By BILL MILBY

It’s time to drown the IRS in the harbor as our forefathers did with the British at the original Boston Tea Party on December 16, 1773. It worked then, it might work again! It was the beginning of our free nation, under God….free from the taxing tyranny of the British.
I believe it’s time to do it again. To free ourselves from the taxing tyranny of the IRS. And I personally believe that nothing short of abolishing the IRS (as Ted Cruz has promised to do if elected) will do the job. It has gone beyond tweaking it around the edges as all the other candidates are promising.
Americans are rightfully frustrated with the complexity of the 74,608-page-long federal tax code.
The federal tax code is 187 times longer than it was a century ago, according to Wolters Kluwer, CCH, which has analyzed the federal tax code since 1913.
Amazingly, in the first 26 years of the federal income tax, the tax code only grew from 400 to 504 pages. Even through President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, the tax code was well under 1,000 pages.
According to a March 27, 2016 article in The Washington Examiner, Most of the growth in the tax code came in the past 30 years, growing from 26,300 pages in 1984 to nearly three times that length today.
So why am I on my high (tax) horse today? Obviously, all of us just made it through tax season last week; never pleasant but usually bearable. This year for me it was very personal as I took a call from my accountant Saturday afternnon while having dinner with my family at a nice Mexican restaurant. She said “Sorry for the bad news but you owe another $$$$$ (an amount that was three times more than my annual salary when I first went to work at Chrysler)! The waiter almost had to pick me up off the floor. And that was after paying quarterly taxes all year long as my accountant had prescribed last year.
On top of that I’ve kept all my deductible business, medical and traveling receipts logged them all into QuickBooks software all year long and spent hours and hours compiling all this information to present it to the accountant in an orderly way.
In 1862, in order to support the Civil War effort, Congress enacted the nation’s first income tax law. It was a forerunner of our modern income tax.   The Act of 1862 also established the office of Commissioner of Internal Revenue. The Commissioner was given the power to assess, levy, and collect taxes, and the right to enforce the tax laws through seizure of property and income and through prosecution. The powers and authority remain very much the same today. (Per http://www.infoplease.com).
As if that weren’t enough, over the weekend Breitbart reported the theft of Social Security numbers on a significant scale by illegal aliens who then use the system to earn billions of dollars in benefits from our federal government. It was reported that the IRS knows about this but won’t cooperate with the Social Security Administration to stop it.
So I say we should drown the IRS in the harbor with another Boston Tea Party! Any takers?
Thanks for reading All About Seniors…..see you next week!
Bill Milby, CSA, is a Certified Senior Advisor and a Director of Visiting Angels® of Macon, a non-medical, living assistance service for seniors. If you have questions or comments about this column you can reach him at william.mercylink@gmail.com or search for us at www.facebook.com/VisitingAngelsMacon.