Rooney: It's tax time, but remember tax benefits of gifts to charity
April is the time green returns to lawns, trees and the Internal Revenue Service. The big problem with taxes, besides paying them, is preparing them. As genius physicist Albert Einstein said, “The hardest thing in the world to understand is income tax!”
If Einstein couldn’t figure out his taxes, how does the IRS expect the average do-do brain like me to cope? In 1913, the first tax code was 400 pages long; by 2008, it had grown to 67,506 pages. About 300,000 trees are cut down annually to produce paper for all IRS forms and instructions, making tax elimination an ecologically sound reason to ban IRS paperwork. There’s Turbo Tax for the computer savvy, but my skills are limited to opening e-mail. I don’t know if it’s my age, the large number of brain cells I’ve lost attending multiple social functions or the increased complexity of the tax code, but the Rooney Bin joins 60 percent of taxpayers, who spend $27.7 billion to have someone else prepare taxes for them. (No wonder my mother wanted me to be an accountant.) We’re happy to turn the task over to our sainted bean counter.
Rejoice! Friday, the 99th day of 2010, marked Tax Freedom Day, the day you and I – well, you anyway – have earned enough money to pay this year’s taxes. According to taxfoundation.org