The Fair Tax Act
I believe that the American tax code is without question in serious need of reform. In 1913, the Tax Code was a mere 500 pages in length. Today, the code and regulations total more than 60,000 pages. Four common forms, form 1040 and schedules A, B and D, take an estimated 28 hours and 30 minutes to prepare. A mere two decades ago when the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) first started tracking this information, the average paperwork burden was 17 hours and 7 minutes, about 11 hours less. It costs U.S. taxpayers and businesses more than $100 billion annually - this is roughly equivalent to what we spend to run the Departments of Education, Homeland Security, and State - to unravel our tax code's complexity. That is $1 billion that American business cannot use to create new jobs; and American families cannot use to pay their home heating bills or their kid's college tuition or to buy prescription medications.