Working for the state: Spain's Tax Freedom Day

Ever wonder where all your hard work actually goes? Back in the day, a tough daily shift of manual labour paid five pesetas. People quickly nicknamed the five peseta coin a 'duro', meaning it took a hard day's labour to earn it.

Long time residents of Spain may recollect the 100 peseta shops were colloquially called the '20 duros' shops. In fact, buy anything costing 100 pesetas and you were often asked for 20 duros.

We might like to think we have moved forward from those times, but if you look at the actual numbers, the modern reality is a bit of a slap in the face.

Take a look at Tax Freedom Day - the theoretical day of the year when you finally stop working to pay off the state and actually start earning a few cents for yourself. Economic think tank Fundación Civismo has done the heavy lifting to crunch the numbers.

By adding up the total real tax burden - from income tax (IRPF) and VAT (IVA) to social security contributions and local charges - Civismo calculates just how much of your life you hand over to the Spanish tax man in all his guises.

Brace yourself: Spaniards (and us foreigners!) now have to work until late August, devoting 231 days of sweat and toil directly to the state, before keeping a cent. Tax Freedom Day this year fell on 20 August - 58 full days later than it did when Pedro Sánchez became prime minister.

Politicians love to tell us that this massive chunk of our lives pays for the essentials like hospitals, schools, pensions and roads. Fair enough, we all want decent public services. But when you are spending nearly eight full months working purely for the taxman, the price tag feels ridiculously steep - especially when you see how much of it gets flushed down the drain.

Hundreds of millions of euros derived from your early mornings and tired feet end up siphoned into political scandals, bloated bureaucracies, crony contracts and outright corruption. It is one thing to chip in for a hospital; it is quite another to watch months of your hard labour subsidise political greed and fiscal mess-ups.

Old-timers worked a hard day for a duro coin. Today, you spend almost two-thirds of your year working for a government that treats your time like an infinite piggy bank. Hard times indeed.