Here’s one reason other than vacations for American workers to envy August in Europe: it is the first full month in which the average worker on the continent has stopped funding the schools, hospitals, and pensions that hold their societies together and started keeping what is left of their pay, according to a think tank based in France and Belgium, the Molinari Economic Institute.
The report examines the tax and welfare investment in workers in all 27 European Union member states, and what a return it is. This year the average European worker contributed until June 12 to the public services and collective benefits that make a working life possible. In five countries, workers contributed through mid-July before they started keeping the rest of their pay. And in the past year 17 European countries increased compulsory levies, “leading to a loss of between one and six days of social and fiscal freedom,” the report says — a “loss” that, plainly read, is six more days of the pooled investment Americans have chosen not to make.
In 2026 the average European worker contributed €44.60 for every €100 of income, Molinari finds. Compare that to the United States, where, according to Jared Walczak of the Tax Foundation, Tax Freedom Day falls on April 16 — three months earlier, and “tax freedom” means keeping a paycheck unaccompanied by the public services Europeans pooled to build.
The French have it the most generously, as has been the case in eight of the past 10 years. Average workers “have no direct control over how the fruits of their labour are spent” until July 22, Molinari says — four days later than 2025, as the average French employee now faces a total burden of 55.6 percent of earnings. That is the price of pooling half a country’s income to keep everyone afloat. What the French have built with that money — health care that does not bankrupt the sick, pensions that keep the old out of poverty — is what American workers are told is impossible and what American leaders refuse to fund.
High public investment, combined with the universal services it finances, is the precondition for a working life not held together by employer-provided insurance, college savings accounts, and GoFundMe campaigns, and the foundation of the broadly shared prosperity the United States has not managed for decades.
The Molinari Economic Institute’s report is a quiet indictment of every American who has been told to fear collective investment, and a model for anyone on either side of the American aisle who wants a society where a sick child does not bankrupt a family, where a laid-off worker does not lose their home, and where a retiree is not one bad investment away from poverty.
The government pools what workers earn, and every worker draws on what the government has built. We pool most of what we earn so the people who clean our hospitals, teach our children, and build our roads can live with dignity — and that pool returns more than it costs in liberty.
The American right celebrates April 16 as the day a worker is finally free. What it actually marks is the day an American worker is on their own: one illness from bankruptcy, one tuition bill from a lifetime of debt, one layoff from losing everything.
