The NHS & the United States of America

[asheep_uk]

I was just looking up tax rates for comparison and I'm a little surprised.

For childless single taxpayer making a decent middle class wage of $50,000/yr the basic income tax rate in the US is 25%.
In the UK it's 14.9%. Is that right? I thought you guys paid much more taxes than we do?
For Social Security we pay 6% and for NI you pay 11%.
So our total on the above is 31% and your total is 26%?

I'm sure there's a bunch of small variables like sales tax (VAT), state income tax, fuel taxes, tobacco taxes, etc., but for the majority of the tax burden it looks like you guys are paying less and can still afford better social programs.
So what am I missing?

Our top-tax rate, if you earn over £37,500 ($62,000) is 40%. Our NI is 23.8%. Our VAT is 15%, but will go back up to 17.5% in January 2010. You pay council tax for the house you live in, which is based on where your house is and how big it is. We pay road tax for our cars, which for a 1.2 litre petrol car is about £115 a year. We pay VAT and fuel tax on petrol and diesel. So yeah, we're drowning in it. But for some reason that doesn't stop us buying new cars and making our average house price £150,000 ($250,000) compared to the US $215,000. (And most of our houses are rabbit hutches compared to what the US has.)