Facts about our tax system

If you think our tax code is overly complicated, you're not alone. And you're probably right. Consider the following not-so-random facts:

--Our original tax code, published in 1913, contained 11,400 words. Today the tax code contains over 7 million words. By comparison, the Bible only contains 773,000 words.

--When the Sixteenth Amendment created the income tax, the lowest tax bracket was 1% and the top tax bracket was 7%. Today, our lowest bracket is 10% and the highest is 35%.

--There are about 490 different tax forms in the IRS' library.

--Our "easiest" tax form, the 1040EZ, comes with an instruction booklet that is 33 pages long.

--The IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions each year. If laid end to end, they would stretch 28 times around the earth.

--The Cato Institue estimates that taxpayers spend 6.4 billion hours each year working on their tax returns. That's the equivalent of a company having 3 million full-time employees.

--General Electric Co. electronically filed a tax return containing 24,000 pages. If this return had been printed, it would be over eight feet tall!

--The IRS has 114,000 employees - five times as many as the FBI and an operating budget just for payroll of approximately $10 billion.

--It costs the IRS $2.45 to collect $100 in taxes.

--The government spends an estimated $2 billion per year on federal tax compliance. This is more than it costs to produce every vehicle made in the United States in a year.

I am not necessarily an advocate for a flat tax, but given these facts, it's clear that something needs to change. Besides the fact that there is too much pork in Washington, our current tax system costs our government - and by extension, our citizens) too much to administer.

--Dan Musick is the Tax Services partner with Cook & Associates, a full-service public accounting firm with offices in San Marcos and San Antonio, TX