Today's graduated income tax system is a morass of deductions, exemptions, allowances, credits and other loopholes.

• The internal Revenue Service has 480 tax forms and another 280 forms to tell you how to fill them out.

• The IRS sends out eight billion pages of forms and instructions to more than 100 million taxpayers every year - requiring the chopping down of 293,760 trees (or an equivalent amount of recycling).

• All the IRS regulations and tax court rulings take up 336 feet of shelf space.

• An IRS study estimated that taxpayers spend 5.4 billion hours on paperwork at a cost to the private sector of 24 cents for every dollar of taxes collected.

• Other studies put the cost at 65 cents per dollar collected - even more for certain types of taxes.

Source: Robert E. Hall and Alvin Rabushka, The Flat Tax, Second Edition (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1995).

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