I think Linoge found the problem with the United State’s tax code, in a chart no less. Also I’m going to drop this is a the quote of the day:
Our government has gotten greedier, our civil “servants” have gotten more interested in catching average citizens in arcane and byzantine laws and arbitrarily-changed rules, and every time we try to hold on to a little more of our hard-earned money – money that is literally a physical manifestation of our lives’ work – the government gets more creative in stealing it away from us.
How dare us stupid peasants try to keep some of our hard earned money!
That is pretty much the only explanation I can come up with for the tax code growing the way it did – someone figured a way to “hide” more money from the government in a then-legal fashion, and within a few years, another thousand tax code pages were added to the books outlining how that “hiding” place was now taxed.
Rinse, lather, repeat.
And here we are, to the point where you stand effectively no chance of filing your taxes accurately. Oh, wait, they view that as a feature, not a bug…
Thanks for the link/honor!