US Tax Freedom Day Clock 2011 Released

Yesterday, the Tax Foundation announced the date for Tax Freedom Day for 2011 and ActionAmerica.org updated their popular Tax Freedom Clocks, accordingly.

Based upon government reported tax and income data for all states in the USA, the Tax Foundation has determined that in 2011, the average US taxpayer will have to work till April 12, in order to earn enough to pay his taxes for the year. That's more than a quarter of the year. The state Tax Freedom Days vary from March 26 in low-tax Mississippi to May 2, in high-tax Connecticut.

Since the Tax Freedom Day Clocks tick in seconds, ActionAmerica.org has taken the data provided by the Tax Foundation and re-calculated Tax Freedom down to the second. So the exact moment of Tax Freedom in the USA is April 12, at 12:46:05 AM. That's the base time used by the Tax Freedom Clocks.

The US Tax Freedom Clocks are available as both a Flash web widget and as a Macintosh Dashboard widget. They count down the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds till US Tax Freedom and then count up the months, days, hours, minutes and seconds since Americans began earning their own money.

The purpose of these clocks is to keep Tax Freedom Day and the issues of our enormously excessive taxes, that Tax Freedom Day exposes, before the public year-around, rather than just for a month or so, near Tax Freedom Day.

ActionAmerica encourages you to visit the Tax Freedom Clock web page on our site, so you can copy the embed code and include it on the various blogs, forums and social networking sites that you visit. Let's keep this in front of the public all year.

Tax Tyranny Clock Released

To condemn 100 Years of Tax Tyranny and to help others inveigh against that 100 Years of Tax Tyranny, ActionAmerica.org has created the Tax Tyranny Clock, which is a live clock that continuously counts down the time to the 100th anniversary of the day the legislation that created the 16th Amendment was passed.

Almost 100 years ago, on July 12, 1909, Congress passed the legislation that was sent to the states for ratification, to become the infamous 16th Amendment. We are proud to join ZapTheIRS.com and others, in calling for a national day of mourning on July 12, 2009, to lament 100 years of Tax Tyranny. The Tax Tyranny Clock continuously counts down the days, hours, minutes and seconds to that infamous date. After that date, it simply announces "100 Years Plus".



Post it Everywhere!

ActionAmerica.org invites you to embed this clock on your own web sites and blog posts, in order to call attention to this dark centennial. Place it on any of your posts to forums or social networks that allow embed code. It's real easy. Simply go to the Tax Tyranny Clock page and copy the single line of embed code and paste it into the HTML of any site that allows embed code. Place it anywhere and everywhere that you can. Let's make this day of mourning a major event.

ActionAmerica.org will host this widget until at least August 12, 2009; one month after that day of infamy.

Action America Analyzes IRS Collections by Income Category (Percentile) for Tax Year 2005

It's that time of year again. The official IRS Collections Data for 2005 has just become available and Action America has published our annual analysis of that data in an article titled "1986-2005 IRS Collections Data by Income Category (Percentile)."

Interestingly, as in previous years, the latest IRS data shatters the popular myth that there are so many loopholes in the tax code that the rich don't pay tax. In fact, as past years' data has shown, the latest IRS Collections data, broken down by income category or "percentile", conclusively dispels that myth. In fact, this data leaves no doubt that the rich pay far more than their share.

Here is just a sample of what's in this year's tax collections data.

• The top-earning 1% of taxpayers earned 21% of the income.
• The top-earning 1% of taxpayers paid 40% of taxes collected.
• That's roughly double their share, based upon income.

Once again, this report shows that the Bush tax cuts didn't benefit the rich, as liberals would have us believe. In fact, the most relevant benchmark of tax load - the ratio of percent of total income earned, to the percent of total tax paid, by each income group - has been higher for the top-earning 1% of income earners, in each of the years 2001 through 2004, than in any of the prior four years, when that ratio was trending down. Only in 2005 has that ratio dropped to close to the level that it was when Bush took office. Interestingly, the years 2002 and 2003 were the first years since 1996 that the top-earning 1% paid more than double their share of taxes, based upon income. Try to spin that as the media may, such data demonstrates, beyond any shadow of a doubt, that if anything, the Bush tax cuts actually hurt, rather than helped the richest taxpayers.

But there is a lot more to it than just that. Check out the article for more analysis and a link to the actual data, in spreadsheet format, on the IRS web site. Afterwards, come back here and discuss it. [more...]

Note: Every year, between September and February, the IRS releases their most recent collections data, sorted by income category or "percentile". Because of the time it takes to complete collections and to compile the data, the released data is always about two years old.