At the beginning of the 20th century, federal taxes were equal to 3% of GDP and the entire tax code was only a few hundred pages. Now at 20% of GDP and 46,000 pages (481 separate tax forms), Americans will spend 6.1 billion hours complying with the code. Due to the code's complexity, more than half of filers will pay for "professional preparation" of their taxes (up from only 20% in 1960) at a cost of more than $200 billion—almost 10% of what the IRS actually collects.
