tax
Global Tax Rates Comparison: US vs World
If you plan on making a lot of money, you might want to move to Switzerland. The Swiss don’t tax income all that heavily, charging an income tax of anywhere from zero percent to 13.2 percent.
You don’t want to move to Denmark, though. Yes, the people of Denmark are regularly voted to be the happiest people on Earth. It’s uncertain, though, how many of these polls take place at tax time. The government in Denmark charges income tax rates ranging from 38 percent to 59 percent. Imagine trying to get away with that in the United States.
In fact, the United States is fairly mild when it comes to income tax rates. The government here collects taxes equal to 15 percent to 35 percent of citizens’ yearly income, depending on how much money they make. Despite the country’s middling tax ways, complaining about income taxes has long been a U.S. institution. Americans have been grumbling about income taxes since 1862, when the Income Tax Law was signed.
This law, by the way, was established to pay for the Civil War. The fact that U.S. citizens are still paying income taxes today, long after the Civil War has ended, is testament to the widely held belief that the federal government will never let go of a tax or fee once it’s been established.
Other countries with notable income tax rates include neighboring Canada, which collects from 15 to 29 percent of its residents’ incomes in taxes. In Mexico, the government charges taxes equal to anywhere from zero percent to 28 percent of its citizens’ incomes.
Other counties have extremely wide ranges when it comes to the income taxes that they levy. In Iceland, for example, citizens pay anywhere from none of their incomes to 37 percent in taxes. In Sweden, that range swings from nothing to 57 percent. And in France, citizens pay anywhere from 5 percent of their income to 40 percent of their income in taxes each year. ( source : Creditloan.com)
Power of Corporate s Vs Tax They Pay
Source: US Uncut – No Cuts Until Corporate Tax Cheats Pay Up!
The following are collected from a report by the Institute for Policy Studies. The report is called Top 200: The Rise of Corporate Global Power. Over time, additonal facts and stats will be added from other sources as well.
- Of the 100 largest economies in the world, 51 are corporations; only 49 are countries (based on a comparison of corporate sales and country GDPs).
- The Top 200 corporations’ sales are growing at a faster rate than overall global economic activity. Between 1983 and 1999, their combined sales grew from the equivalent of 25.0 percent to 27.5 percent of World GDP.
- The Top 200 corporations’ combined sales are bigger than the combined economies of all countries minus the biggest 10.
- The Top 200s’ combined sales are 18 times the size of the combined annual income of the 1.2 billion people (24 percent of the total world population) living in “severe” poverty.
- While the sales of the Top 200 are the equivalent of 27.5 percent of world economic activity, they employ only 0.78 percent of the world’s workforce.
- Between 1983 and 1999, the profits of the Top 200 firms grew 362.4 percent, while the number of people they employ grew by only 14.4 percent.
- A full 5 percent of the Top 200s’ combined workforce is employed by Wal-Mart, a company notorious for union-busting and widespread use of part-time workers to avoid paying benefits. The discount retail giant is the top private employer in the world, with 1,140,000 workers, more than twice as many as No. 2, DaimlerChrysler, which employs 466,938.
- U.S. corporations dominate the Top 200, with 82 slots (41 percent of the total). Japanese firms are second, with only 41 slots.
- Of the U.S. corporations on the list, 44 did not pay the full standard 35 percent federal corporate tax rate during the period 1996-1998. Seven of the firms actually paid less than zero in federal income taxes in 1998 (because of rebates). These include: Texaco, Chevron, PepsiCo, Enron, Worldcom, McKesson and the world’s biggest corporation – General Motors.
- Between 1983 and 1999, the share of total sales of the Top 200 made up by service sector corporations increased from 33.8 percent to 46.7 percent. Gains were particularly evident in financial services and telecommunications sectors, in which most countries have pursued deregulation.
COMPARISON CHARTS 