Today is a day many of us wish to wipe from memory. It's the day federal and state taxes are due.

But it's a day we must remember always. Or at least until November.

The first problem with paying taxes is the annoyance, waste and frustration involved. The forms are labyrinthine, the language murky, the research laborious. You have to remember, and provide legally binding evidence for your activities all year. It's the only act in which you are required to testify against yourself, and it's in an area in which 99 percent of us have no training or expertise.

The National Taxpayers Union estimates the average person spends 26.5 hours and $207 sorting through receipts, studying tax instructions and filling out forms. In other words, the typical taxpayer throws away a whole day of his or her life, plus money, just for the privilege of giving even more money to the government. The U.S. Treasury Department estimates the total cost of complying with the income tax at $125 billion a year. It's a monumental waste of time and energy.

It's also nerve-wracking. Every honest taxpayer wonders if he or she is making a mistake that could end up in a jail sentence. The tax code runs to 60,000 pages, some of it contradictory, and all of it written in obscure, convoluted language.

There's also the feeling that the whole process is downright unfair. Since 1998, 483 companies have lobbied the IRS, hiring 2,884 tax lobbyists. Since it's unlikely that most of us have our own lobbyist pushing for tax breaks, we usually feel we're getting the short end of the stick. And we usually are.

Also irritating is the knowledge that some people and companies get away with paying less than what they owe, or nothing at all. Government studies suggest that more than $300 billion in taxes go uncollected every year. There are estimates that this adds more than $2,000 a year to the tax bills of households that are honest about their taxes.

That's a rotten cherry on top of a rancid concoction.

Two suggestions come to mind. One is to simplify the tax code. If you've ever filled out a tax form for a state with a flat tax, you are filled with gratitude at how easy it is. Utah is in transition to such a plan, but this year you have to do your calculations twice, so we can't give state lawmakers credit for simplification yet.

Whether a national flat tax is a good idea can be debated. We're just saying that a simpler tax system would likely be fairer, and it certainly would save time and money.

Our second suggestion is to keep your experience from today in mind at least through Election Day. If you don't like taxes now, wait to see what happens if the Congress and president we elect in November do away with the Bush tax cuts, which expire in 2010. That would mean the biggest tax increase since World War II, the Wall Street Journal has reported.

We're talking about you, Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton. The two Democrats want to roll back the tax cut for people making more than $250,000. Republican John McCain wanted to dump the tax cuts but changed his mind and now says he wants to keep them.

Choose whom you like, but don't believe anybody who says the rich would pay more if the tax cuts go away. The biggest losers, the Wall Street Journal says, would be people in the lowest income tax bracket, because when Bush tax cuts are taken away the rate for those folks jumps from 10 percent to 15 percent.

All in all, it would mean the return of a tax system as it was in the 1970s -- when it was even more byzantine, unfair and confiscatory than what we have now.

So when you go the polls on Nov. 4, think back on April 15 and the days leading up to it. Think about the frantic hunt for receipts, the weary reading of instructions, and the nervous calculation of figures.

Then imagine doing all that, only worse, on April 15, 2010 and every year thereafter. If you do as you mark your ballot, the chore of income tax may be worthwhile after all.