Former Forbes editor William Baldwin uses the occasion of the magazine’s 100th anniversary to ponder another fixture of American life over the past century: the federal income tax.
It was just a nibble when the federal income tax started in 1913. The first 1040 had seven brackets, ranging from 1% to 7%. It raised $28 million, a bit less than a dollar per employed citizen. The instructions were a page long.
Today, when we look out at the business of collecting income tax, we see a might industry. It employs CPAs, lawyers, bookkeepers, TurboTax coders, collectors, enrolled agents, congressional staffers, pontificators, and of course journalists. No doubt some lucky person was hired to replace that IRS ethics lawyer disbarred in 2015 for dishonesty. And lobbyists get hired to protect the favoritism accorded, from the earliest days, to real estate and insurance. Taylor Swift once got a job performing at a fundraiser for Kevin Brady, chairman of the House Ways & Means Committee. …
… The Tax Foundation estimates that Americans spend 8.9 billion hours per year on taxes, the equivalent of 5 million full-time jobs.
