Lou Dobbs has an article on CNN where he talks about the current congress being worse than the 80th US Congress of 1947-1948, called the do nothing congress by Harry S Truman. I think the problem is not that the congress does too little, it's that it does too much. I am a great believer in Parkinson's Law which states that "work expands so as to fill the time available for its completion." I've seen this hold true in consulting jobs, preparing tax returns, and developing software. If we give congress a year to get 2 months of work done they will take a year making up laws in search of a problem.

We should limit the session to 3 months a year or perhaps 6 months every other year. Our elected representatives can spend more time at home talking to their constituents to find out what we really want.

I was purusing throught the IRS website like I often do at this time a year and came across the 2004 Internal Revenue Service Data Book which provides some interesting facts and figures about taxes. The data is for fiscal year October 1, 2003 to September 30, 2004. There are 33 different tables that can help one get their hands around the scope of the tax collection process and the dollar amounts involved.

Amount of Internal Revenue Refunds Issued by State

The first table shows the amount of refunds issued, including interest, by state. The refunds cover corporate, individual, employment, estate, gift, and excise taxes. Seeing this amount of refunds on the top 5 states makes me think of one thing: poor tax planning.

Top 5 refund states

Bottom 5 refund states

California at 31,169,773 exceeds Wyoming by 7,837%.

Internal Revenue Gross Collections by State

Table number 6 shows the gross revenue by state in the same categories.

Top 5 gross revenue states

Bottom 5 gross revenue states

Comparing Refunds to Gross Revenues

Putting the two tables together shows how the amount of refunds compares to the gross revenues. The nation wide average for all 50 states and the District of Columbia is 13.635% ($273,021,058 refunds / $2,002,295,537 gross revenue).

The five states with the lowest refunds to revenues ratio are:

The five states with the highest refunds to revenues ratio are:

Eloysa Vasquez recently gave birth to a baby boy. What makes this amazing is not that the child was 3 lbs 7 ounces, but the mother was only 37 lbs before getting pregnant. The China Daily has a story with a picture of the happy family.

There is a news article today on the Science Blog that talks about researchers at RPI creating fusion at room temperatures. My first thought was about the infamous research done by Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann in 1989 on cold fusion. I hope this doesn't turn out to be such a flop and we can take another step towards reduced petroleum consumption.