The term “European Socialism” keeps turning up in the Rhetoric of the Right, and they seem to expect it to make my hair curl and give itself highlights.

I’ll confess that I don’t know a whole lot about European Socialism, in the sense of what it is really like to live there. So when the Right says that it’s “horrible” and “debilitating” and that it undercuts “freedom,” I can’t really call them liars. At least not personally. I simply don’t know enough about it.

But what I do know is that they are telling untruths when they say it is funded by “massive taxation.” I know this because I sat down and did the math. The truth is that Americans pay more in taxes than the European Socialists do.

Let me repeat that. American taxation is higher than European taxation.

I picked the Netherlands (where the Dutch live), a nation with lots of individual freedoms, its own military, and which is also one of the most “socialized” of the European nations. Their tax-paid benefits include:

• Military
• Social Security (retirement/disability)
• Socialized Health Care
• Public Education (through college/trade school)
• Unemployment Insurance
• Housing Assistance
• Child Care Reimbursement
• Annual Vacation Reimbursement

I did this calculation back in 2009, based on 2008 tax rates. That was at the end of Saint GW Bush’s radical tax-cutting spree, so US taxes were as low as they’d been in a long time, and health-care insurance was still reasonably affordable because the insurance companies could still rake in profits by selling it only to people who didn’t need it.

The US effective tax rate is shown below with no medical insurance coverage, with 2008 (private) medical insurance coverage, and with the 2012 “affordable” medical insurance coverage factored in. I omitted college costs and benefits, which has the effect of making the US situation look better than it really is.

If we don’t include any healthcare costs in the US, we can see that taxation in this European cradle-to-grave Socialist State is a whopping 4% higher than in the US, across all tax brackets (blue versus green).

When we add in health insurance as it existed in 2008, the US effective taxation becomes regressive rather than progressive: it takes more away from the poor than the rich (orange — note how it decreases as income rises). Note that it is higher than the Dutch rate in all income brackets (green).

When I update those health insurance numbers to what they have soared to under the “Affordable” Care Act of 2008, health care actually becomes completely unaffordable for low-income people, and spikes even the higher income brackets (yellow).

Of course, regressive taxation by definition spares the wealthy. So at income-levels of $1M/year or more (not shown) where paying for health care comes out of the petty cash box you keep by the garage door (as does college tuition for your kids), we can get back to claiming that European Socialism has “massive taxes” of an additional 4% for the ultra-wealthy.

Next time you hear some conservative Limbaugh-mouth ranting about the “high cost of European Socialism,” point them over here. And if they don’t like my numbers, they can refigure them for themselves. Assuming they can add.

Here are the hard numbers.