Ouch. It’s Tax Day.

Posted Monday, April 14, 2008

Print Icon

Email this story

  • Ouch. It’s Tax Day.

It’s almost Tax Day! While you stand in line, waiting to get your properly postmarked envelope for Uncle Sam, here are a few tax stats to keep you company. [MSNBC]

26.5 hours: Amount of time the average person spent putting their taxes together. (And this doesn’t count your wait in the line at the post office.)

$207: Amount of money the average person spent “collecting, calculating and compiling” their tax returns.

140 million: The number of individual tax returns the IRS will process this year.

155 pages: The length of the instruction form that comes with your 1040 this year.

4 pages: The length of the instruction form that came with the first 1040 back in 1945

$1.2 billion: The amount of money we’d save if the IRS let all Americans file their taxes online, free of charge.

$8 billion: According to the General Accounting Office, the amount more than over 50,000 federal government contractors owe in unpaid federal taxes.[Radio Iowa]

$290 billion: The “tax gap,” or the difference between the amount of taxes that are legally owed and the amount of taxes that are actually paid.

Why so expensive and time consuming? That’s what a few lawmakers on the Hill are wondering. Here are a few bills they’re sponsoring to ease our tax pain (or at least fix the system a little):

  • In the Senate, Sens. Charles Schumer (D-NY) and Daniel Akaka (D-HI) are pushing a bill that would allow all Americans to file their taxes online, free of charge.
  • In the House, members are voting on a bill that would stop contractors from using foreign subsidiaries just so they can avoid paying taxes (like Social Security taxes).
  • The House is also voting on a bill that would ban federal agencies from giving contracts to companies that don’t pay their taxes. (Did you know federal agencies are hiring contractors that refuse to pay taxes?)

And if that didn’t hurt enough, there’s always this: 42.2 cents — Amount of your tax dollar which goes straight to the military. (Over half – or 28.7 cents – goes to pay for the Iraq War.)

Print Icon
blog comments powered by Disqus