Kerby Anderson
Today is Tax Day. But I would suggest that a more important date is Tax Freedom Day. That is the date when your tax burden is lifted. It is calculated by dividing the official government tally of all taxes collected in each year by the amount of all income earned in each year. Put another way, it is when you are no longer working for the government but are now working for yourself and your family.
This year Tax Freedom Day occurs on April 12. And remember this is an average. Citizens in states like Louisiana already have had their Tax Freedom Day. Citizens in New York must wait until the middle of May for their Tax Freedom Day. Some estimate that Americans will pay more in taxes than they will spend on food, clothing, and housing combined. Another estimates we pay more in taxes than we spend on food, education, and healthcare combined.
There is one more date worth mentioning. It is called Cost of Government Day. This is the date on which the average American has paid his share of the financial burden imposed by the spending and regulation that occurs on the federal, state, and local levels. This date occurs sometime in July. This date is a little less precise since it is difficult to calculate all the costs of government regulations.
Even so, the Cost of Government Day really puts things in perspective. It takes a little more than half of the year to finally get government off your back so that you can begin to earn a living for you and your family.
Both dates help us realize what is happening around us. There is a cost, but often we don’t see it. Our taxes are withheld from each paycheck, so we often don’t think about what we are paying. And since the cost of most regulations is hidden, we don’t see those costs either.
Imagine if we had to pay all our taxes in one lump sum. You can bet there would be an outcry from taxpayers that year.

Kerby Anderson
Tomorrow is Tax Day, and I would like to focus some needed attention on the significant cost of tax compliance. But before I get to those facts and figures, let’s start with some first principles.
Many people refer to April 15 as “the day we pay our taxes.” But most of our taxes were already withheld from paychecks. Tax Day is when we file the more than 280 million tax returns to see if we get any money back from the Federal treasury.
Tax compliance has become more difficult because the federal government spends more than it receives. It needs to print more money to cover the nearly $2 trillion annual deficits they run up. That means the dollar is worth less each year. If you put the money you try to save merely into a bank account, you are losing more and more value each year. To keep up with monetary inflation, we need to either become investment experts or hire one.
If we hire a financial planner, things usually get more complicated because our money is often invested in ways most of us don’t completely understand. Then we usually need to hire a tax professional. During this time of year, I often say that I am at the mercy of bookkeepers and accountants. They are the experts in the Byzantine tax code that runs more than 6,800 pages and take billions of hours to apply that knowledge to the multiplicity of investments and then fill out the mountains of IRS paperwork and tax returns.
Americans spend about 8 billion hours trying to comply with the tax code at a total compliance cost of more than $550 billion. We do this because government spends too much and therefore must print too many dollars. If you dread tomorrow, perhaps you should agree with me to cut the cost of government and simplify the tax code.