MUNCH, MUNCH: Taxes gobble up 38.2% of the average family’s income. That’s more than the amount for food, clothing and shelter… combined!
TIMBER! Nearly 300,000 trees are chopped down annually to produce the paper needed to print the IRS’s mountains of forms and instructions.
ASTRONOMICAL! The IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions every year. Lay them end-to-end and they’d encircle the earth 28 times. That’s a 672,000-mile highway of confusion!
THE ART OF, UH, SIMPLIFICATION? The Gettysburg address has 269 words… the Declaration of Independence, 1,337 words… the Bible, 773,000. However, U.S. tax law has ballooned from a relatively “slender” 11,400 words in 1913, to a seam-busting 7 million words today!
DRIVEN TO COMPLY: American taxpayers spend over $200 billion and over 5.3 billion hours to comply with federal taxes each year. That’s more than it takes to produce every car, truck, and van in the United States.
SURPRISED? 60% of taxpayers must hire a professional to complete their return.
