Mona Charen: Do you trust your neighbor to pay taxes?: "The 7 million words of the U.S. tax code are so abstruse, reports the CATO Institute's Stephen Moore, that 70 percent of the members of the two tax-writing committees in the House and Senate pay accountants to prepare their taxes.

The compliance cost for the American economy is quite staggering. The Tax Foundation estimates that in 2002, businesses, individuals and non-profits spent over 5.7 billion hours preparing taxes. Scott Moody of the Tax Foundation puts the cost of these man-hours at $194 billion -- more than the revenue of the Wal-Mart Corp. It is also considerably larger than the 2004 budget deficit of $71.3 billion."

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