Chris Pappas: “Today, I say to the gentleman, is an important day for all Americans, and it is an important day for a good friend of…”

“Today, I say to the gentleman, is an important day for all Americans, and it is an important day for a good friend of mine, Jim Flannery, an accountant, who is also celebrating his birthday today. It is particularly unique to have someone in that line of work who has today as his birthday. Our tax system, our Tax Code, is complex, and I am told, although I have not counted, that there are 17,000 pages of IRS laws and regulations, approximately 480 IRS forms, and even the instructions to the 1040 EZ are 28 pages long. I know the gentleman from Missouri had earlier today held that book, that was probably about that thick, of the IRS regulations. The IRS spent $4 billion on a computer system recently that was referred to as the tax system's modernization computer program, $4 billion, and I am told that it does not work. The average American family pays approximately 19 percent of their income in Federal taxes, which is significantly higher than the single-digit percentages just a few decades ago.”