Keith Devens .com

Thanks for the link!
For the braves who have not the time to read it in its whole, I'll put two extracts:
"Our focus here is on top marginal rates, that is the highest percentage of tax imposed on every additional dollar, yen, deutsche mark or franc earned above standard taxable income levels."
"So where does our analysis of ‘all-in’ tax rates lead? One lesson is that the gaps at the margin between top income earners domiciled in various OECD countries are narrower than often imagined and certainly not as wide as the headline rates show. In fact, the marginal top rate in most countries rises substantially when considering the all-in rate of taxes on income, to 61% in France and Turkey, 62% in Denmark and Sweden, 65% in Japan and 66% in Belgium. The highest all-in rates for taxpayers in the United States fall in the 40–48% range, depending on the State where they are resident. That puts the gap with their counterparts in Sweden, which most people would see as the quintessential welfare state, in some cases at as low as nine percentage points. But before European countries gain too much confidence from this, US income earners can point out that taxpayers in Sweden and most other OECD countries in Europe move into top rate brackets at much lower income levels than they do."

Sadly, I don't think I'll be concerned with this rate anytime soon :-(

So the ~60% rate I heard for France wasn't inaccurate, it was just for the highest tax bracket? Thanks for the summary. I didn't get to read the article in detail yet (I posted it when I was over my friend's house last night). Did you check out the PDF they have of all the stats? I browsed through that for a bit and they had some kind of metric of taxes as a percentage of GDP. IIRC, the numbers were similar to the numbers you just quoted. I'm wondering exactly how the two metrics relate.

Arg, I didn't notice the PDF, I've got to check that. Time to sleep now!

In page 35/90 (page #38) of http://www1.oecd.org/publications/e-book/0102071E.PDF , the column "Disposable income of average production worker" is interesting. It's not exactly the stat I was speaking about, but I think it demystifies some clichés.
Another interesting page for the common inhabitant is the #85 (81/90) it shows where a good percentage of the social redistribution goes. Yes we can be called socialist :-)