You want some maddening numbers? We’ll give you some maddening numbers involving contemptible US income tax system:

By the government's own estimate it takes an average US taxpayer over 28 hours to complete a 1040 tax return. And 60% of all taxpayers needed a paid professional to help them to file their taxes.

Individuals and businesses spend 5 billion hours annually complying with the income tax. And, with estimated compliance costs of over $200 billion, this is 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 was 173 pages in length. Today, the IRC contains over 60,000 pages, along with nearly 500 IRS forms, each containing many pages of fine print instructions.

The IRS publishes and distributes over 8 billion pages of forms and notices each year which, if laid end to end, would circle the Earth 28 times!

The tax code is so complex even the IRS can't figure it out. Recently, a US Treasury investigation found that IRS employees gave the wrong answer about 50% of the time when responding to taxpayers' questions!

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%!

The administrative costs of the bloated 114,000 employee IRS bureaucracy exceeds $10 billion a year. That number is five times the number of FBI agents and twice as many as CIA employees!

In the year 2000, individual income taxes consumed 10.2% of the entire US GDP.

Sad to say, neither President Bush or Senator Kerry have addressed the need for federal tax reform in spite of long standing major proposals for a flat tax or a national sales tax. Politicians who continue to ignore the tax/IRS dilemma do so at their own peril!

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