Tax Freedom Clock Web Widget

Tax Freedom Day Clock Web Widget

Alert: (3/31/10) The Tax Foundation has just announced that in 2010, Tax Freedom Day will not occur until April 9.

John Gaver
March 31, 2010

John Gaver To help draw attention to the excessive amount of taxes that Americans pay, ActionAmerica has released its popular US Tax Freedom Day Clock in yet another format - this time, as a Flash-based web widget.

Each year, the Tax Foundation publishes a report, in which they have calculated the date on which the average US taxpayer has worked long enough, to earn enough money, to pay all of his taxes for that year. For obvious reasons, the Tax Foundation refers to this date as Tax Freedom Day.

The Tax Foundation has just reported that in 2010 Tax Freedom Day falls on April 9. In other words, most Americans will work for more than a quarter of this year, to earn enough money to pay all of their taxes for the year.

But, that's not the worst of it. The Tax Foundation points out that this date does not take into consideration the 1.3 trillion budget deficit which will have to eventually be paid. It is based only upon projected incomes and taxes for this year.

The deficit-included date for Tax Freedom, is when Americans would achieve Tax Freedom, if they were required to pay for all government spending this year, including the $1.3 trillion federal budget deficit. If that were the case, then Tax Freedom Day would fall on May 17 (see the Tax Foundation chart). That will certainly push future Tax Freedom Days further into the year.

The Tax Foundation further points out that, "Since 1948, when Tax Freedom Day was first calculated, the difference between what governments are spending and what they're collecting has never been as great as during 2009 and 2010." Of course, as the tremendous costs associated with Obamacare kick in, the deficit will skyrocket, pushing this date even later, in years to come. This should be a wake-up call for all Americans.

We began by releasing the Tax Freedom Day Clock simply as a JavaScript clock at the top of web pages in our Tax & Economy section, which is what you see at the top of this page. It quickly became very popular, generating lots of traffic and feedback, so a few years ago, we introduced the Tax Freedom Day Clock Macintosh Dashboard widget. That got the attention, not only of Mac Users in the USA, but in other countries, as well. We received requests from folks in several countries, asking if we would create one for their country. It was partially because the greatest number of those requests were for a UK version of the Tax Freedom Day Clock and partially because the necessary tax data for the UK is easily available that we introduced the UK Tax Freedom Day Clock, both as a JavaScript clock on our site and as a Macintosh widget.

We have also received many requests to release a version of the Tax Freedom Clock, in a format that can be easily inserted into web pages and blog posts, as a web widget, so here it is. Sorry, Brits. Yours will follow soon.

It is a Flash applet, so it should work on any web site or blog that allows web widgets (object code or embed code) and display properly on all modern browsers.

ActionAmerica.org encourages you to share this widget with your friends, by placing it on your own web site, on your Facebook and MySpace pages and other social networking sites and in the signature of your various forum postings.

To share this widget with others, just select all of the text in the following box and copy it (Ctrl–C on a PC or Cmd–C on a Mac). Then, paste it into the HTML code of your web site, blog or forum posting (Ctrl–V on a PC or Cmd–V on a Mac), where you want the Tax Freedom Day Clock to appear on that page. That's all there is to it. Note that some blogs and forums may not allow "object" or "embed" code, though most do. The "object" code version is most widely allowed on forum postings.

For those sites that do not allow "object" code, you might try the "embed" code, below.

The Tax Freedom Day Clock web widget is a clock that counts down the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds till the next US Tax Freedom Day or, if Tax Freedom Day has passed, the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds that most Americans have actually been earning their own money, since Tax Freedom Day.

The underlying data that makes the US Tax Freedom Clock possible comes from annual calculations by the non-partisan Tax Foundation, who are the unofficial keepers of the US Tax Freedom Day.

The Tax Foundation uses the most unbiased method possible for calculating the national Tax Freedom Day. As you can see below, it is very straight forward:

Federal, state & local taxes	x	365 (or 366) days	=	Tax Freedom Day

Total income

Dividing the total of federal, state and local taxes, by the total income of all Americans, gives us the percentage of our annual income that goes to taxes and likewise the percentage of the year that we have to work for the government to pay those taxes. Take that percentage and multiply it by the number of days in the year and you know how many days you have to work to pay your taxes for that year.

Note that all of our Tax Freedom Day Clocks convert that number of days to an exact date and time and counts down to that time. This allows us to count down not only to the day of Tax Freedom, but to the second, so you can watch the clock, as it ticks down to or up from Tax Freedom Day.

Each year, the Tax Freedom Day Clocks will all be adjusted, as soon as the Tax Foundation announces the new date. That usually occurs some time near the first of April. This page will also be updated to reflect the new date, when it is announced. However, any such change in the date is usually nominal, as only five times since 1970 has the year to year change been more than four days and 26 times the year to year change was two days or less (see chart for 1967 to 2009 or download spreadsheet for 1900 to 2010, from the Tax Foundation).

In actuality, Tax Freedom Day is different for each state, depending upon the various tax rates that may be in effect in each state, for that tax year. In that case, the formula changes slightly, using only federal, state and local taxes for each state and only the total income for each state.

Individual state Tax Freedom Days for 2010 ranged from March 26, in low-tax Alaska and Louisianna, to April 27, in high-tax Connecticut. To learn when Tax Freedom Day falls in your state, visit the Tax Foundation web site.

For our Tax Freedom Day Clock, we use the National Tax Freedom Day, which, as mentioned above, falls on April 9, in 2010. As mentioned above, for the first few months of each year, the Tax Freedom Day Clock will use the previous year's date, until the data becomes available for the new year - usually in late March or early April.

