Tax Freedom Day Clock

Action America has updated its US Tax Freedom Day Clock, to continuously display the time till or since Tax Freedom Day, in months, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

Our original Tax Freedom Day Clock counted only in months, hours and fractions of hours. This added detail allows visitors to actually watch the clock tick down ever so slowly towards Tax Freedom. The Tax Freedom Day Clock continues to count down (or up) for as long as the web page is open, automatically switching to displaying the time since Tax Freedom, after that time has passed. The Tax Freedom Day Clock also automatically resets every January 1, at midnight.

Action America also released the US Tax Freedom Clock Widget for Macintosh, (snapshot to left) along with this update. It functions the same as the web based Tax Freedom Day Clock. Besides resetting every January, this widget automatically fetches the new date for Tax Freedom Day from the internet, each year when that new date is announced. The widget fetches that date, once each time it is opened or displayed. If the widget is being displayed when the new Tax Freedom Day is posted, it will update itself the next time it is displayed. This eliminates the need to download a new widget every year, just to get the new date.

For the record, the 2009 Tax Freedom Day date has not yet been announced. As soon as it is announced by the Tax Foundation, we will update both the web-based clock and the widget. For now, both are using the 2008 Tax Freedom Day of April 23.

Also, having returned, within the last year, from living in London for about a year, we have also decided to release both Tax Freedom Clocks, formatted to use United Kingdom tax and income data, for all of our new friends in London and Scotland. The web-based UK Tax Freedom Day Clock and the UK Tax Freedom Clock Widget both use the UK Tax Freedom Day of June 2, as calculated by the Adam Smith Institute.

When you think about how long you have to work to pay your taxes, you have to ask yourself if the services that you get from the government are worth all of those lost days at work or if maybe you could provide some of those services for yourself, at a much higher quality and at a lower cost. Think about it...