Paying the Man
July 13, 2007
Coldly calculated through the year, it takes Germans 194 days of work to pay their tax bill, according to Karl Heinz Däke, president of the German Association of Tax Payers, which calculates the so-called "income burden rate" each year.
Tax Payers' Day is the day of the year from which on people don’t work to pay taxes anymore, but just for themselves. This day is proclaimed by tax payers' unions worldwide: in the United States, it falls on April 30th, and in the UK, on June 3rd.
The date is calculated by dividing the amount of all taxes collected by all the income earned in a given year. In Germany, the authorities -- federal, state and local -- will take 53 percent of income this year. With a little math, this puts German Tax Payer's Day to July 13th.
A misleading calculation?
But it's a calculation the German Finance Ministry calls misleading.
"It's a one-sided interpretation of the data that does little to judge the actual situation," ministry spokesman Torsten Albig said, adding that the association's estimate of state spending is considerably higher than that of the federal bank and other economic institutes.
After reading a report in the Handelsblatt newspaper, however, some Germans may still call for the country's tax payers' memorial day to be moved to earlier in the year and ask to keep more than 47 cents per euro they make.
Federal and state finance offices saw the total tax income increase faster than it expected in the first half of 2007, according to the German business paper. Citing anonymous finance ministry sources, the paper said the ministry took in 238.8 billion euros ($329 billion) in the first half of 2007, 29 billion euros more than in for the same period of 2006, an increase of 13.9 percent.
An official report, scheduled to be released next week, is also reported to show that June tax revenues were nearly 50 billion euros, 12.6 percent more than in June 2006.
Lower unemployment is one of the key reasons why the state's revenues have increased, according to the German Finance Ministry.
"The deciding factor comes mainly from the increase compared to last year of tax contributions through the social welfare system," the ministry said in a statement.