The important thing to remember is that in all but eight states, at least a quarter of your days at work each year, go to pay your taxes. Only Alaska, Louisiana, Mississippi, New Hampshire, New Mexico, South Dakota, Tennessee, and West Virginia come in under a quarter and only by six days, at best. In the worst states, that number rises to just under a third of your work year. Converting that to hours, in an eight hour work day, we all work at least the first two hours just to pay the government. The people in Connecticut work the first two hours and 34 minutes to pay the government.

That's like working two or more hours of every day, for which you will NOT get paid.

Modern politicians call that work that you do for them, without getting paid, "patriotic." However, Abraham Lincoln had a much better term for it. He called it by its proper name - "slavery."

So the question that you must ask yourself is, "Are the services that I receive from the government worth a quarter to a third of my work days, each year?"

Or, to put it another way, "Are the services that I receive from the government worth a quarter to a third of my working life?"

How many of those lost days at work went to build a "bridge to nowhere" or to provide other pork? How many of those lost days went to bail out billion-dollar banks that made bad loans? How many of those lost days do you think were spent to line the pockets of a bureaucrat or government contractor? Would you have spent any of your hard-earned money on any of those pork projects or bailouts? Couldn't you provide or purchase many of those government services for yourself, for much less money and have more left over to improve your lifestyle? Are you getting a fair return in services, from the government, for all that work that you do for them? Think about it...

Tax Freedom Day is exactly what the name implies. It's the day on which the money that you earn actually begins to benefit you and not the government.

There are a few detractors of Tax Freedom Day - almost exclusively, those who support big government - who try to convince folks that Tax Freedom Day is not representative of the average American, since the rich pay a much larger percentage of the taxes that are actually collected. Interestingly, those detractors conveniently ignore certain facts. For example, the Tax Foundation reports that in 2006, approximately 43 million federal tax returns, representing 91 million taxpayers, claimed zero taxes owed and another 15 million households (retired, disabled and those who live on welfare) don't even file. What about all them?

Certainly, the detractors of Tax Freedom Day are correct in pointing out that the rich pay significantly more of the tax load. But they conveniently ignore other more important facts like, the fact that the rich also earn significantly more of the income and the fact that over 120 million of Americans pay no tax at all (based upon federal income tax records - also, these people usually pay no state income or property taxes either and pay an insignificant amount of other taxes). In fact, some will soon be getting rebates for taxes that they never paid.

The 120+ million poor Americans, who pay NO tax, offset the effect of the less than seven million rich taxpayers (earning over $160,000 per year), who pay more than 60% of the taxes actually collected. That means that Tax Freedom Day actually comes closer to representing the average middle-class, working American than either the rich or the poor.

This is just one example of how the detractors of Tax Freedom Day, ignore facts that conflict with their spin. But to make matters worse, they are generating more and more spin, every year, to try to hide the problem exposed by Tax Freedom Day. Just remember that those detractors are almost exclusively folks who want more government and higher taxes, rather than less - worse, some of those folks actually benefit from higher taxes.

We want to thank our friends at the Tax Foundation for their annual efforts to bring us this information. If you have not visited their site, we encourage you to do so. You may be surprised at what you will learn.

Now that you are suitably depressed over how much of your hard work goes to support the government (that is, if you are an American), I will toss you a bone, to make you feel not quite so bad.

If you were in the United Kingdom, Tax Freedom Day wouldn't occur till June 2, based upon data from the Adam Smith Institute. Of course, if you include government borrowing, the UK's Tax Freedom Day moves further back to June 14, 2008. Either way, for almost half a year, Brits work to support Her Majesty's Government. Some Brits will try to justify this, by telling you that they get free health care. But, as someone who has lived there, I can assure you that the quality of health care that they get is not even a faint shadow of what even our poor people get, in the USA. In actuality, they don't get "free" health care. They pay dearly for it, working almost half of each year, for Her Majesty's government and because it is government run, the quality of their health care is pathetic. Even though I paid for my own health care, I had to come back to the USA to get a proper diagnosis and treatment for a common ailment.

Although England's excruciating tax level doesn't forgive our own government, for forcing us to work so long for them each year, it does give us reason to be glad that we don't live in Europe. On the other hand, now that Obamacare has been signed into law, it appears that is exactly where we are headed.

Note 1: The Tax Freedom Day Clock at the top of this page uses JavaScript to effect the countdown, so your browser must support JavaScript and Javascript support must be turned on. If you don't see the days to Tax Freedom above, it's probably because either you, someone else who uses your computer or a piece of software has disabled Javascript in your browser or although it's very unlikely, you may be using a very old browser that does not support JavaScript. Although Action America is designed to be easily used and navigated without JavaScript functionality, several features such as this one will not show up, if JavaScript is not enabled.

Note 2: We have occasionally had people contact us, early in the year, telling us that our Tax Freedom Day Clock is off by one hour. The clock has, in each case, been accurate. We want to remind our readers, who might want to check our calculations, not to forget that there is a one hour time change, between January 1 and Tax Freedom Day. Our clock counts down actual hours, rather than adjusted hours. However, if you do think that you see an error in the clock, please don't hesitate to contact us. After all, although we have tested it extensively, a minor glitch might have slipped through our testing.

Note 3: After some effort, we developed a work-around for a bug in Internet Explorer (IE), that had initially kept IE users from seeing the above clock. We tested this clock on eleven major browsers, on Windows, Mac and Linux platforms and IE was the only one that was affected. Although IE users can now see this clock, it is partially because of many standards adherence issues like this and myriad security issues in Internet Explorer, that we strongly recommend that IE users download and use either the Firefox of Safari browser. Note too, that both also load complex pages much faster than IE.