Chart of the week: feeling the squeeze

Tax revenues as a proportion of GDP are the highest since the early 1950s. We may have hit the limit of how much money the government can safely extract form the economy.

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Louis XIV's finance minister, Jean-Baptiste Colbert, said that "the art of taxation consists in so plucking the goose as to obtain the largest possible amount of feathers with the smallest possible amount of hissing". Britain's geese are hissing unusually loudly at present.

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