> whereas someone from a high tax country loses roughly half their income on them

Please, typically those taxes go (not completely) to stuff you’d otherwise be paying for from your after tax cash.

One obvious one is health care (which Americans pay much more for than Europeans, just not via their taxes). Less spent on roads: more car maintenance/shorter car lifespan.

One can have a reasonable argument over which should be bundled and which should be unbundled, but to say broadly that one “loses” on taxes is either lazy or ideology.