{"id":19828,"date":"2016-04-12T11:58:43","date_gmt":"2016-04-12T16:58:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19828"},"modified":"2016-04-12T11:59:09","modified_gmt":"2016-04-12T16:59:09","slug":"hate-taxes-you-certainly-are-not-alone","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/?p=19828","title":{"rendered":"Hate Taxes? You Certainly Are Not Alone\u2026"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Hate Taxes? You Certainly Are Not Alone…<\/a><\/h3>\n<\/div>\n
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\"Taxes<\/a>At this time of the year, millions of Americans are rushing to file their taxes at the last minute, and we are once again reminded just how nightmarish our system of taxation has become.\u00a0 I studied tax law when I was in law school, and it is one of the most mind-numbing areas of study that you could possibly imagine.\u00a0 At this point, the U.S. tax code is somewhere around 4 million words long, which is more than four times longer than all of William Shakespeare\u2019s works put together.\u00a0 And even if you could somehow read the entire tax code, it is constantly changing, and so those that prepare taxes for a living are constantly relearning the rules.\u00a0 It has been said that Americans spend more than 6\u00a0billion<\/strong>\u00a0hours preparing their taxes each year, and Politifact has rated this claim\u00a0as true<\/a>.\u00a0 We have a system that is as ridiculous as it is absurd, and the truth is that we don\u2019t even need it.\u00a0 In fact, the greatest period of economic growth in all of U.S. history\u00a0was when there was no income tax at all<\/a>.\u00a0 Why anyone would want to perpetuate this tortuous system is beyond me, and yet we keep sending politicians to Washington D.C. that just keep making this system even more complicated and even more burdensome.<\/p>\n

If you hate taxes, you are far from alone.\u00a0 According\u00a0to NBC News<\/a>, here are some of the things that Americans would rather do than pay taxes\u2026<\/p>\n

Six percent would rather sell a kidney, eight percent would rather name their first-born \u201cTaxes,\u201d and 11 percent would rather spend three years cleaning the bathrooms at noro-torious Chipotle.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Of course our system was never intended to be like this anyway.\u00a0 Our founders hated taxes, and they fought a very bitter war to escape the yoke of oppressive taxation.\u00a0 During his very first inaugural address, Thomas Jefferson clearly expressed what he thought about taxes\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cA wise and frugal government\u2026 shall restrain men from injuring one another, shall leave them otherwise free to regulate their own pursuits of industry and improvement, and shall not take from the mouth of labor the bread it has earned. This is the sum of good government.<\/em>\u201d<\/p>\n

Why couldn\u2019t we have listened to him?<\/p>\n

When the federal income tax was originally introduced a little more than a century<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hate Taxes? You Certainly Are Not Alone… At this time of the year, millions of Americans are rushing to file their taxes at the last minute, and we are once again reminded just how nightmarish our system of taxation has become.\u00a0 I studied tax law when I was in law school, and it is one […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[5983,13418,13419,3552,13420,4901,13421,13422,13423,13424,4509,13425,13426,1257,13427,783,13428],"class_list":["post-19828","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","tag-economiccollapseblog","tag-file-taxes","tag-file-their-taxes","tag-income-tax","tag-law-school","tag-michael-snyder","tag-no-income-tax","tag-prepare-taxes","tag-preparing-taxes","tag-preparing-their-taxes","tag-tax","tag-tax-fairness","tag-tax-law","tag-taxation","tag-taxed","tag-taxes","tag-the-u-s-tax-code"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19828","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19828"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19828\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19830,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19828\/revisions\/19830"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19828"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19828"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/olduvai.ca\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19828"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}