Although people have different views on taxes, most people think the federal tax code is too complicated. To celebrate last month’s tax day, we offer two comments on the code written 90 years apart.
The blog tax.com quotes Chicago lawyer Charles Hamill, who railed against the code’s complexity in 1915, only two years after it was enacted. Hamill thought the law was “the worst piece of legislative draftsmanship I have ever seen placed upon a statute book anywhere. It is so complicated it is utterly impossible to understand its meaning save by consulting a palmist.”
And an essay on the late writer David Foster Wallace’s strange fascination with the tax code appearing in the April 17, 2011 New York Times Book Review quotes tax lawyer Stephen Lacy’s 2005 letter describing a passage from IRC § 509(a), “legendary as the most difficult sentence to understand in the tax code.” Lacy says: “I find that, although I never quite understand what it says, after I read it several times and concentrate, I can actually get a weird Zen-type meditation high! (Then again sometimes, it provokes a profound anxiety attack.)”
Exhibits A & B: A 1915 federal income tax form and the text of IRC § 509 (a).
