Lord Saatchi Proposes 'Official' Tax Freedom Day

by Jason Gorringe, Tax-News.com, London

04 June 2003

'Tax Freedom Day' arrived on June 2 for the UK taxpayer this year, and if a bill being introduced by Lord Saatchi, the Conservative Treasury spokesman in the House of Lords, makes it onto the statute book, the day will not only be officially calculated by the Treasury and announced annually in the budget speech, it will also become a national holiday.

The concept of tax freedom day is based on the amount of days that we have to work to satisfy our tax obligations to the government, and according to the Adam Smith Institute, is due to fall later and later over the next few years as the tax burden increases.

However, whilst some observers have written Lord Saatchi's bill off as a right-wing propaganda stunt, the peer insists that the message is essentially an apolitical one, as government's handling of the public finances can be judged against a simple measuring stick, no matter what the political leanings of that particular government.

Another goal is to make the ever more complex taxation system in the UK more transparent. According to Saatchi, there are now over 250 varieties of tax credits and allowances, reliefs and exemptions, tapers, indexations and disregards, so therefore a simple measure that would indicate just how much or how little we are handing over to the Treasury to run state services would be useful.

As Saatchi himself stated recently, according to a Telegraph report: "The Bill takes an obscure table from page 260 in the Budget Red Book, holds it up to the light and puts it in everybody's diary."

Fellow Conservative peer Lord Strathclyde, the party's leader in the Lords concurred: "With this Bill the House of Lords can help to simplify the system. It reduces the scope to hide complicated tax increases in the small print," he observed.

The Adam Smith Institute recently calculated that tax freedom day will be falling five days later next year on June 7, whilst in 2005 we will be working until June 9 to pay our dues to the Treasury. American taxpayers meanwhile got off relatively lightly in comparison. This year tax freedom day in the US fell on April 19, and with the President's tax cuts filtering through over the coming months, will likely fall even earlier next year.

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