South Carolina Senate Fact #14: America’s Tax-Preparer Army Is Over a Million Strong

Our nation’s 60,000 page tax code is mired in archaic rules and special interest loopholes. In fact, the system is so complicated that Americans employ 1.2 million tax preparers just so they can comply with the convoluted tax code.

Support for this million-person army of tax preparers represents a $194 billion drag on the economy. Unfortunately, tax accounting doesn’t create wealth for America—it’s simply a monstrous waste of resources that could be put to work creating goods and services that people actually need. Is it really in our national interest to put some of our finest legal and business minds to work jumping through irrational hoops of tax code generated by the IRS? To put it into perspective, America spends more man-hours filling out tax forms than it spends building automobiles. Or, that $194 billion wasted paying for tax preparation could buy 9,088,779 brand new Ford Tauruses.

Fortunately, Representative Jim DeMint understands that there’s a solution: scrap the code. DeMint has been at the forefront of the fundamental tax reform effort in the House of Representatives, and has never voted for a tax increase in all his years in Congress.

Inez Tenenbaum, on the other hand, has no plan for fundamental tax reform. Instead, she has resorted to distorting Jim DeMint’s record on tax reform and she’s falsely claiming that DeMint will raise taxes. In fact, it is Tenenbaum who has supported the largest tax hike in South Carolina state history just last year, and it is Tenenbaum who, on her web site, proposes further complicating the tax code.

Unlike Jim DeMint, Inez Tenenbaum refuses to promise to scrap the code. Does she think that America should have a tax code so complex that it takes 1.2 million professionals to sort it out? Does she think we’d prefer to pay accountant than own over 9 million more new cars?

For more information, please visit http://www.freedomworks.org/southcarolina/