Happy Tax Freedom Day to all of my American readers who’ve been working since January 1 to keep our local, state, and federal governments running! (Here in Massachusetts our tax burden is slightly higher than the national average so our tax freedom day will come perhaps a week later (2013 map), but to Massachusetts readers I can wish a “Happy Snow Freedom Day” as it would seem that the snow piles in shaded areas are finally gone.)
Background: Tax Foundation’s Tax Freedom Day page (note that I think the Tax Foundation gets this wrong. Tax Freedom Day does not say anything about the cost of government, only about the cost of taxes. The cost of government includes explicit borrowing through bonds and deficit spending. It also includes pension commitments whose cost is unknown and/or not accounted for. We would presumably have to keep working much later if we paid for government on a current basis rather than pushing much of the cost into the future.)
There seems to be a correlation between Tax Freedom Day and:
High taxes = longer life expectancy ?
High taxes = better education ?
High taxes = more personal earnings ?
http://www.citylab.com/work/2015/04/the-geography-of-well-being/391188/
Paul:
Thanks for the reference. It would be a powerful message for politicians to deliver to taxpayers: keep paying us 50% of your income or you will die! But I don’t think that the chart shows what you suggest that it does. Massachusetts does well (thank you, Harvard and MIT + being extremely unfriendly to immigrants who would drag down the averages) yet our tax burden is roughly in line with the national average. New Hampshire does equally well but its tax burden is among the very lowest (see http://taxfoundation.org/state-tax-climate/new-hampshire ). New York is the most burdened group of citizens in the U.S. and they don’t top the charts. Vermont and New Hampshire show up pretty much the same in all of those charts (NH has a higher income) despite the fact that Vermont has an above-average tax burden and NH has a dramatically low one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_life_expectancy
shows that Singapore and Hong Kong have substantially higher life expectancy than the U.S., for example, though the government spends only about half the percentage of GDP compared to the U.S. government (see http://www.heritage.org/index/country/singapore for example; government spending is down to 14.4 percent of GDP, compare to over 40% in the U.S.; http://www.heritage.org/index/country/hongkong shows about 18.5 percent of GDP spend by the government there).