Lumping all fees and duties together is not what people normally assume. Usually, just the income tax is compared, as it is present in most economies of the world.
Here in Norway an income tax bracket of 50% for a well-off middle class family is fairly normal. On top of that, sales tax is 25%, gas is mostly made of taxes (about 2.5 times what you'd pay in the US) etc.
Still somehow there's less bitching about taxes (or gas price) per capita than you hear from overseas :)
I hear a lot of bitching about food and gas prices for example here in Finland. Also very few people DON'T have a problem with some sort of bureaucrat, for example idiotic and incoherent health inspectors, bureaucrats deciding who gets subsidized etc.
The best way to deal with bureaucrats here is to catch them making a mistake and then using that to make them sign the papers. (Usually this involves following their orders until there is some kind of incoherence in them, and thus is costly if those orders involve eg. building/renovating something that is fine as is).
For some reason the favorite explanation nowdays is that the EU is in fault here, even though this crap has been going on before the EU existed.
Here in Norway an income tax bracket of 50% for a well-off middle class family is fairly normal. On top of that, sales tax is 25%, gas is mostly made of taxes (about 2.5 times what you'd pay in the US) etc.
Still somehow there's less bitching about taxes (or gas price) per capita than you hear from overseas :)