The Declaration of Independence contains 1,337 words.
The Gettysburg Address was 269 words.
The King James translation of the Bible contains roughly 773,000 words.
Compare that to the Federal Tax Code, which last year exceeded 8 million words in length.
Every year the IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions, killing more than 100,000 trees.
There are now more than 600 different tax forms.
Even the 1040 EZ "simple" form comes with 33 pages of instructions.
It is estimated that taxpayers spend $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours each year complying with Federal tax laws and completing their tax returns.
The IRS employees 114,000 people, four times as many as the FBI.
The average two-income family pays 39% of their earnings to the government in Federal, State, and local taxes.
The annual tax burden consumes every dime Americans earn from January 1 until April 13.
Wednesday, April 08, 2009
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2 comments:
As a tax collector, I can assure you that people do not read the instructions nor do they read the warnings and notices mailed to them. They then wonder why their bank accounts get frozen or we show up with the cops and take the money out of their cash register. People have no common sense so we have to spell everything out even if it kills millions of trees but then it is their responsibility to read the instructions.
That's the employee count for the entire Department of the Treasury, or close to it.
See here:
http://www.ustreas.gov/education/faq/treasury/history.shtml#q2
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