Couldn't find a good data source for government expenditure as percent of GDP and don't have time to compile the statistics myself, World Bank only went back to 95 which doesn't show what I want to show and OECD only gave raw and not proportional expenditure. So this is taxation data which is far messier. Only thing I want to point out is that you can roughly eye-ball this to see that taxation becomes significantly flatter somewhere in the range of 30 - 50% of GDP but rises quite sharply before then. It very rarely, and only briefly rises over 50% of GDP and that is in only a single case, Sweden. There is no constant rise in government taxation as % of GDP as some would claim and the European countries flatten out without any sort of political movement comparable to the American right or the Tea Party.
Explanation for the graph since it didn't import well. Taxation as percentage of GDP is on the Y axis and I couldn't get the labels to go on the X and don't have time to fiddle with it so the X axis is years past 1965. Best I could do without spending too much time with it.
I couldn't get it to size well, your browser should be able to enlarge it easy enough. Credit for data goes to OECD.
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