The tax code is nine times the length of the King James Bible: This and other tax day facts compliments of the Republican Study Committee

Ryan Streeter

The Republican Study Committee has compiled some tax day facts worth sharing. Here are some of the ones that stand out in particular:

• According to the Tax Foundation, as of 2005 (the most recent data available), IRS regulations contained over 6,958,000 words—an 18.7% increase since 1995 and almost 9 times the total number of words in the King James Bible.
• This year, 100% of the income the average American earns from January 1st to April 12th (102 days) will go to pay federal, state, and local taxes in 2011, according to the Tax Foundation. Therefore, April 12th will be “Tax Freedom Day,” the day on which the average American will start working for anything besides taxes.
• Tax Freedom Day in 1910 was January 19th.
• The IRS was appropriated $12.146 billion in FY 2010. To put this figure in perspective, it is more
  than the amount Congress appropriated for missile defense programs.
• In September 2009, the IRS had an annual payroll of over a half-a-billion dollars and employed more than 90,000 people—more than the combined number of employees (as of September 2009) at the Departments of State, Labor, Energy, Housing & Urban Development, and Education.
• The IRS’s National Taxpayer Advocate estimated in 2006 that taxpayers spend $193 billion each year to comply with income tax requirements. That amounted to 14% of aggregate income tax receipts in that year.

And, looking at the Fortune 500 list, if the IRS were a corporation, it would tie Office Depot as the 192nd largest company in America.

It's also worth noting that Arthur Laffer, in his WSJ column today, puts the total cost of compliance at $431 billion, significantly higher than the figure noted above.

Laffer suggests that halving the costs of compliance by going to a flatter tax devoid of problematic exemptions and loopholes would add a half a percent of growth each year. He illustrates it this way:

Consider a family that made $40,000 in the year 2000. If their income grew by 3.2% per year, the average long-term GDP growth rate, their income by 2010 would be $53,110. Now imagine that the growth in the family's income was not 3.2% but 3.72% (the impact from halving the costs of our current complex tax system). Under this higher growth scenario, the family's annual income would have been $55,568 in 2010. The slight increase in the economic growth rate raises this family's purchasing power by 4.6%. Not too shabby.