THE blogging colossus known as Andrew Sullivan goes a rhetorical step further than my colleague, arguing that Americans are a bunch of "big babies" who refuse to fork over enough taxes to pay for the goodies they ask government to buy for them. The latest twist is a poll showing that Americans also oppose allowing the government to raise its debt ceiling in order to borrow the money to pay for the goodies it has bought for them, in the absence of taxes. By deductive reasoning, we might conclude that Americans want the government to steal things from contractors and not pay for them. But the more likely conclusion, as Jonathan Bernstein argues, is that Americans don't yet understand that "do not raise the debt ceiling" means "default on America's debts, stop cutting Social Security and Medicare checks, don't pay contractors for work performed, and crash the stock market". As the media explains this over the next month or two, public views on this question are likely to shift.

As a side note, though, one point Mr Sullivan makes isn't really correct. Mr Sullivan writes that if Barack Obama "pretends that we can resolve this by revenues alone, he is part of the problem, not the solution." David Brooks echoes that point in an op-ed today, saying "there are no conceivable tax increases that can keep up" with rising Medicare spending. This sounds very hard-headed, but it's not really correct. America has one of the lowest tax burdens of any advanced country. We may not want to fix our debt problem solely by increasing revenues, but if we wanted to, we could.

The Index of Economic Freedom published by the conservative Heritage Foundation (which presumably has no interest in lowballing current US taxation figures) puts the total of US federal, state and local taxes in 2012 at 24% of GDP. In Britain the total tax burden is 34% of GDP. In Sweden it is 46%, in France 42%, in Germany 37%. At the lower end of the spectrum of major advanced economies, Japan is at 28% and Australia is at 27%.

The federal portion of America's tax burden is in the neighbourhood of 18% of GDP. According to the dire long-term budget vision laid out by John Palmer and Rudolph Penner of the Tax Policy Center, federal government spending, currently at 24% of GDP, will rise to about 25% of GDP by 2023 (due mainly to rising health-care costs and interest payments), and may go up to 30% or more by 2037 depending on how much debt we rack up in the meantime.