

For comparable benefits per citizen, the US are prohibitively expensive.

The argument that other countries might be technically higher in taxes will remain moot so long as in the US, needing an ambulance could mean years of financial hardship if you're not sufficiently well off. The same goes for lodging, food safety, etc.

You haven’t accounted for health insurance, college education, and possibly retirement.

Once you add those in, the Nordics still pay a bit more, but not by the margin you might expect.

The US government provides retirement benefits, including healthcare at retirement. You are not required to pay for college, and you can go to a cheap school if you want.

US total government spending is officially 34% of total GDP, Germany is 43.7%. With much of that covering healthcare and collage education which more than makes up the difference for the median family. In the end, the US’s extreme defense spending and horrifically inefficient healthcare system is a massive drag on the economy.

What the US does differently from most of the EU is to hide as much spending as possible in the form of targeted tax breaks. From a cash flow perspective little changes but from a political standpoint it’s not spending.

US military spending is 4% of GDP. When a warmonger is president, that goes up to about 6% of GDP. The NATO commitment is 2% of GDP. It is not particularly extreme.

The real drag is the US healthcare system, which effectively finances most of the medical R&D for the US, India, South America, and Europe, and also provides ridiculous levels of treatment for people who are about to die (in comparison to other health systems). There is also the US social security system, which seems to be very inefficient at best...

US healthcare spending hardly subsidizes the rest of the world. Paperwork and insurance overhead don’t magically turn into R&D money. Litigation, malpractice insurance, excessive testing etc is just waste.

At best ~12% of US healthcare spending is for retail drugs, but it’s not that relevant globally when you consider how much US companies are spending on advertising vs R&D.

That's the budget. The actual outlays are less than $1 billion. Around 3-4% for the last few years.

The only way outlays are under 1 Trillion is if you ignore a great deal of defense spending. A classic trick is to hide future obligations like pensions and other benefits from current spending numbers, but if you need to hand out a pension to get people to work for you then obviously you should include either current or future spending.

So yes, you can get imaginary defense costs to ~4%, but I ask you where is the coast guard, national guard, DoE, or VA’s budget here? “The budget funds five branches of the U.S. military: the Army, Navy, Marine Corps, Air Force, and Space Force.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Military_budget_of_the_United_... Some might argue the national guard isn’t defense spending but we sent 250,000 guard members to Iraq and the guard is fielding F-35’s.

I will acknowledge some some outliers like the United States Border Patrol, while it’s job is literally defending the border it probably shouldn’t be included in defense spending.

PS: It gets even sillier, not that long ago we where hiding the cost of the Iraq war from defense spending numbers.