Andrew Kinnaird: Incentives for tax system changes

  April 18th was Tax Freedom Day for 2013.  On average, all income earned prior to April 18th went to pay federal, state and local taxes. This means that Americans were solely working for the government for the first 4.5 months of this year.

  In 2011 alone, 145,579,530 federal individual tax returns were filed. The U.S. Treasury estimates business and individual taxpayers together spent 6.1 billion hours, that’s 696,347 years’ worth of work, complying with tax law in 2011 alone. In light of the fact the tax code is 73,608 pages long, that time frame makes sense. Of course, the word “comply” is used very loosely here. Few know exactly what blanks to fill in with what information and what amounts to add and subtract.  The enormity and complexity of the tax code is overwhelming. Many recognize the pitfalls of the current system and offer feasible alternatives, yet the only changes seem to be even more additions to the tax code.