Your Taxes in Perspective

I'm a big fan of trying to put taxes in a larger perspective. For example, trying to understand how my tax dollars are spent by the government. Another way to look at the issue is to understand how much money the federal government spends for every man, woman, and child. This is what I call the "tax burden" of the federal budget. The IRS has a different way of looking at things. The IRS looks at how much in taxes they think they can collect versus how much they actually collected. The difference between the two is called the tax gap. But as CPA Kerry Kerstetter points out, the real tax gap is anybody's guess. And Kerstetter is betting that people are actually overpaying their taxes.