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Maddening numbers
From an article last August:
Maddening Numbers
By Bob Baumen
© 2004 Sovereign Society
You want some maddening numbers -- I'll give you some maddening numbers
-- and they all concern the horrible, damnable US income tax system.
* By government's own estimates it takes an average US taxpayer 28 hours
and 30 minutes to complete a 1040 tax return -- 42 minutes longer than
last year. 60% of all taxpayers need paid professional help in order to
file their taxes.
* Individuals and businesses spend 5 billion hours annually complying
with the income tax; with estimated compliance costs of over $200
billion, more than it costs to produce every US car, truck and van.
* When the first national income tax became law in 1913, the entire
Internal Revenue Code fit into 173 pages. Today, the IRC contains over
60,000 pages. There are nearly 500 IRS forms, each with many pages of
fine print instructions.
* The IRS publishes and distributes over 8 billion pages of forms and
notices each year which, laid end to end, would circle the Earth 28
times.
* The tax code is so complex even the IRS can't figure it out. A US
Treasury investigation found that IRS employees gave the wrong answer
about 50% of the time in response to taxpayers' questions. Flip a coin!
* The General Accounting Office reported that in auditing 45 random IRS
transactions, 16 were properly calculated and 29 were wrong, an error
rate of 64%! (GAO Pub. 94-120)
* The administrative costs of the bloated 114,000 employee IRS
bureaucracy alone exceeds $10 billion a year. That number is five times
the number of FBI agents and twice as many as CIA employees.
* In 2000, individual income taxes consumed 10.2% of the entire US GDP.
And yet neither President Bush or Senator Kerry have addressed the crying need for federal tax reform. In spite of long standing major proposals for a flat tax or a national sales tax, the tax/IRS mess is the elephant (or donkey) in the living room, which politicians ignore-- at their own peril.
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