Stolen Playbook Series: Tax Freedom Day

10:30 AM Apr 12, 2006

Every year as tax time heaves into view, an outfit a few blocks down the street called The Tax Foundation announces something it calls "Tax Freedom Day®." Hot off the presses this morning, the foundation announced the date (April 26th) under the headline "America Celebrates Tax Freedom Day®." [yes, with the ®] This is the day of the year on which, supposedly, the government has finished engorging itself of the nation's revenues and the God-fearing folk can at last avail themselves meekly of some portion of their labor's fruits. Or to dumb it down even more:

It tells you, quite simply, that if you started giving your entire paycheck to the government on January 1st and weren't allowed to keep any for yourself until you had paid off your taxes for that year, what date you'd be allowed to start cashing them for yourself.

In both title and content, the "event" addresses itself to those for whose thirst for liberty little extends past the IRS. For going on 30 years, relentless flogging of taxes has served sturdily as, in the memorable parlance of former Reagan OMB man David Stockman, a Trojan horse to get the top rate down, meanwhile becoming such a point of doctrinal purity in certain circles that we have the current administration's comical insistence that essentially any economic scenario (economy booming? economy stalling? surplus budgets? deficit budgets? perpetual war for perpetual peace?) calls for a tax cut.

Needless to say, carping about taxes is rarely attached to any analysis of the attendant social benefits -- if, for example, the country finally nationalized health care, "Tax Freedom Day" would fall quite a bit later, but nobody would be paying premiums out of their own pockets for no obvious decrease of financial "freedom" -- but never mind that. As reliably as the Tax Foundation, the Center for Budget and Policy Priorities repeatedly makes the point that this date, as an average rather than a median, itself grossly overstates the tax burden on the typical taxpayer. (Last year's CBPP analysis is here.)

But who the deuce reads that statistical stuff when a zippy date fits in your back pocket or writes its own lede? (Check some press-release-to-newsprint stories here, here and here.)

The occasion can scarcely fail to impress in the simplicity and effectiveness of execution of that old PR chestnut, capturing free publicity by appropriating a date. Turning dusty statistics into a specific day (and tracking the movement of that date over time) gives form and meaning to abstractions, and spins from whole cloth a "newsworthy" occasion good for ample free media ready-framed for the tax-cutting amen corner and sure to make nutrient-free filler for breakfast table conversation between couples harumphing over their 1040s who've just seen The Tax Foundation guys give a popcorn interview on the Today show.

(The state-level tax freedom days in this report, of course, recapitulate what's long been known about coastal, urban, progressive and "blue" states being net donors to their Heartland cousins. Indeed, the Tax Foundation itself made the same point in a report (.pdf) last month ... spun, naturally, from the opposite side of the looking-glass where donor states supporting progressive taxation is the greater irony than small gummint paragons jealous of their ranching concessions and highway slush funds.)

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