Today is the mythical day when you have stopped working for the government and started working for yourself -- it is Tax Freedom Day 2007. From the Tax Foundation:
Tax Freedom Day answers the basic question, "What price is the nation paying for government?" We divide the most authoritative figure for total tax collections by the most authoritative figure for the nation's income. The answer this year is that taxes will amount to 32.7 percent of our income. We convert that percentage into days worked, and if we started on January 1, it would take until April 30. That's when we could start keeping some of our earnings.
I don't know about you, but I've been working hard all of this year. It is nice to know that I finally get to "keep" what I earn for the rest of the year. Technically, since I live in Tennessee my tax freedom day was a couple of weeks ago -- and you poor folks in New York don't really get to celebrate for another couple of weeks....
Where did all of that money go? The Tax Foundation has this handy diagram to illustrate how those tax dollars get collected.
