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A tax-free day: Is it possible?

By Aaron L. Morris

The deadline for paying your taxes has come and gone again. But don’t think for a moment that you won’t be paying taxes until the next time April 15 rolls around.

Tax Day is dreaded because of the mountains of evidence that taxpayers must provide to the Internal Revenue Service and state governments. But it is a mistake to believe that we pay all of our taxes on April 15. It’s simply the due date for forms that reconcile whether we have paid too much or too little in taxes throughout the year.

Americans pay taxes every single day on nearly every activity in which we participate. Could you live an entire day without paying a single tax? To do so:

You could no productive work. Performing a service or providing a product for profit reaps income for which you would incur a liability for federal, state and local income-tax withholding. A portion of these withheld taxes are funneled into a Social Security system from which you may never receive a dime or a Medicare system you might never use.

You could not purchase anything. You would not be able to patronize your local grocer, dry cleaner or shopping mall. Neither could you enter into transactions for goods and services that are taxed, even if doing so would make your life better.

By not purchasing goods and services, businesses would be denied the revenue needed to provide jobs for families in your community.

You also could not purchase cigarettes, alcohol and gasoline on your tax-free day. These are among the most heavily taxed goods in the country and seem to be popular tax targets for politicians. In fact, it often appears that governments are taxing these products to get us to quit buying them.

You could not drive. Using gasoline would incur a tax liability the next time you have to stop at the pump. But don’t think you could use public transit or taxis either as these sources of transportation must have special tax medallions for the privilege of transporting you.

You couldn’t use a pogo stick, a bicycle or a scooter because buying them incurs a sales tax...but you could still walk barefoot. Walking without shoes may be the only way you can transport yourself without incurring a tax.

You would be greatly limited in the services you can use. You would not be able to use a telephone or cell phone. Phone bills have numerous taxes attached to them.

A tax-free day would mean no contact with family or friends who are not within walking distance. Your productive job could even be endangered because you would not be able to call in absent.

You couldn’t watch television, either. There would be no watching of news, weather or movie channels because of the taxes on cable and satellite venues. Unless you could find those old rabbit ears to put back on your television, you had better be prepared with a good book to read. Of course, the book would have to be free because a purchased one would mean you are not escaping tax liability.

And if you are a homeowner, you would have to find a different place in which to read that book. Homeowners have even greater difficulty than others in getting through a day without incurring tax liability. After all, property taxes are payable at both the state and local levels.

Primitive camping may be one way to spend a tax-free day. But to escape tax liability, you would need to set up camp near a fresh stream of water in some woods that have no owner. If you could make it for 24 hours eating only the berries on nearby fruit trees, you might be able to escape tax liability for a day.

Even if you died, your day would not be free of taxation because the government would then be able to collect taxes from your estate!

Get the picture? We pay taxes on nearly every transaction and activity in which we engage – even our own death! And like humorist Mark Twain said: “The only difference between a tax man and a taxidermist is that the taxidermist leaves the skin.”

We may not have paid all of our taxes on Tax Day. But considering the seemingly endless ways that our hard-earned dollars are snatched by taxes, it is appropriate – as one wag puts it – that “Tax Day comes during a month that begins with April Fool’s and ends with cries of ‘May Day!’”

– Aaron Morris is a fiscal policy analyst for the Bluegrass Institute, Kentucky’s free-market think tank.

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