Americans Spend 6.6 Billion Hours on Taxes
Income taxes are really, really bad. And I don’t mean that they are bad because they are expensive, I mean they are bad because they hurt the nation.
This is one example: the tax code is so convoluted that it takes hours and hours of people’s lives just to comply with them — and if you consider the millions of hours corporations have to spend complying, it’s worse.
The income tax will never be made reasonable, however. It doesn’t matter how really, really bad income taxes are for the economy and the nation. They are just too useful a tool for politicians. As long as a ‘deduction’ system is in place, politicians can pander to special groups with promises of deductions, and continue to ‘soak the rich’ to get more votes from people in lower tax brackets.
The nation did fine for over a century with no federal income tax. The truth is, as this country was intended to function, income taxes are totally unnecessary. But since the entitlement mentality will never be purged from society now, as it is far too ingrained (welfare, social security, Medicare, etc), at the very least the progressive income tax should be replaced with either a flat-rate income tax or a national sales tax. But both systems would eliminate or significantly impede the ability of our politicians to take money from your pocket and give it to someone else.
So it will never happen.