Tax Time!

A billion seconds ago, it was 1976; the same year Jimmy Carter declared, "Our income-tax system is a disgrace to the human race." By comparison, at the rate our federal government is wasting our money, a billion dollars was just 3 hours ago.

The tax code has reached over 9,000,000 words, or about 60,000 pages. Roughly 40 times longer than the 1,500-page book, War and Peace -- But without the easy reading.

If a speed-reader were to read one page of tax code per minute (forget comprehension), for 8 hours per day, every weekday, it would take him 1.4 years to read the entire tax code. He probably still wouldn't understand a bit of it.

Nevertheless, we continue to add to it. Cuts here, hikes there, refunds, addenda, exemptions, gun control laws, special favors, etc.

The U.S. Treasury Dept. puts the cost of complying with the Tax Code at an estimated $125,000,000,000.00 annually (other estimates are as high as 194,000,000,000,000.00, but what's another $69Billion, right? Lets pretend we trust them, and use their figure of $125Billion. Remember, that is money spent just to get ready to pay taxes. It doesn't count toward actually paying them.

How do we comprehend 125Billion? Well, to give you an idea, 125Billion seconds ago was 1,955 years before Christ walked the earth.

Next time you hear a Democrat complain about the cost of "Bush's war in Iraq", which right now sits at $474Billion (another staggering number), put it into perspective for them. If we took the money which Americans are forced to waste every year in complying with the tax code, and paid it toward "Bush's war", we'd pay it off in a little under 3.8 years. Enough about your "children's children paying for this war"!

And speaking of children...

With $125Billion, you could purchase enough rice to feed every single one of the Seventy-Six Million, Five-Hundred Eleven Thousand, Eight-Hundred Eighty Seven people who are starving in famine-plagued Ethiopia, 3 meals a day for the next 20 years. You could probably throw in steak and lobster every now and then if you were willing to shave off a couple years.

As if the money isn't a big enough waste, we don't just waste $125,000,000,000.00, we also waste 6,600,000,000 man-hours EVERY YEAR. If 125Billion seconds ago was 1955B.C., how long ago was 6.6Billion HOURS? Quite frankly we can't comprehend that amount of time, but for the record, it was 753,424 years ago. Think of the money and products that could be made with that much time. But no, instead we spend that time just filing taxes.

Since we can't fathom 753,424 years, in man-hours by itself, lets get creative.

If the average 1800 sq. ft. home takes an estimated 2,000 man-hours to build; with the hours wasted every year, we could build such a house for every man, woman, and child in Wyoming, Washington DC, Vermont, North Dakota, Alaska, and South Dakota, combined!. And still have enough hours left over to build one for everybody in Pittsburgh, PA. That's 3,300,000 houses!

Literally monumental achievements look like child's play, when compared to such a revolting waste of time and productivity. The American Dream: To try and decipher the tax code... Again.

What could be be doing instead? We could build The Golden Gate Bridge 264 times over, or complete another 942 Empire State Buildings. I wonder how many billion hours we are from discovering a cure for cancer.

I'd like to know how many hours went into the building of the World Trade Center, but all I can find are figures for the cleanup time. The figure is 3.4 million man-hours. We could have done the cleanup 1941 times.

This is probably the only time I will ever say it, but Jimmy Carter was right -- This country's income-tax system is a disgrace to the human race.