UK Celebrates Tax Freedom Day

[sintax]

UK celebrates tax freedom day

Thinktank says we are working five months for Gordon Brown

Ashley Seager
Tuesday May 31, 2005
The Guardian

Today is the day when Britons can celebrate the end of working to pay their taxes for this year and start working for themselves, according to a thinktank.

The right-leaning Adam Smith Institute (ASI) calculates what it calls tax freedom day each year and says 2005's is three days later than last year.

"It's a glum thought but if you are an average British citizen and you started work on January 1 this year, every penny that you have earned up to now has in effect been taken away by the Treasury," says Eamonn Butler, ASI director.

He says that in the Middle Ages the average serf only had to work four months of the year for his feudal landlord, whereas in modern Britain people have to toil five months for Gordon Brown, the chancellor of the exchequer.

http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,1456,1495663,00.html

[daleo]

1. Taken away and given back

In the form of schools, pensions, hospitals, medical care, roads, bridges, airports, police, the legal system, military protection (sometimes debatable), social assistance, medical research, unemployment insurance, universities, museums, support for the arts, postal service, daycare support, coast guard, environmental monitoring, weather forecasts,...