Link Banana

In case you had doubts about the United State being one of the least equal “developed” countries, The Economist has a simple chart for you.

Two charts:

• Americans like to think they work a lot. Though they put Western Europe to shame, South Korea blows them (and everyone else in the OECD) away.
• On the other hand, Expedia’s embarassingly basic and self-promoting survey found that Americans earn fewer vacation days than Western Europes four biggest countries, but they leave fewer of those on the table than the Spanish.

Sadly, I don’t have any servicable graphing program, so I don’t actually have a chart for you. I just thought it was rather interesting that The Economist ran the amount of foreign aid given by OECD countries one day and followed that with the amount spent on leisure in those same countries. It should also be noted that both graphs are per percent of GDP, not a simple total value.

It should come as no surprise that the United States has essentially the lowest “environmental taxes” — as a percent of total tax revenue — of the OECD, an organization of mostly rich countries. I was surprised that New Zealand “beat” the US, and that Australia was solidly in the middle of the pack.

The Economist has put together a pretty interesting graph of the personal tax burden in OECD — generally “rich” — countries. The United States and Canada are both near the middle of the pack, though Canada’s lower (which surprised me).