Another tax season, another blood letting

Now that tax season is over, I can rant once again. The burden on the US public for this insane method of collecting revenue is staggering. According to the IRS, there were 133,917,068 individual tax returns filed for tax year 2006. Those returns yielded $1,236,259,000,000 in gross collections. That works out to approximately $9,232 per return filed. The average cost to US citizens to prepare those returns is $207. The total taxpayer time expended to create and file those returns was 26.4 hours according to the IRS. According to the Social Security Administration, the average wage in 2006 was $37,078.27 per year, or roughly $18.54/hour. So that equates to an average total cost per return of $696.46. Multiplied by the number of individual returns, and you end up with $93,267,881,179 wasted in time and expenses collecting individual taxes.

Yeah, sure, one can argue that $93 billion spent to collect $1.2 trillion isn't so bad. Yet one has to ask, why are we spending $93 billion dollars? And that isn't including the US government's time and expenses associated with collecting that revenue, nor does it include all the various state income tax costs. In this day of computers, electronic communication, automated record keeping, etc., why haven't we eliminated 90% or more of the expenses associated with collecting income tax? Do we really need to waste $93 billion? Or maybe if we just cut the tax code back from some 15,000-40,000 pages depending upon who you ask, to say 10 pages, maybe we could completely eliminate that $93 billion waste. That much money would eliminate world hunger according to a number of estimates. To put that in a world perspective that would eliminate 600,000 deaths of children due to hunger related illnesses per year!