1) The word “Tax” comes from the Latin “Taxo” which means “I estimate”.
2) The Federal tax code was 400 pages in 1913 – in 2010…it was 70,000 pages
3) The number of words in “Atlas Shrugged” is 645,000. The Bible has approximately 700,000 words. The number of words in the Federal Tax Code is 3,700,000.
4) While every person who earns a paycheck pays Federal Income Tax, only 43 of 50 states charge their citizens income tax. The states that do not have income tax are Alaska, Florida, Nevada, South Dakota, Texas, Washington, and Wyoming.
5) The IRS is a U.S. government agency that is responsible for collecting taxes and enforcing revenue laws. It is part of the U.S. Department of the Treasury.
6) Over 1 million accountants are hired each year in America to help with taxes.
7) In 1691, England taxed the number of windows on a house. As a result, people built houses with very few windows and even boarded up existing windows. This caused nationwide health issues due to lack of airflow and eventually ended in the tax being repealed in 1851.
8) Emperor Peter the Great of Russia put a tax on beards in 1705. He hoped this would encourage men to be clean shaved – a look that had become popular in Western Europe.
9) The word “accountant” is from the French word “compter”, which means “to count or score”.
10) England has a tax on television. Color TVs are taxed more than black-and-white TVs. However, if a blind person has a television, he or she pays only half the tax.
11) Disposable diapers are subject to sales tax in Wisconsin, but cloth diapers are not.
12) In Texas, cowboy boots are exempt from sales tax.
13) The Federal form 1040, was introduced in 1913. It was required of any U.S. permanent resident with a net income of $3,000 or more and was only three pages.
14) Albert Einstein is quoted as saying: “The hardest thing in the world to understand is the income tax.”
15) Alabama is the only state in the United States to have a playing card tax (10 cents). On the flip side, Nevada gives a free deck of cards with every tax return filed.
16) The IRS provided approximately $416 billion in refunds in 2011.
17) WWII led to the creation of the Bureau of Internal Revenue. This later became the IRS, which is the world’s largest accounting and tax-collection organization.
18) One of the most significant relics of Egyptian history, the Rosetta stone, is actually a tax-related document. It was so important that it was written in three languages.
19) According to some historians, plane geometry was actually invented by tax collectors and not Euclid (the famous Greek mathematician) in order to determine land size for harvest tax.
20) In 1787, U.S. citizens could only vote if they were taxpayers.
21) Newspapers use large sheets of paper because of the “knowledge tax”. In 1816 the British taxed newspapers per page, resulting in them using larger paper to add more content and shorten the number of pages.
22) There is no known civilization that did not have taxes. The very first civilization, the Sumerians, recorded their tax records on clay cones.
23) Since 2001, there have been more than 4,500 changes to the tax code.
24) Taxpayers lose out on millions by not filing returns – tax payers gave up $950 million in refunds in 2012.
25) More than one-fifth of paper tax returns contain an error.
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