Talk:Tax Freedom Day

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Contents 1 Request clarification on tax rates on rich 2 NPOV 3 Criticisms sections 4 Cost of government 5 Tax Freedom Day Around the World

[edit] Request clarification on tax rates on rich

This article says "the rich pay a much higher proportion of their income in tax". In contrast, I always hear that wealthy people have various ways to hide their income such as offshore countries or the lower tax-rate on capital gains.

Don't want an edit-war or anything but would like some discussion on this point to ensure NPOV.

EmRick 22:09, 13 Jun 2004 (UTC)

The word trick is "officially considered income". That may leave out an awfully lot of untaxable "income".159.105.80.141 14:30, 26 March 2007 (UTC)

If the "average" tax rate is 35%, that means some people pay higher than 35% and some lower than 35%. So, I don't think one could say anything that will be true 100% as there are a lot of variables. That being said, these stats are very interesting: 84.6% of all Federal Taxes are paid by the top 25% of wage earners. Even more telling, the top 1% of wage earners pay about 36.89%. Michaelcox 18:06, 29 April 2007 (UTC)

[edit] NPOV

While reading this I noted that the author of the article only gave the opinions of critics of the Tax Freedom Day. I was wondering if anyone could get the people for it?

[edit] Criticisms sections

This section only seemed to apply to the U.S. tax freedom day so I made it a subheading under United States. Christopher Parham 02:03, 2005 May 23 (UTC)

[edit] Cost of government

I removed the phrase that equates the total amount of taxes with "cost of government". While "cost of government" (such as salaries for politicians, maintainance of ministry buildings, paying for blunders any government makes every now and then,, etc), a large part of taxes does not at all contribute to "cost of government", but instead is used for schools, police, national defence, roads, etc.

Of course, the Anarchist POV is that without a government we would not pay taxes at all, so in this sense every tax is caused by the government.

--Aleph4 13:02, 30 September 2005 (UTC)

[edit] Tax Freedom Day Around the World

I modified this table to sort based upon the Tax Freedom date instead of alphabetical by country. It gives more information, allowing an easy comparison of Tax Freedom Days (and tax rates) amongst the data set. Given such a small number of countries, it is easy to find the one your interested in without resorting to sorted order. I also fixed a typo on the Australian Day-Count field and tax rate. --VonHammer 14:37, 5 June 2007

That is a bit misleading. The article itself says Due to the different ways that nations collect and categorize public finance data, however, Tax Freedom Days are not comparable from one country to another. --Aleph4 (talk) 12:35, 8 February 2008 (UTC)