This is the first day of the year when your pay check is actually yours …that’s because yesterday was Tax Freedom Day.
It’s a concept developed by the Fraser Institute to remind us that the cost of the people who work for us – the public sector – is our responsibility and we should understand the magnitude of that burden.
So, they look at the aggregate cost of taxation and compare it to income levels to determine how many days of the year we work to fund the operations of government. As they put it, if we had to pay our taxes upfront, this is the first day that we would have paid off the government obligation and start to collect the pay check for our own needs.
June 22 is Tax Freedom Day in Saskatchewan this year. That’s four days better than last year but two weeks later than in 2021 as the cost of government appears to be rising. We pay more than the national average and, given the recent conversations around municipal spending, we will likely fall farther behind next year.
