[opendoor]

Originally Posted by CliffFletcher

I guess that’s something to bring up with the OECD, which is where I get my stats from.

https://stats.oecd.org/Index.aspx?DataSetCode=CTS_CIT

But if you have a more credible source, I’m always looking for good sources of data.

Well no, they have a bunch of categories there and you're just looking at one of them. That particular data is strictly taxes on corporate Net Income, which as I said is very narrowly focused. If we had a 0% corporate tax rate but a 100% payroll tax to fund social services, would that make us an attractive place to do business? No, not at all because the average business would be paying about 30% of their revenue into taxes.

I'm not aware of anywhere that explicitly breaks down all employer costs (though I'm sure that exists), but the OECD's Social Security Contributions would be an OK proxy of non-tax revenue that funds social services. It includes employee contributions, so it's not strictly focused on employer costs, but if you sort in descending order, you can see Canada is way, way down the list because we fund things largely through taxes. Whereas a country like Germany largely funds its healthcare system through payroll taxes and mandatory employee contributions, while Sweden funds a lot of its welfare state through payroll taxes. Those don't show up under tax revenue per se, but they're effectively the same thing.

https://data.oecd.org/tax/social-sec...ndicator-chart

Here's the actual chart for 2021:

https://data.oecd.org/chart/77n4

As for the other side of my analysis, do think the Canadian voting public would be amenable to paying northern European income and sales taxes?

No, not a chance. Though I do think an introduction of a modest healthcare payroll tax might be a decent way to get more funding into the healthcare system. Canada increased the total CPP contribution rates by about 5 percentage points in the '90s and early '00s with little negative effect, so over a period of time we could probably do a similar thing with a payroll tax. If we phased in a 5% mandatory healthcare contribution (say 2% employee and 3% employer) over a period of time, that would add about $30B in funding a year in today's dollars while still keeping payroll taxes well below most European countries.