American taxes are so complicated. Let's add another 1-2% for the mental cost of having to know all this stuff, or pay someone else to know it. It's just crazy.
It’s incredible the US has any other economic output, considering the effort spent on taxes.
At one of my businesses, we remit 4 separate sales taxes to 4 separate governments, and each has to be itemized, so receipts are multiple pages long for no reason.
Then there are myriad possibilities for being exempt from either all or some of the taxes, and those records have to be kept in case of an audit.
There must be enormous amounts of tax evasion too, the attack surface is so great no one can audit it all. The most tax advantaged account, a Health Savings Account, lets people set money aside today, invest it, and let it grow for however long they want, and then withdraw it for healthcare expenses, all tax free.
But the healthcare expenses can be from any point in time in the past. A 30 year old can save their receipts for purchases ranging from over the counter painkillers to childbirth bills from the hospital, and then reimburse themselves when they are 80 years old.
How can it even be possible to audit someone’s healthcare expenses that happened 50 years ago? The counter party will surely no longer have the records to cross reference, so it’s basically the government taking people’s word for it.
