While people do indeed pay plenty of taxes in the U.S., things could be worse: they could be in Belgium. That's where you can find, according to an article in Forbes, the world's highest income tax rate. Combining income and social security taxes, a single person on an average salary without children will pay 42.8 percent of their income to the government there. The United States, by contrast, ranks number eight on this list, at 22.7 percent, slightly below the number seven country, the U.K. (24.9 percent), and quite above the number nine country, New Zealand (16.4 percent). The lowest income tax for the average person would be Mexico, at 9.5 percent.