By Nathan Mehrens
A version of this article appeared at FoxNews.com.
Last year America marked a dubious milestone in its history — the 100th anniversary of federal taxes levied “on incomes, from whatever source derived.” Ensconced in the Sixteenth Amendment, the federal tax code totaled 400 pages when the income tax first took effect in 1913. Today this tax code is a staggering 74,608 pages long — and is administered by a bureaucracy of 90,000 employees at a cost of more than $11 billion annually.
According to the latest data from the Tax Foundation, Americans will shell out $3 trillion in federal taxes this year — and another $1.5 trillion in state levies. That’s $4.5 trillion — a whopping 30.2 percent of income.
Lurking within the code’s monstrous size, myriad complexity and astronomical cost are any number of pernicious evils. And that’s before we take into account the political persecution perpetrated by President Obama’s Internal Revenue Service (or the ensuing cover-up and ongoing failure of the Justice Department to prosecute these abuses).
The IRS targeted administration critics in an apparent effort to silence them leading up to the 2012 election — yet the President recently claimed there was “not even a smidgen of corruption” associated with this effort.
Does anyone really believe that?
Even if it were administered ethically and uniformly, the tax code’s complexity is a boon for well-connected special interests that use that complexity to benefit their constituents.
