The rising percentage of our life which goes to the government

Last month Charmaine in Happy Belated Tax Freedom Day shared this interesting pie chart which shows how many days we have to work for various categories of stuff:















Charmaine found this on The Tax Foundation's Tax Freedom Day.

I left a comment asking if anyone knew of this kind of data over the last hundred years. Charmaine was able to track down the data for what percentage of people's income went to taxes over the last hundred years.

I've pulled the numbers for each ten years:

1900 January 22 22 5.9%
1910 January 19 19 5.0%
1920 February 13 44 12.0%
1930 February 12 43 11.7%
1940 March 7 66 17.9%
1950 March 31 90 24.6%
1960 April 11 101 27.7%
1970 April 19 109 29.6%
1980 April 21 111 30.4%
1990 April 21 111 30.4%
2000 May 3 123 33.6%
...
2008 April 23 113 30.8%

The second column is the day the average person stops working for the government.

The third column (in bold) is how many days the average person is working for the government.

And the last column is what percentage of our income goes to the government.

Sobering.


I would still love to see a comparison of what percentage of our income has gone to various categories over the last hundred years.


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