Cooperation & Coercion by Antony Davies

Author:Antony Davies
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Intercollegiate Studies Institute (ORD)
Published: 2020-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

7

TAXES

The American tax code is so complicated that no one can possibly understand every aspect of it. Not the taxpayers, who are obliged to follow it; nor legislators, who are charged with writing it; nor even the IRS, which is charged with enforcing it.

In fact, legislators cannot even agree on the length of the tax code! Their confusion is obvious:1

The income tax code and its associated regulations contain almost 5.6 million words—seven times as many words as the Bible. Taxpayers now spend about 5.4 billion hours a year trying to comply with 2,500 pages of tax laws.

—Senator Rob Portman (R-OH)

With its 6,000 pages and 500 million words, the complexity of our tax code is the prime source of frustration and anger felt by millions of Americans toward their government.

—Representative Spencer Bachus (R-AL)

The IRS tax code is 44,000 pages and growing.

—Representative Walter Jones (R-NC)

If these estimates are to be believed, the tax code is somewhere between 2,500 and 44,000 pages long, and contains between 5.6 million and 500 million words. The estimates vary so wildly that it seems our average legislator has no idea how long the tax code is.

If even those charged with writing the tax code do not know its length, how are we to abide by the incomprehensible mess they have created? When the federal income tax was introduced in 1913, the 1040 tax form came with only a single page of instructions. By 2012 that single page had become 189 pages. And another 500 forms accompany the 1040 we all know and love. Thank you, Washington, D.C.

It turns out those congressional guesstimates underestimated the size of the tax code. According to tax publisher CCH Inc., the federal tax code currently runs to more than 73,000 pages, more than three times the length it was in the 1970s. How big is 73,000 pages? If you were to print out the tax code, it would take up more than nine feet on a bookshelf. If someone were to work forty hours a week with no vacation, reading at a rate of one page every two minutes, he would read for a year. He would then learn that his hard work had been for nothing, as the code would have seen about 365 changes since he began reading. Between 2001 and 2016, Congress made nearly six thousand changes to the tax code, or about one every twenty-four hours.2 Because of all this complexity, the federal government established a position known as the National Taxpayer Advocate.

Nina Olson, who served in the role from 2001 to 2019, referred to the tax code’s complexity as one of the most serious problems facing U.S. taxpayers. In her 2016 report to Congress, Olson noted that U.S. taxpayers and businesses spend about six billion hours a year complying with the filing requirements of the Internal Revenue Code. Those hours are the equivalent of one year’s labor of three million full-time workers. This figure adds nothing to American productivity. It is wasted time.3

Taxing for Social Engineering

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