“People who complain about taxes can be divided into two classes: men and women.” 

— Unknown

“Income tax has made more liars out of the American people than golf.”

— Will Rogers, humorist

“The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”

— Albert Einstein, physicist

These and other similarly amusing quotes actually are compiled on a page appearing on the IRS website (Google “IRS tax quotes”). Who knew that the federal tax collection agency had such a sense of humor?

Seriously, most Americans view April 15, Tax Day, not with mirth, but with fear and trepidation.

That is partly because most of us believe that Washington is taking too much of our annual income, according to a Gallup Poll released Monday. And partly because many of us agree with Mr. Einstein that the federal tax code is much too complex.

And the American people are right on both counts.

Federal taxes are rising faster under President Obama than they did under any presidency since World War II. Indeed, as a percentage of the nation’s gross domestic product, taxes have increased from 15.1 percent in 2009 to a projected 17.8 percent in 2014, according to the White House Office of Management and Budget.

And the federal tax burden will further increase to 18.8 percent of GDP by 2016, the president’s final year in office. Not the least because of the new Obamacare taxes that only now are starting to take effect.

Meanwhile, there’s the ever-increasing complexity of the federal tax code, which the independent IRS taxpayer advocate in 2008 declared the “largest source of compliance burdens for taxpayers.”

Indeed, if some masochist decided to print out the entire code on regular letter-size paper, it would require roughly 74,000 pages. That’s nearly 25 percent more pages than just 10 years ago.

The IRS estimates that it takes the average taxpayer 13 hours to comply with the federal tax code, including six hours for record-keeping, two hours for tax planning, another for miscellaneous tasks and four hours to actually fill out the forms the IRS requires.

— Copley News Service