U.S. is giving tax rebate checks to all Americans of about $600 per person. This is Bush's plan to stimulate the economy. You only get it if you file a tax return.

The total cost is said to be about $265 billion dollars.

However, this year Americans will spend about $264 billion on tax help to file their taxes. Average individual with any kind of complicated tax return (two adults working, retirement plans, charitable giving, any kind of self employment income), may spend $1000 on getting professional tax advice. This is wastage built into our system, and is only increasing every year as the tax code gets bigger and bigger. Just like the growing procedure and structural complication in the courts that makes it almost impossible for an individual to seek justice on their own without an attorney, it's getting more and more difficult to file our tax returns without "professional" advice.

So we're either:

• Barely getting back what we spent on tax preparation for a single year
• Increasing the deficit for future generations
• Stimulating the Chinese economy when people spend the rebate at walmarts
• Sending it to the sand countries when people use the rebate to fill the gas tanks off their cars

In the olden days, the tax collector screwed you out of our property, and there was nothing you could do about it, except get back to work and try to re-earn, re-produce, what had been taken from you. In the olden days, you could see redress in the courts by appearing before a magistrate, with a couple of friends who could attest to your facts, and your plead your case.

Today, the legal and procedural hurdles make it almost impossible to go to court on our own to seek justice, especially if the other side has an attorney, we have to come up with a bunch of money to hire our own attorney, and hope that we're accomplishing more than funding lunches between the attorneys where they eat food we could never afford, in restaurants we would never think of eating in, wearing suits we can't afford, and telling jokes at our expense.

As far as taxes, it's so complicated that unless we have a single job as an employee with no investments, we get to waste tons of time, and money, incriminating ourselves to tell the tax collector how much he should steal from us. So now he steals not just our property, the system allows him to steal our time too.

What productive things could you have done in the time wasted in telling the tax collector how much to steal from you? How much extra money would you have at retirement if you could have invested the funds you will pay during your lifetime in tax preparation fees.

Oh yes, that's right, tax preparers often claim they save us more than they cost us. Because of an overgrown and overburdening overcomplicated system.....