This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Tuesday, April 14th, 2009. I'm Caleb Brown.

The tax system is getting more and more complex and most Americans have given up instead

opting to use professional tax preparers but that complexity means more than

just spending some extra money at H&R Block, it also means invasions of privacy and some troubling

trends on the horizon.

So says Cato's Director of Tax Policy Studies, Chris Edwards. The tax code keeps getting more complex every year.

The latest data shows that Americans spend 8 billion hours a year filling out tax forms and learning tax rules.

That's the equivalent to having a tax army of 4 million people working full time

every year filling out tax forms. It's a huge waste of time and

effort. The cost of filling out all these forms is about 200 billion dollars a

year. The IRS national taxpayer advocate that's supposed to stick up for

the taxpayer finds that there are 500 different changes in the tax code every year affecting individuals and

businesses. There are 70,000 pages of tax laws and regulations and that's up from

40,000 pages just 12 years ago.

So this has got completely out of control.

Members of Congress keep throwing in new loopholes and provisions

into the tax code. President Obama has made the tax code complex

already. It's completely out of control.

Aside from complexity itself and there's a lot of words in the tax code and the actual just

the dead weight loss of actually filling out the forms what are some of the other

costs of complexity? Well there's a great deal of inefficiency created by all this paperwork and the complex rules.

It makes it very hard for Americans to make important financial decisions, for example.

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