Tax Foundation

Government workers, especially here in Philadelphia, get lots of holidays that ordinary taxpayers don't get. To balance things out a bit, I propose a new holiday called Tax Freedom Day, which is to be celebrated by any person who doesn't work for a government entity, does pay taxes on time, but is super-rich and therefore doesn't worry about taxes. Picking the day to celebrate this new holiday will be a bit tricky. Last year, for instance, it would have been April 30. Thanks largely to Gov. Casey's $3 billion tax increase, Pennsylvanians can't celebrate until tomorrow - May 6. According to the Tax Foundation in Washington, that's the day average Pennsylvanians finally start working to feed themselves and their families instead of slaving away to feed the insatiable tax appetite of monsters called federal, state and local governments.

Uncle Sam will keep his hand in your wallet longer than ever this year, a Washington research organization said yesterday. On average, taxpayers will labor a record 128 days - Jan. 1 through May 8 - to earn enough money to pay their 1991 taxes, according to the Tax Foundation, a nonprofit group that annually calculates how long it takes Americans to cover the cost of all federal, state and local taxes. The tax "burden is at its highest level ever," said Dan Witt, the group's executive director.

Paul Gann, now 75, who with the late Howard Jarvis founded a tax-reform movement on the West Coast, will celebrate next month the 10-year anniversary of Proposition 13, which has lopped off an estimated $75 billion in California property taxes since it passed overwhelmingly in 1978. That's the good news. On Thursday, there will be another kind of celebration, this one, however, marking the ignominious liberation of the average American from the tax bite. The Tax Foundation in Washington calls it Tax Freedom Day, the day when Americans start working for themselves, having satisfied the requirements of federal, state and local taxes.