Taxes: Time for Responsibility

Top Ten Reasons to Reform the U.S. Tax Code

By Steve Forbes

1. To put it in perspective: Abraham Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, which defined the American nation, is 272 words in length. Our Declaration of Independence is some 1,300 words. The Bible, which spans several thousand years of human history, is 773,000 words. But the federal tax code, with all of its attendant rules and regulations, is 9 million words and rising.

2. Since 1986, the tax code has been amended 14,000 times, and its length has grown by more than 3 million words.

3. Americans spend 6.6 billion hours preparing their tax forms. By 2015, annual compliance will cost the American people some $483 billion a year.

4. The Internal Revenue Service employs more investigative agents than the FBI and the CIA combined, and with 144,000 employees, employs more people than all but the 36 largest corporations in the United States.

5. The proliferation of deductions, credits, and other special preferences in the tax law leads to unequal treatment of taxpayers.

6. The tax code reduces income through punitive taxes on saving, work, and entrepreneurship, which leads to a smaller and less productive economy.

7. Half of all Americans pay no income taxes.

 

8. A Small Business Administration study found that the tax compliance burden is 67 percent higher for small businesses than large businesses.

9. A short time ago, the IRS was so bureaucratically mired that it couldn’t even account for how it spent 64% of its own budget.

10. The federal government is borrowing 40 cents of every dollar that it spends.