This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 18th,

2023. I'm Caleb Brown.

Taxpayers are often at a loss to understand why they owe the specific amount they owe,

and complying with our complicated system of taxation

costs Americans billions of hours each year.

Cato's Adam Michelle explained some of his proposals to vastly simplify the process of paying taxes.

How much time do Americans spend doing their taxes? I know I hear it every year, but what is it roughly?

Too much time for starters.

The estimates are about for individuals actually sitting down and filling out their tax returns.

It's like 2 billion hours every year which is tens of

billions worth of dollars if you sort of cost that out with the opportunity

cost that they could have been spending doing something else.

So that alone is a huge waste and that should be enough.

If we're not looking at any other costs, just the time commitment for average Americans in terms of trying

to comply with our Byzantine and Kafka-esque tax code. So simplifying that, what does that look like?

Yeah, well, you're right. It's not just the time that people spend complying with it.

It's the anxiety over not understanding sort of what they're

what they're complying with and what ultimately gets spit out at the end when

people go to sit down their taxes most people do it with an accountant or through a program and both of those

options basically just ask you a long list of questions and then the sort of

uninterpretable number gets spit out the end that you have a refund or you owe the government money.

And so there's that piece of the cost.

...