Tax day is finally here! For some of us, that means a sigh of relief. For others, it’s the most stressful day of the year. And still others really couldn’t care less because they filed their taxes long ago and have already purchased a new lawn mower with their return. Regardless of which category you fit into, we all file them, we all pay them, we all worry about them. We’re talking about taxes, baby! And now that April 15th has come, why not read up on a few bits of rather meaningless, but totally interesting facts about TAX DAY!
1. The Gettysburg address is 269 words, the Declaration of Independence is 1,337 words, and the Bible is only 773,000 words. However, the tax law has grown from 11,400 words in 1913 to 7 million words today.
2. Nearly 300,000 trees are cut down yearly to produce the paper for all the IRS forms and instructions.
3. The IRS sends out 8 billion pages of forms and instructions each year. Laid end to end, they would stretch 28 times around the earth.
4. The IRS employs 114,000 people-twice as many as the CIA and five times more than the FBI.
5. Even Albert Einstein—sometimes referred to as the smartest man in the world—wasn’t all that wild about taxes. He once said, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
6. The average number of days a person worked to pay his or her 2009 taxes was 103. (As you can imagine, that number has increased by now.)
7. Excise taxes are also called “sin taxes.” They are taxes on alcohol, tobacco, and gambling.
8. Americans spend over $27.7 billion every year doing their taxes.
9. Wealthier Americans pay higher taxes than middle- or lower-income earners. The wealthiest 1% of the population earns 19% of income but pays 37% of the income tax. The top 10% pays 68% of the tab. The bottom 50% earns 13% of the income, but pays just 3% of the taxes. This does not include payroll taxes for Social Security and Medicare.
10. American taxpayers spend over $200 billion and 5.4 billion hours working to comply with federal taxes each year, more than it takes to produce every car, truck, and van in the United States.
And there you go! Now you can share all of your brilliant tax day knowledge with friends and neighbors who are, like us, glad that April 15th has come and gone yet again.
