Welcome to Tax Freedom Day.

Does your wallet suddenly feel a little heavier? Do you suddenly feel free to pick up the tab the next time your kid's soccer team goes out for pizza after a big game?

Or, as you're probably wondering right now, have I just flown in from a planet where the atmosphere is made up entirely of happy gas?

Tax Freedom Day is the invention of the Washington-based Tax Foundation. Every year, the folks there calculate the amount of federal, state and local taxes the average person pays on an annual basis. Then they figure out how many days the average person would have to work just to pay the bill and nothing else.

This year, it took until April 17. Congratulations. Everything you earn from now until New Year's Eve is your own.

Of course, your own mileage will vary. The Foundation breaks it all down by state, as well. The average person living in Utah actually reached freedom day April 14, which puts the state smack dab in the middle — 25th out of 50 states. Alaskans earned their tax bills faster than anyone — April 2. People in Connecticut will be the last to taste freedom, on May 3.

But those are just boring statistics. It's enough to know that you spend about a third of your time working to pay your government. And, of course, that happens day in and day out, without ever slackening the pace.

Which probably explains why there weren't a lot of people lining your way to the post office on April 15 with signs urging you to support a rollback of the Bush tax cuts. In politics, as in anything else, timing is an art.

Just before Friday's income tax filing deadline, an Associated Press/Ipsos poll was released showing that about 49 percent of Americans would rather visit the dentist than fill out their income tax forms. I'm not in that group, by the way, and not just because my dentist reads this column and it's never nice to anger your dentist. I see a lot of advantages to oral surgery over taxes. For one, the dentist usually can give you something to deaden the pain. For another, when you leave the dentist's chair, at least you know you'll feel better in a couple of days.

And yet, despite the constant, unrelenting pain of taxes, Americans seem surprisingly docile about it all. The only complaining we hear every year is from people who procrastinate and have trouble meeting the midnight deadline on the 15th. No one talks of tossing tea into the harbor demanding to keep more of what they make. People who get large refunds rejoice as if they struck gold in the Klondike.

They would certainly react differently if someone else — their neighbor, say — took some of their money and held it interest-free for a year.