We are free — after we gorge a bit on taxes
Jay Evensen
That's how it goes when your daughter is preparing for a wedding.
But I'm paying less for the bride and all her bridesmaids than I am this year in federal, state and local taxes. That says less about the cost of weddings than it does about taxes.
A change of perspective can make a big difference in how we view things. Instead of just glancing at the deductions on your paycheck stub or adding numbers on your tax returns, look at it this way:
In any given eight-hour work day, you spend an average of two hours and 28 minutes working just to pay that day's share of taxes of every kind. In comparison, you work 17 minutes to afford clothing and accessories, 46 minutes for food, one hour and 19 minutes for housing costs and one hour and six minutes for medical care.
Obesity is a national epidemic, and yet we spend far less than a lunch break each day working to pad our waistlines. Instead, we're gorging ourselves on taxes.
That breakdown comes courtesy of the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan research group in Washington. For many years now, it has published an annual estimate of when "Tax Freedom Day" arrives in the U.S. That is the day when the average American has earned enough to pay all his or her tax bills for the year, assuming they did nothing but apply all earnings to taxes from Jan. 1.
The foundation calculates freedom day by state, as well. In Utah, it comes April 21 this year. That represents the 17th highest tax burden in the nation and a lot later than Alaska's March 29.
If you're really into numbers, the annual report gets specific about types of taxes. You work 12 days to afford property taxes, 16 days for sales and excise taxes and a whopping 42 days for federal and state income taxes (which makes all the fuss about property taxes seem a bit misplaced). The entire report is available at www.taxfoundation.org.
Of course, there is yet another perspective to all this, and that has to do with the services those taxes buy. That is, of course, the arena in which the real fights begin.
My concern in presenting these figures is that we could soon look back on these days nostalgically. Last week, the Bush administration released a report showing Medicare and Social Security on the brink of disaster. Medicare will have exhausted its insurance trust fund by 2019, and Social Security will begin paying out more than it receives in 2017.
Recent comments
If we want lower taxes, we have to do things for ourselves rather...
Steve Glaser | March 30, 2008 at 11:39 a.m.
Liar - You either joined the wrong party, or you are lying about...
MEB | March 30, 2008 at 10:17 a.m.
And yet Utah happily plans tax guzzling extravaganzas like the Lake...
taxed | March 30, 2008 at 10:00 a.m.
