Somewhere between 65 and 75 percent, anyway. Herd to pin down.
Health insurance is no longer optional. It IS a Tax. Just ask Roberts.
bkmk
Some part of medical insurance pays for better technology and thus life extension. However, most/many hospitals have to pay for care of illegals.
Some part of most other insurance policies for cars, houses, etc. should be considered a tax because they are needed to protect against lawsuits inflicted by myriad laws. Million dollar awards for pain and suffering are caused by liberal judges attempting to extract money for favored constituents, actions which needlessly drive up costs for insurance.
And then there’s INFLATION, which is clearly a STEALTH TAX. Adjustment needs to be added for the inflation on consumption goods. If consumption is 70 percent of the economy as many say, the effect of government induced inflation (through largely hidden increases in the money supply that is increasing at 9 percent per year) is HUGE.
Someone questioned the employer’s MANDATORY “Contribution” to Social Security (and even optional medical packages). When management determines how many people to layoff, all benefits are included. The cost of an employee is a sum of all the costs and accruals.
Also, road tolls (now becoming popular in Texas) need to be added.
75% is a bogus number for many reasons. One is that you can’t directly add marginal tax rates. Another is that some of these taxes are offset on the federal tax base, e.g., you can deduct certain state taxes from your income for the purpose of determining adjusted gross income.
A more useful measure is the ratio or percentage of total taxes (state, federal and local) to total income.
According to the Statistical Abstract of the USA http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/2012/tables/12s0678.pdf total income in the USA for 2011 was $12.5 trillion.
According to http://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_revenue_2011USrn total state, federal and local taxes came to $4.9 trillion.
Thus, of every dollar of income, on average 39.1% is consumed in various taxes.
If you factor in health insurance, then it’s entirely possible to get this average figure close to 50% on average.
But 75%, not true.
Jack
this doesn’t even consider the cost of regulations.