Johnny Isakson: “today is an anniversary of a day of great renown in American history. Two hundred and thirty-two years ago, on December…”

“today is an anniversary of a day of great renown in American history. Two hundred and thirty-two years ago, on December 16, 1773, a band of colonists boarded three ships in Boston Harbor, dumped the cargo of tea into that harbor, and it became known as the Boston Tea Party. It was a protest of taxation without representation in that great injustice. I rise today on the floor of the Senate to tell you that injustice still exists in our tax system, not in taxation without representation but in the complexity of our system. Think about it for just a second. It takes the average American filing the simplest form, 1040, 13 hours, the length of 6 college basketball games, just to fill out our simplest form. It takes 3 of 5 Americans the cost of hiring an outside accountant to consult with them just to meet the demands of the current tax system. It means the Tax Code is now 1,685,000 words long, which is exactly 380 times the number of words in the entire Constitution of the United States of America. As all of us on the floor of the Senate know, in months, 17 million more Americans will be brought under the alternative minimum tax, a tax that was allegedly started only to address the taxation of a few that now addresses the taxation of the many. Earlier today, I introduced legislation to deal with this injustice and create a mechanism for us to forthrightly come before the people of the United States and develop a simpler, fairer, and flatter system of taxation.…”