...Why? The goal of the exercise is to figure out what percentage of your income really goes to taxes, not the amount of personal value you get from those taxes. That would be a really interesting thing to figure out too, but it's not what I was talking about. (If you read my comment as implying that I think the taxes I pay outstrip the personal value I get from them, you misread it - my only point is that you absolutely can figure out what your real taxation percentage is.)