Submitted my federal and state taxes this week. 6.3% effective federal income tax rate (total cash paid / AGI).
3.6% effective state rate, again relative to AGI.
Other random facts:
Home property taxes: 2.6% of AGI
For comparison, Mortgage interest: 5% of AGI (I refinanced a month ago though - this will be much lower next year)
social security/medicare: 6.3%/ 1.47% AGI (note that because some benefits are not in AGI, but are in FICA, this is not the 6.20%/1.45% that is expected)
Again for comparison: My out-of-pocket health care premiums are about 3.6% AGI.
A rough estimate is that 30% of my AGI is subject to sales tax - which in my state at 6% means 1.8% of my AGI is sales tax. If ALL my available AGI was subject to sales tax, sales tax would only go to 4.8% of my AGI, so not much difference.
This is why the so-called fair tax can't fix wealth inequality. A "filthy rich" person probably only spends, what, 10% of their AGI on taxable goods? Even if you taxed that spending at 100%, you'd only end up with an effective tax rate for the rich of 10%. And not even that, because you'd have to exempt probably $100k of taxable spending to not destroy the lower and middle classes with the VAT. I'm slowly having my philosophy move more toward only having wealth taxes and no income taxes. With some kind of modifier or exemption for primary residence - I disagree with forcing someone to work to keep a house. So maybe you say "the first <median house price in your region> of wealth is exempt from property tax" or something, and have no exemptions for business property. I haven't yet formalized a method to prevent landowners from abusing renters and avoiding loopholes.
This is a total tax burden of about 21-22%.
I really don't understand why people scream about high taxes in the US.
I'm sort of curious what others' total tax burdens are.
(For those not in the US, AGI is "adjusted gross income" - it is wages plus interest/dividends/business income, minus some specific classes of losses and expenses; for me it is health care premiums because I don't have anything "complex.")