Our tax code and George Washington's character

I recently paid my quarterly estimated taxes, so I have taxes on my mind.

Tax Creep(s): Like old age, tax complexity has been creeping up on us.

Today, taxpayers must wade through 126 pages of instructions for the standard 1040 form, more than triple the number in 1975.

The current 1040A short form has doubled the number of lines that appeared on the 1945 version of the standard 1040 tax return. Its 85-page instruction booklet now tops the long form 1040 instructions published just seven years ago.

The IRS prints at least 1,101 publications, forms and instructions, which contain 16,339 pages, up from 943 documents with 12,933 pages just two years ago.

Americans toil for about 6.42 billion hours on tax forms and record keeping, accounting for 84 percent of the federal government's entire paperwork burden.

Our tax code is a house of cards that could soon collapse under the weight of its own complexity. Our economy, our civil liberties and our already complicated lives would be much better off with fundamental tax reform. -- David Keating, National Taxpayers Union

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The following is the first of a two part series adapted from a speech delivered by Richard Brookhiser, a senior editor at National Review, at the dedication of a statue of George Washington on Hillsdale College campus in Hillsdale, Mich.

The Character of George Washington

I want to talk today about two qualities of George Washington's character.

The first is persistence. There's a line in the song "America the Beautiful": "Thine alabaster cities gleam, Undimmed by human tears." It means that the cities of America, unlike those of Europe, have not been torn and destroyed by war. That's not quite right. The city I live in, New York, has been attacked twice in American history.

The first attack was in the summer of 1776, and George Washington, commander-in-chief of the American Army, was responsible for the city's defense. The Declaration of Independence had been read for the first time in New York on July 9. That very week, Americans on Long Island saw a British fleet moving toward New York Harbor. The British, who made camp on Staten Island, had at their command ten ships on the line, dozens of other ships, and 32,000 professional soldiers (including Hessians). To oppose this force, Washington had no navy, no ships, and 19,000 soldiers, most of them militia and most of them untrained. Over the next few months, he and his men fought two battles: the Battle of Long Island, in what is now Brooklyn, and the Battle of White Plains north of the city. They lost both.

The second attack on New York was on September 11,2001. I live about three miles north of the Trade Center site. It was a primary day, so I was out to vote, and I could see the plume of smoke quite clearly from both of the towers. It was a beautiful fall day. Then I had to go to work at the National Review, where I watched the towers burning on television. I have a friend in upstate New York who's an artisan. He makes and designs furniture and builds houses, and when he saw the towers burning on television, he said to his father, "Those buildings are coming down," and he got up and left the room. I'm not an artisan, so I didn't know they were coming down. I watched them fall, and then I left the room to write about it for National Review.

New York lost 3,000 men and women on 9/11, far more than the several hundred American soldiers who were killed in the battles of 1776. But for the rest of the Revolutionary War, the British kept all their American prisoners on ships in the East River, where they were not well fed, had no good air and were given barely any water. Every morning the British would say, "Rebels, throw out your dead," and corpses would be pitched overboard. Eleven thousand men died, and for years people in Brooklyn found skeletons on the waterfront.

We lost the two Trade Towers on 9/11, along with several smaller buildings. George Washington lost the entire city, which the British occupied for the remainder of the war. The British could also be said to have used weapons of mass destruction: They encouraged slaves to run away from their American masters with the promise of freedom, but any slave who had smallpox was sent back in the hope that he would infect his fellow slaves and rebel masters.

It's been less than two years since 9/11 and we've fought two short wars: Afghanistan was about six weeks, Iraq about three weeks. The American Revolution lasted eight-and-half years. It was the longest American war until Vietnam -- longer than the Civil War and our part in World War II put together.

So we have our problems, but Washington had his. And in many ways his were worse: America was much weaker then, and the enemy it faced was much stronger. Washington's persistence through the Revolutionary War was remarkable. But it didn't end there. When the war was over and he retired to private life, he was called upon to serve again. He presided over the Constitutional Convention in 1787, was inaugurated as the first president in 1789, and served as president for two terms. So the full time of his service -- including the war, the Constitutional Convention and his eight years as president -- was 17 years.

Franklin Roosevelt served 12 years as president and died a month after his fourth inauguration. Jefferson, Wilson and Reagan each served eight years as president. Lincoln served four years a s president and was murdered a month after his second inauguration. Washington served 17 years at the center of American life -- a record that has not been matched. Washington's mother is supposed to have said, when told of one of his Revolutionary War victories, "George generally completes what he undertakes." He certainly did, and he did so through a lifetime of public service.

Gary Rust is the chairman of Rust Communications.