Thousdands of words in US tax law for 1995 to 2005 in 10 year
intervals. This includes income taxes and all taxes in the code
itself (written by congress) and regulations (written by government
administrators).
Usage
data(UStaxWords)
Format
A data.frame containing:
year
tax year
IncomeTaxCode
number of words in thousands in the US income tax code
otherTaxCode
number of words in thousands in US tax code other than income tax
EntireTaxCode
number of words in thousands in the US tax code
IncomeTaxRegulations
number of words in thousands in US income tax regulations
otherTaxRegulations
number of words in thousands in US tax regulations other than
income tax
IncomeTaxCodeAndRegs
number of words in thousands in both the code and regulations for
the US income tax
otherTaxCodeAndRegs
number of wrds in thousands in both code and regulations for US
taxes apart from income taxes.
EntireTaxCodeAndRegs
number of words in thousands in US tax code and regulations
Details
Thousands of words in the US tax code and federal tax regulations,
1955-2005. This is based on data from the Tax Foundation
(taxfoundation.org), adjusted to eliminate an obvious questionable
observation in otherTaxRegulations for 1965. This series was
not reported directly by the Tax Foundation but is easily computed as
the difference between their Income and Entire tax numbers. This
series shows the numbers falling by 48 percent between 1965 and 1975
and by 1.5 percent between 1995 and 2005. These are the only declines
seen in these numbers and seem inconsistent with the common concern
(expressed e.g., in Moody, Warcholik and Hodge, 2005) about the
difficulties of simplifying any governmental program, because vested
interest appear to defend almost anything.
The decline of 48 percent seems more curious for two additional
reasons: First, it was preceeded by a tripling of
otherTaxRegulations between 1955 and 1965. Second, it was NOT
accompanied by any comparable behavior of otherTaxCode.
Instead, the latter grew each decade by between 17 and 53 percent,
similar to but slower than the growth in IncomeTaxCode and
IncomeTaxRegulations.
Accordingly, otherTaxRegulations for 1965 is replaced by the
average of the numbers for 1955 and 1975, and
EntireTaxRegulations for 1965 is comparably adjusted. This
replaces (1322, 2960) for those two variables for 1965 with (565,
2203). In addition, otherTaxCodeAndRegs and
EntireTaxCodeAndRegulations are also changed from (1626, 3507)
to (870, 2751).
Independent of whether this adjustment is correct or not, it's clear
that there have been roughly 3 words of regulations for each word in
the tax code. Most of these are income tax regulations, which have
recently contained 4.5 words for every word in code. The income tax
code currently includes roughly 50 percent more words than other tax
code.
J. Scott Moody, Wendy P. Warcholik, and Scott A. Hodge (2005) "The
Rising Cost of Complying with the Federal Income Tax", The Tax
Foundation Special Report No. 138.
Examples
data(UStaxWords)
plot(EntireTaxCodeAndRegs/1000 ~ year, UStaxWords, type='b',
ylab='Millions of words in US tax code & regs')
# Write to a file for Wikimedia Commons
svg('UStaxWords.svg')
matplot(UStaxWords$year, UStaxWords[c(2:3, 5:6)]/1000,
type='b', bty='n', ylab='',
ylim=c(0, max(UStaxWords$EntireTaxCodeAndRegs)/1000),
las=1, xlab="", cex.axis=2)
lines(EntireTaxCodeAndRegs/1000~year, UStaxWords, lwd=2)
dev.off()
# lines 1:4 = IncomeTaxCode, otherTaxCode, IncomeTaxRegulations,
# and otherTaxRegulations, respectively
##
## Plotting the original numbers without the adjustment
##
UStax. <- UStaxWords
UStax.[2,c(6:7, 9:10)] <- c(1322, 2960, 1626, 3507)
matplot(UStax.$year, UStax.[c(2:3, 5:6)]/1000,
type='b', bty='n', ylab='',
ylim=c(0, max(UStax.$EntireTaxCodeAndRegs)/1000),
las=1, xlab="", cex.axis=2)
lines(EntireTaxCodeAndRegs/1000~year, UStax., lwd=2)
# Note especially the anomalous behaviour of line 4 =
# otherTaxRegulations. As noted with "details" above,
# otherTaxRegulations could have tripled between 1955 and 1965,
# then fallen by 48 percent between 1965 and 1975. However,
# that does not seem credible, especially since there was no
# corresponding behavior in otherTaxCode.
Results
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> library(Ecdat)
Loading required package: Ecfun
Attaching package: 'Ecfun'
The following object is masked from 'package:base':
sign
Attaching package: 'Ecdat'
The following object is masked from 'package:datasets':
Orange
> png(filename="/home/ddbj/snapshot/RGM3/R_CC/result/Ecdat/UStaxWords.Rd_%03d_medium.png", width=480, height=480)
> ### Name: UStaxWords
> ### Title: Number of Words in US Tax Law
> ### Aliases: UStaxWords
> ### Keywords: datasets
>
> ### ** Examples
>
> data(UStaxWords)
> plot(EntireTaxCodeAndRegs/1000 ~ year, UStaxWords, type='b',
+ ylab='Millions of words in US tax code & regs')
>
> # Write to a file for Wikimedia Commons
> svg('UStaxWords.svg')
> matplot(UStaxWords$year, UStaxWords[c(2:3, 5:6)]/1000,
+ type='b', bty='n', ylab='',
+ ylim=c(0, max(UStaxWords$EntireTaxCodeAndRegs)/1000),
+ las=1, xlab="", cex.axis=2)
> lines(EntireTaxCodeAndRegs/1000~year, UStaxWords, lwd=2)
> dev.off()
png
2
> # lines 1:4 = IncomeTaxCode, otherTaxCode, IncomeTaxRegulations,
> # and otherTaxRegulations, respectively
>
> ##
> ## Plotting the original numbers without the adjustment
> ##
> UStax. <- UStaxWords
> UStax.[2,c(6:7, 9:10)] <- c(1322, 2960, 1626, 3507)
> matplot(UStax.$year, UStax.[c(2:3, 5:6)]/1000,
+ type='b', bty='n', ylab='',
+ ylim=c(0, max(UStax.$EntireTaxCodeAndRegs)/1000),
+ las=1, xlab="", cex.axis=2)
> lines(EntireTaxCodeAndRegs/1000~year, UStax., lwd=2)
> # Note especially the anomalous behaviour of line 4 =
> # otherTaxRegulations. As noted with "details" above,
> # otherTaxRegulations could have tripled between 1955 and 1965,
> # then fallen by 48 percent between 1965 and 1975. However,
> # that does not seem credible, especially since there was no
> # corresponding behavior in otherTaxCode.
>
>
>
>
>
> dev.off()
null device
1
>