I occurs to me that this is somewhat interesting, so I'll describe how US taxes work. Amongst the most obvious ones are sales tax, which is generally analogous to your VAT, as I understand it, in that you pay an additional percentage of your purchase to the government. This tax goes to state and local (usually county) governments. It's really a tax paid by the seller, but it gets directly passed to the consumer in probably more than 99% of the cases.

Then there's income tax. Most of us fill out a federal form at the beginning of our employment tenure called a I-9 that is used to tell the employer how much to take out of our paychecks. It asks you to describe, essentially, how many people there are and how many jobs are held in your family. Then some magic unseen formula is used to determine how much gets withheld every pay period. Those who are self-employed use a different set of forms used to pay esitmated taxes that they send in themselves on a regular basis. At the end of the year, you get to fill out forms used to determine how much you needed to pay for that year. If you paid more in those withholdings, you get it back. If you paid less, you get to pay up. If you paid a lot less, you get to pay up plus a penalty. (Which is why people pay estimated taxes instead of just waiting for the year end.) Then you do it again for the state. (Some states don't have income tax, though, IIRC.)

There are some other taxes, too, like those used to support Social Security (which is mostly federally sponsored old-folks pensions) and some others that I forget right now. There's also an income tax on ``Capital Gains'', which are investments that made money over the course of multiple years. It's taxed at a lower rate than regular income tax. There are also property taxes that you pay on cars, houses and other big possessions that get remitted to the state or local governments. There are random other things, too, but that covers probably 95% of the outlay.