Simplify My Taxes!
This week, I devote my Fox Business show (Thursday at 8pm & 12 midnight ET) to our horrible tax code. (A one hour show isn't enough to capture it all, but I'll try anyway.) Taxes used to be simple. In 1913, the first income tax form and instructions totaled four pages. By contrast, today's 1040 plus instructions totals 176 pages.
How did this happen? As I explain in my syndicated column this week, politicians love to create special exceptions and tax credits for special interests, because it helps get them contributions:
The favored groups cheer their tax breaks, but the result is that everyone else pays more, and everyone must spend more time deciphering the rules.
And with every credit, the tax code gets more complicated. The code is now 3,784,745 words long, not counting the 2009 and 2010 changes. It will get worse in the future.
Americans spend more than 7 billion hours trying to comply,
according to a forthcoming study from the National Taxpayer Union (NTU).
"That is the equivalent of 3.7 million employees working
40-hour weeks year-round without any vacation. That's more workers than are employed at the five biggest employers among Fortune 500 companies," writes David Keating in the NTU study.
"Counting time and money for individual taxpayers, the
compliance burden would total an incredible $103 billion for individual taxpayers alone."
stossel.blogs.foxbusiness.com |
