Nate Silver at 538.com had an interesting post a while back regarding “Tax Freedom Day” He brought up some interesting points:

Tax revenues as a share of GDP by country:

Note that America isn’t the lowest, but we are fifth lowest and our share (28 percent, which includes state/local taxes) is 20 percent lower than the OECD average of about 35 percent.

He then goes on to break it down by type (income, corporate, excise, etc) and point out that federal taxes as a share of GDP in America have held steady since 1950 at around 20 percent.

Corporate and excise taxes, paid mostly by businesses and which conservatives complain are inefficient and simply passed through to consumers anyway, have gone down as a share of that 20 percent. What’s gone up are payroll taxes which fund programs like Medicare and Social Security that the same tea partiers were warning Obama and congressional Democrats not to touch in the same breath they were complaining about the socialist expansion of the healthcare system.

So what is it then that the tea bagger anti-tax brigade are against? The fact that we pay more taxes than Mexico and Turkey? Please enlighten me.