By DAVE HAMRICK
Editor-at-large

Phone your friends in New Jersey and tell them to celebrate. Today is the day they stop working for government and start working for themselves.

For the Jersey-ites, today is Tax Freedom Day.

The average nationwide Tax Freedom Day was May 3, and we in Georgia are a bit better than the average when it comes to taxes — we should have celebrated April 29.

If you've never heard of it, the concept behind Tax Freedom Day is simply to make people aware of just how much we are paying in taxes. The figures are compiled by the Tax Foundation, a nonpartisan, nonprofit organization that has monitored fiscal policy at the federal, state and local levels since 1937.

So many of the taxes are hidden in the costs of things we buy or disguised as user fees. And, of course, even the income tax is sneaky. Most people have no idea what percentage of their incomes they pay in income taxes.

In fact, many are so dumb that if you ask them how much they paid in taxes, they'll say, “I didn't pay any. I got some back.”

Anyway, for those who can understand what I'm saying, congratulations. You are now working for yourself.

The Tax Foundation simply does the math, figuring up how much the average person pays in state, local and federal taxes and then representing that in terms of the number of days you have to work to pay those taxes.

In Georgia, that's 120 days. We're ranked 31st among the 50 states. The highest taxes are in Connecticut, where they'll be working for the government through next Thursday.

The figures are broken down a dozen ways at the Tax Freedom Day web site, www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday.html#states. Check it out and see if it doesn't get your blood boiling.

For those who can't do that, I'll lay out some of the facts for you here.

For instance, the federal income tax bite is broken out. Of the 120 days you work for the government, 83 of those are for the federal government, including both income tax and Social Security/Medicare. State and local taxes take 37 days to pay.

You work 50 days to pay individual income taxes and another 30 days to pay payroll taxes, which fund social insurance programs such as Social Security and Medicare.

You work 16 days to pay sales and excise taxes, and 10 to pay property taxes (these are national averages, not broken down by state).

There's also a great pie chart that presents the same figures in terms of hours out of an eight-hour work day, comparing the tax figures to what you spend for everything else in your life.

I love how the Clinton crowd anguishes over health care costs, although I'm sure they know that we work less than an hour a day, about 55 minutes, to pay medical costs, while we work an hour and 52 minutes paying the federal government and 50 more minutes paying state and local governments.

If they cared so much about “our children,” maybe they would do something about the biggest problem families face — the cost of government.

And while they accuse us of wasting too much of our money on riotous living to provide an excuse to take more and more of our incomes, they blithely ignore the fact that only 27 minutes of the average person's work day goes to pay for recreation.

We have only ourselves to blame for the fact that we manage to save only eight minutes' worth of income, although, if our taxes were lower... who knows?

In case you were wondering whether things are getting any better, they're not. In 1980, Tax Freedom Day came April 21. During the first part of the Reagan years, it dropped all the way to April 17 before starting its steady rise to where it is today.

And with Democrats blocking any attempt at a “risky” tax cut, I don't expect to see TFD coming any earlier in the near future.

Here's one more piece of information for you. All of the taxes together take more of your income — more of your sweat and toil — than what you spend for housing, food and clothing combined.

If by now you are not looking up your elected representatives' addresses in an uncontrollable rage, I suspect one of three situations exist:

1. You aren't reading this column.

2. Your political philosophy is that people are too stupid to choose how to spend their own incomes and that the government should be as large and as controlling as possible.

3. You're being loaded into a coroner's van with a copy of the paper clutched in your fingers.

I often implore those who disagree with me — and I know you're out there — to write in and refute what I have to say, but I'm usually disappointed.

But if you're in that second group and not ashamed to admit it, please write in and tell me why it's acceptable for Americans to spend from 114 to 139 days every year (depending upon what state they're in) working to pay the government.

And please tell me where you think it should stop, if at all. Is there a limit to how large the government should be, how much it should control our daily lives and how much of our incomes should go to it? If so, what is it?

As far as I can tell, the national Democratic Party doesn't believe in any limit at all.

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