Tax Insanity
And I thought my taxes were bad. Did you know that in 1936, the highest-earning Americans had a 79% tax rate?!!
Just in time for Tax Day (a day when flags should be be flown at half staff to mourn the income we lose to government bureaucracy), the Hoover Institution has released a fascinating history of taxes in America.
Think filing taxes is a pain? No kidding.
According to one source, the current tax code and its associated regulations “contain almost 5.6 million words–seven times as many words as the Bible.” One website that provides access to the tax code and its related documents notes that the complete tax code is 24 megabytes in size and, if printed 60 lines to the page, would fill more than 7,500 letter-size pages.
Contempt for the current tax system is rampant. In The Flat Tax, Hall and Rabushka note that President Jimmy Carter stated that the income tax was “a disgrace to the human race.” President George W. Bush commented that “the tax code is a complicated mess. You realize, it’s a million pages long.” Even Albert Einstein once quipped, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
Tags: Taxes