D.C. residents are free on April 15.
“Tax Freedom Day” — the day when District residents will have worked enough to pay off all of this year’s tax obligations — falls on the same day as the deadline to file the federal tax return.
Virginia’s is April 13, the 10th-latest in the country, and Maryland’s is April 19, which ranks fourth. For the United States as a whole, Tax Freedom Day fellon April 9 this year.
Tax Freedom Day is “an intuitive way of understanding the size of government tax collections,” said Kail Padgitt, an economist for the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan tax research group based in D.C.
Dallas Hostetler, a Florida businessman, created the idea more than 50 years ago, eventually deeding the intellectual property to the Tax Foundation. The foundation calculates Tax Freedom Day by dividing the country’s total tax payments by projected income.
The latest Tax Freedom Day for the country fell on May 1, 2000, Padgitt said.
This year’s is more than two weeks earlier than it was in 2007, when it fell on April 24. The shift has been driven by tax revenues falling faster than incomes during the recession, and both the Obama and Bush administrations enacting temporary income tax cuts for 2008, 2009, and 2010, the foundation’s report said.
Still, “Americans will pay more taxes in 2010 than they will spend on food, clothing and shelter combined,” Padgitt wrote.
