[KUJustin]

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200 billion is way too high in my opinion, probably ban order of magnitude. Here's a rough estimate:

Most employees wouldn't spend more than a couple of hours a year on tax, which accounts for around $8 billion at $20/hr.

For a rough idea of the corporate market, PricewaterhouseCoopers is the largest accounting firm in the world, 146,000 people in 150 countries, and their annual revenue is 20 billion. A fraction of that would be tax. Most larger firms and businesses maintain good records anyway (income, receipts, salaries), so you can't count that as a cost of tax. So, I'd estimate something like:

24 million US businesses filing tax returns at 50 hours/year each and $20/hr =~ $20 billion.

So I'd estimate between 10 and 30 billion are spent on tax each year or ~0.2% of US GDP.

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My only question is if "ban order of magnitude" is a typo of "by an order of magnitude" or if he's suggesting my guess is so bad I should be banned, haha.

Anyway, thanks for the numbers and link. That looks like an obviously biased source, but at the same time the number seems reasonable to me and I wouldn't expect them to make something up out of thin air.

I'm mostly just glad this didn't get hijacked into a debate on the merits of the income tax. I was really just curious.