| Hello John, In ancient times, the Romans celebrated April as the sacred month of Venus, the goddess of love. It was probably easier to think about love back then — the Romans didn’t have to fret over filing an income tax return by the 15th like we do here in America. The sad part is that while Americans dutifully file their taxes every year, they don’t feel like they get much in return. According to polling done by Public Opinion Strategies, some 63% of American voters don’t believe they personally benefit from government spending, and a whopping 81% say the government does a bad job managing what they send to Washington. What makes it even worse are the costs associated with paying our taxes. Believe it or not, the IRS has a Taxpayer Advocate Service, an independent organization within the IRS that is supposed to ensure fair treatment for taxpayers. In its 2022 annual report, it spelled out how much time and money Americans spend paying their taxes. An individual taxpayer is estimated to spend 13 hours and $240 out-of-pocket costs just to prepare and file one annual tax return. For a small business, the amount of time and money spent on tax compliance is roughly 82 hours and $2,900. Individual taxpayers spent a total of 897 million hours in FY 2022 just on recordkeeping. This is in addition to the 1.15 billion hours spent on tax preparation of individual returns. Business entities spent about 1.14 billion hours and $48.3 billion on tax preparation in FY 2022. If the IRS says it’s that bad, you know it has to be worse. Of course, extending the Trump tax cuts would make April 15 a little less taxing (pun intended). Indeed, one of the law’s best features is that it simplified the code and made filing easier, though more needs to be done. But the 15th isn’t the only important Tax Day in April. According to calculations by my colleague and tax expert Patrick Fleenor, April 22 is the day that Americans stop working for the government (state, local, and federal) and start working for themselves. That’s right. Everything Americans earn up to April 22 is equivalent to what they pay to support our gargantuan government. So, just a week after your taxes are due, you get a reminder of just how much and how hard you worked to support governments that you likely think do a poor job managing what you give them and whose spending you don’t think you benefit from. It’s the same old story. The politicians in Washington waste what we pay in taxes and then demand we pay even more. But sending more of our hard-earned money to D.C. politicians just feeds a system that only seems to benefit the politicians and their supporters — not American families. So, it’s critical that Congress gets going on renewing the Trump tax cuts and not let them expire at year’s end. The longer things drag on, the more fraught the situation becomes. We all know how things work in D.C. Congress waits until the last possible minute to act on a bill, and then the horse trading commences. Before you know it, the bill doesn’t look anything like it did when they started. Americans deserve better. It’s time to demand action. Contact your representatives and urge them to prioritize extending the Trump tax cuts without delay. | 
