Democrats want to expand welfare by soaking the rich. That doesn’t add up.

Democratic Party leaders and presidential candidates so often tell us that we can have significantly more domestic services and pay for it by hiking taxes on the wealthy and large corporations. Would that it were so simple.

Ask a Democrat what sort of America they want to build, and they’ll give you examples of things some other country has that they want to bring here. Finnish education, Canadian single-payer health care, European public transit — the list goes on and on. Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) is the most open about his dream: He’s said that he wants the land of the free and the home of the brave to look a lot more like Denmark.

What Democrats loathe to mention, however, is that Finns, Canadians and Danes pay for their services the old fashioned way — with higher taxes on everyone.

Denmark was long the highest taxed country in the world until France surpassed it in 2017. The country as a whole pays 46 percent of its gross domestic product in taxes, much higher than the United States’ 27 percent. They get this high level of revenue by taxing ordinary citizens at extremely high levels.

Take the income tax. Including all levels of tax, Danes making a bit more than 542,000 Danish krones pay a 56.5 percent marginal income tax rate. That sounds fine until you learn that it takes 6.6 krones to equal one U.S. dollar. That 542,000 krone income is equivalent to a bit more than $80,000 a year. Yikes!

The taxes don’t stop there. Danes also pay a value-added tax (VAT) of 25 percent on almost everything they buy or consume, including services. Clothes, cars, smartphones and even haircuts all get 25 percent added directly into the price. They call the tax the Momsloven. Though the Danish word has nothing to do with what it sounds like in English, many Americans would find a mother’s love like this a form of abuse.

Denmark is admittedly an extreme example, but no country pays for its welfare state with high taxes on the wealthy and on corporations. The recently passed tax bill that reduced the federal tax on large corporations to 21 percent only moved the United States in line with the international average.

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