Put that in your T.E.A. and drink it.

Keith Chrostowski of the Kansas City Star examines research by the University of Maryland's Thomas F. Schaller, who...

...notes that in America, state and federal taxes as a share of the gross domestic product amount to 28 percent. He points out that's among the smallest in the 31 first-world nations in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development. Mexico, Turkey, Japan and South Korea pay smaller shares.

That's still a lot of American tax money to redistribute, right? And by a statistical measure called the "Gini coefficient," which gauges the distribution of income in society, America does redistribute some of its wealth. According to Gini, the more evenly income is distributed, the closer the coefficient is to zero.

America's number, before government taxes and transfers, is 0.46. This is just at the Organization for Economic Cooperation average of 0.45. After taxes and transfers, it drops to 0.38, indicating the redistribution of wealth. But that 0.38 is the highest of any first-world country, indicating the U.S. is the least redistributive.