You should ALL read this.

[kcjenkins]

http://www.ntu.org/main/press_papers.php?P...mp;org_name=NTU

Like old age, tax complexity has been creeping up on us. We may not notice it one year at a time, but a review of older tax documents compared to today’s forms and instructions reveals just how shockingly complicated taxes have become.

In the most recent Fiscal Year (FY), the Treasury Department reported its paperwork burden, which consists almost entirely of tax forms, at 6.97 billion hours. That is the equivalent of 3.35 million employees working 40-hour weeks year-round without any vacation. The projection for the Fiscal Year following is over 7.2 billion hours.

Individual taxpayers alone will spend an estimated 3.55 billion hours complying with the income tax laws this year, up from 3.18 billion hours last year. Using an inflation-adjusted estimate from the Tax Foundation for the average total hourly compensation rate ($26.09), this time is worth $92.6 billion.

Seventy-four years ago, the Form 1040 instructions were just two pages long. Even when the income tax became a mass tax during World War II, the instructions were just four pages. Taxpayers today must wade through 155 pages of instructions, nearly quadruple the number in 1975 and nearly triple the number in 1985, the year before taxes were “simplified.”

Today’s short form, at 47 lines, has about double the number of lines on the 1945 version of the standard 1040 tax return.

[Byron]

It's a good thing I don't read the instructions -- think of all the time I save!

I'll wait for the Cliff Notes version.

[JRS]

It's a good thing I don't read the instructions

Like all us guys, we don't do instructions. It also makes me realize why some of the questions on the general public boards, to put it mildly, are a little dense.

[SunTaxMan]

Instructions?

You mean there ARE instructions?

No wonder I had so much trouble this season!