According to Mankiw, the US is about average on taxes...

Greg Mankiw posted this today on his blog. Interesting way to look at whether the US is a high/low tax country.

"...Looking at taxes as a percentage of GDP may mislead us into thinking we can increase tax revenue more than we actually can. For some purposes, a better statistic may be taxes per person, which we can compute using this piece of advanced mathematics:

Taxes/GDP x GDP/Person = Taxes/Person

Here are the results for some of the largest developed nations:

France: 0.461 x 33,744 = 15,556

Germany: 0.406 x 34,219 = 13,893

UK: 0.390 x 35,165 = 13,714

US: 0.282 x 46,443 = 13,097

Canada: 0.334 x 38,290 = 12,789

Italy: 0.426 x 29,290 = 12,478

Spain: 0.373 x 29,527 = 11,014

Japan: 0.274 x 32,817 = 8,992

Of course, the US is middle-of-the-pack as it stands today, and after two rounds of tax cuts under Bush, which this administration is intent on letting expire to Clinton-era levels. A more interesting analysis would be to examine the level this administration's policies will raise that number to.

Stay tuned.