Their results are as follows: Many other companies and organizations in countries throughout the world now produce their own "Tax Freedom Day" analysis.
Due to the different ways that nations collect and categorize public finance data, however, Tax Freedom Days are not necessarily directly comparable from one country to another.
Regarding the discrepancy between their calculation of August 3 as the typical Belgian worker's Tax Freedom Day and that of PriceWaterhouseCoopers (PWC), L'Anglophone's authors wrote:[41] [PWC's] figures count revenue from all taxes (including those on corporate profits, petrol, cigarettes, &c.) and thus present a more complete picture of the country’s total tax burden," adding that it is "an average applied to all Belgians – not all Belgian workers; in 2008, less than half of Belgium’s population (4.99 million working out of 10.67 million citizens) was legally working.
Consequently, a huge share of Belgium’s tax burden is borne by the working population.In the book Filthy Lucre: Economics for People Who Hate Capitalism, philosopher Joseph Heath criticizes the idea that tax-paying is inherently different from consumption: It would make just as much sense to declare an annual "mortgage freedom day", in order to let mortgage owners know what day they "stop working for the bank and start working for themselves".
[42] For Canada, the Fraser Institute also includes a "Personal Tax Freedom Day Calculator" that estimates a customized Tax Freedom Day based on additional variables such as age of household head, sex of household head, marital status and number of children.
For example, a 2005 study by Osgoode Hall Law Professor Neil Brooks[43] argued that the Fraser Institute's Tax Freedom Day analysis includes flawed accounting, including the exclusion of several important forms of income and overstating tax figures, moving the date nearly two months later.