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Drowning in bureaucracy – U.S. has more tax preparers than all police, firefighters combined

By   /   August 21, 2012  /   No Comments

by J. D. Heyes | Natural News

When the bureaucracy of the Leviathan has grown so large that it needs more people to function than there are local and state-level public servants, it’s well past time to take account of how large we have allowed our government to become.

And by that way, that rumbling sound you hear is our founding fathers rolling over in their graves and, most likely, looking for some tea to chuck into a harbor somewhere.

According to FaceTheFactsUSA.org, a non-partisan organization supported by George Washington University (insert founding father connection here) that essentially tracks and reports on the size and growth rate of the Leviathan, there are 1.2 million professional tax preparers in the U.S., to navigate the “labyrinth,” complex and cumbersome tax code – a figure that surpasses the number of police officers (765,000) and firefighters (310,400) combined.

The complexity of the U.S. tax code has grown immensely just in the past decade alone, the group says, and that’s due in large part to what can only be described as the politicization of it – politicians wanting to use it to win favor with constituents (and on that note, it’s appropriate here to point out that 49 percent of Americans pay no federal income taxes at all, according to the respected, bi-partisan Senate Joint Committee on Taxation, but more on this later).

The tax code just keeps on growing

In a video posted on its website, the organization described its findings:

“If you’re paying someone to help with your taxes, you’re not alone. You know, back in 1913 there were just 400 pages of federal tax law. Now, we’ve got more than 72,000 (the figure shown in the video is 72,536 pages). So it’s not surprising the taxes stress people out. They can leave Americans with the fear of being audited by a taxation system so complex they can’t hope to understand it. To figure out all that complexity, we pay tax preparers. As many as 1.2 million tax preparers get paid to understand America’s taxes. That’s more than all our police and firefighters combined. “

Without question, our massive and complicated tax code has created a cottage industry of analysts and preparers whose ranks would certainly shrink if lawmakers ever got serious about simplifying the tax code(and there are lots of groups and individuals who have good ideas about how to accomplish that). But is that such a bad thing?

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