Jacob Sullum calls April 15America’s 6-Billion-Hour Day — because Americans spend 6 billion hours preparing their taxes — and explains “Why a mugger is better than the IRS”:
Both take your money, but the mugger doesn’t make you fill out forms.
According to the Tax Foundation, the cost of complying with the federal income tax will be $279 billion this year, or 22 cents for every dollar collected, up from 14 cents in 1990.
And where is your tax money going?
To add insult to injury, the money extracted through this arduous, intimidating process may be spent on the Stanley Theater in Utica, the Museum of Glass in Tacoma, or the Bulgarian-Macedonian National Education and Cultural Center in Pittsburgh. These institutions are among the beneficiaries of the spending earmarks cataloged by Citizens Against Government Waste in its latest Congressional Pig Book.It’s true such pork accounts for a small percentage of the federal budget. But here’s another way of looking at it: If you pay $10,000 a year in federal income taxes, your entire contribution amounts to just 1 percent of this year’s subsidy for the Waterfree Urinal Conservation Initiative and 0.07 percent of the money allotted to the International Fund for Ireland, sponsor of the World Toilet Summit. Now you know you were literally correct when you speculated about where your tax dollars were going.