documents/insights.md

Table of Contents

Insights

Taxes

  • The Treasury Department estimates that 169 million Americans file individual income tax returns every year. On average, each respondent spends about 12 hours and 37 minutes on them. That translates to more than 2.1 billion total hours.
  • If you volunteered to file everyone's returns, it would take you around 243,000 sleepless years. To make today's deadline, you would need to have started during a prehistoric ice age, before Homo sapiens wore clothes. (The world was populated by woolly mammoths and beavers the size of bears.)
  • If Americans spent that time on other things, they could generate an extra $94 billion per year, according to Treasury data. That's almost triple the G.D.P. of Iceland and more than Trump's tariffs have lawfully raised in revenue so far, according to the Yale Budget Lab.