Happy Tax Freedom Day

157 days out of 365 - that's how long it takes to settle all the tax bills. In other words - we work for an hour, we get paid for 34 minutes.

The Fraser Institute, a Vancouver-based think-tank, declared Monday, June 6, as the day the average Canadian would have fulfilled all tax obligations to various levels of government.

That's under a fictional scenario in which all the money you initially make in the year goes directly toward paying your taxes.

Under that scenario, every dollar you make after Tax Freedom Day for the rest of the year would be yours, all yours.
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"That said, the average family is still paying 43 per cent of its income to one level of government or another. Despite the trend, it's still a substantial amount of money that works out to almost $40,000 for the average family."
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The Fraser Institute calculates that raising taxes to match current government spending at all levels, and run balanced budgets, would push Tax Freedom Day back a full 16 days to June 22.

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Now, when the new budget is out, we still have to wait 2.5 years (until spring of 2014) just for the budget to be balanced - and only then we can look forward for some real tax cuts. (Not those token $75 mail-in rebates for arts and gym.)

Meanwhile the only winner is Quebec, that will actually get the $2.2B "compensation" for... not even harmonizing its tax with the GST, but merely applying the QST on a broader base... 20 years ago. What was non-negotiable just 10 weeks ago, became a campaign promise soon thereafter. Ironically, the same budget that phases out per-vote subsidies for political parties delivers a four orders of magnitude higher "per lost vote" subsidy for a province that has just lost its effective veto power on the government.

So we better not look forward for the Tax Freedom Day to move to May (let alone - to early May, as it was before Trudeaupea) anytime soon.