It's a matter of opinion, of course. But to characterize an expense that's *by far the largest* for the typical household as "insanely low" is absurd.
First off, "insanely low" wasn't my quote. But if we're going to have an intelligent discussion on this you've got to show some basic intelligence. Your interpretation of the graph you linked to is a rookie mistake in understanding averages and what they mean. It doesn't show that taxes are the largest expense of a "typical household"
at all! It does say that if you sum up all taxes paid by all Americans they exceed the sum of housing, clothing, and food for all Americans. That's a very different thing.
Back to math basics, if I have 9 people making 10k a year and 1 making a million per year, it's completely innacurate to say that the typical person in that set made $109,000 per year. That's exactly the mistake you're making here. The richest 1% of Americans hold 38% of the wealth. Even if we had a 10% flat tax, that 1% would be paying far more in taxes than household costs. As one would expect, when you're make $30M a year you spend a tiny portion of that on food, clothes, and houses. And they would drown out the other 99% when preparing then graph you linked, even if the 99% paid far less in taxes than they do for household goods. Simple math. And in fact that's exactly the case, no way in hell that the "typical" American or even a tiny number of Americans pay more in taxes than rent, food, and clothes, that would be clear if you spent more than 5 minutes studying the tax code and had basic middle school math skills. Just look at your own tax bill, what was your ratio of taxes paid last year to money spent on housing, food, and clothes (assuming you don't still live with your parents)? Take a family of four with the two kids not paying any taxes, or the vast majority or retired folks, even more pronounced.
The sad thing is that the folks who made that graphic up knew full well exactly what I just explained, and they purposely posed it the way they did to ensnare people like you into making yourself look like a fool by misinterpreting it in exactly the way you did. That's both intellectual dishonesty and pure manipulation based on an intelligence assymetry. How does that not make you pissed? You got suckered!
That massive math error aside, if you did a multiple regression on actual taxes paid per capita for a country and the well-being of the citizens of that country you'd see a steeply sloped line with an r-squared of close to 100% That's no accident.
