Yes It's 75,000 Pages, But Most of It Is Irrelevant to You

The length of the Internal Revenue Code and the regulations, rules, forms, and instructions that come with it, while staggering, are not for the most part of any real concern to ordinary citizens. The IRC (Title 26 of the United States Code) consists of 11 Subtitles. Of that total, the only one that is of real concern to the average citizen is Subtitle A. Income Taxes. To be sure, if buy booze, you pay the excise taxes in Subtitle E. But, you do not have to know anything about them unless you own a beer distributorship, you lucky dog. Further, Subtitle A has lots and lots of material that most people know nothing about. E.G. "Chapter 3 - Withholding Of Tax On Nonresident Aliens And Foreign Corporations" The relevant stuff is in Chapter 1 - Normal Taxes and Surtaxes.

The irrelevance pattern is repeated recursively in Chapter 1. Most of what affects individuals is in Subchapters-A and B, but the list of Subchapters goes on to Y. You probably do not need to know anything about H-Banking Institutions or  L-Insurance Companies. Once upon a time, a very long time ago, in a previous millennium, I needed to learn about Subchapter K-Partners and Partnerships for professional reasons. Please believe me when I tell you there is a special place in the 10th circle of Hell for the man who wrote the 25 page, 11,198 word, explanation of three words in §704(b)(2): "substantial economic effect". But, once again, you can spend, a long, productive, and happy life in total ignorance of that abomination.

It is true that some of the few remaining sections that are relevant to ordinary individuals have developed into very long disquisitions. For example §163, that authorizes the deduction of interest payments, has grown enormously. In the 1939 IRC, the provision (§23(b)) that was ancestral to §163, was 58 words long and included a rule about tax exempt bonds that was later put in a separate section. In the 1954 recension, it was 3 subsections of 258 words. It is now 14 subsections totaling 6835 words.
 
Some of that verbiage was added is to alleviate taxpayer problems, such as a subsection that turned, as if by wizardry, mortgage insurance premiums into deductible interest payments for a few years. Other provisions were inserted to deal with possible abuses like bearer bonds*. And yet other provisions were added to deal with market developments. Today everyone lives off of consumer credit. but, the first bank credit cards were not issued until 1958. When the first versions of the IRC were adopted, the common assumption was that money would only be loaned and interest paid for business purposes. The invention and spread of consumer credit necessitated a rethinking of the treatment of interest payable on consumer credit. In 1986, as part of the extensive amendments adopted that year, subsection (h) was added basically to disallow interest on consumer credit.

I have little doubt that vast stretches of the existing tax code could be rewritten to clarify and simplify it. But, I doubt that anyone really cares about it that much. People who have to deal with it have learned it as it is, and would rightly question whether any change would destabilize the meaning of the parts they have to deal with. Any rewrite would leave substance of the provisions alone, and that is where the problems lie.

Note: The 74,000 page figure comes from  Wolters Kluwer, CCH the publisher of the "Standard Master Tax Guide" a series of loose-leaf volumes containing: the text of the income tax provisions of the Internal Revenue Code; excerpts of relevant Congressional Committee Reports; IRS regulations; and summaries of IRS rulings and judicial opinions. Much of that material accumulates from year to year, e.g. judicial opinions from the 1930s are still in there. In 2013 the exact number they gave was 73,954. Every month, they sent you more pages with the latest developments to insert at various locations in the binders. Many law firms and accounting firms had full time employees whose job it was to keep the binders up to date. I am sure that, by now, most tax professionals use an on-line version to save the difficulty and expense of maintaining that much paper.


*For those of you who are blessedly of too young an age to have dealt with bearer bonds, they were paper certificates payable to bearer, i.e. whoever showed up at the issuer's place of payment and surrendered the piece of paper. Interest on the bonds was evidence by tiny post-dated checks (called coupons) printed on the paper, which were also payable to bearer. To cash them in you cut them off of the paper bond, and submitted them to the issuer for payment. The taxing authorities had to depend on the honesty of taxpayers to find out how much interest they received in a year. People who derived most of their income from cashing the interest coupons were called: "coupon clippers". Such people seldom clipped cents off coupons from the Sunday paper to keep their family's grocery budget in line.