Last week was a stressful one for many of us as we stared down the daunting tax code to file our taxes by Wednesday’s deadline. To say our tax code is a mess is an understatement. At 4 million words — which is 3,998,800 more than the King James Bible — and nearly 74,000 pages long, it stands as one of the biggest boondoggles holding our economy back. The tax code is tedious, wasteful, inefficient and well… taxing, causing too many folks to spend more and more time and resources just to comply with the law.

In fact, as Americans wrestled through the complex code, our economy lost a whopping $234 billion and 6.1 billion hours of productivity. There’s no doubt that this year’s tax code was especially difficult with the addition of Obamacare and its 3,000 pages of complexities and regulations.

On top of the burdensome tax code, the federal government continues to take bigger chunks of our paychecks to pay for Washington’s spending addiction. In North Carolina, we finally earned enough money to pay our combined total tax bill for the year on April 16. That means all of those hours of hard work you punched prior went straight to our growing tax burden. If this seems unfair, would you believe it if I told you President Obama wants to make that day later by taxing us even more?

According to the Tax Policy Center, under the president’s proposed plan to increase taxes by $2.1 trillion, the average American family would see an increase in their tax bills. I fail to see how this approach will increase wages, promote job creation or provide the economic security families deserve. We have a tremendous opportunity to advance bipartisan tax reform that would empower individuals and families to keep more money in their pockets and more hours on their schedules. I support completely overhauling our current tax system to make it simpler, fairer and flatter and reducing taxes to force the government to live within its means, just like working families do here at home.

This tax season, we’re also reminded of President Obama’s plan to hand over our tax dollars to illegal immigrants. Under the president’s amnesty executive order, illegal immigrants could be eligible to get Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) for years they worked illegally in the United States. Taking billions of dollars from law-abiding taxpayers to write checks to unlawful immigrants is an absolute disservice to working families and hardworking immigrants who lawfully entered our country.

The bottom line is, the president’s policies neither help grow our economy nor serve the best interests of North Carolinians. While Washington continues to turn a blind eye to families who are playing by the rules, yet struggling under the Obama economy, I’m fighting for you and your family. Just this week, I supported legislation to stop IRS abuse and hold agency employees accountable for misconduct. From targeting taxpayers for their political beliefs to rehiring hundreds of untrustworthy ex-employees, it’s clear the IRS doesn’t have the best interest of hardworking taxpayers in mind. I believe in you, our neighbors, our friends and our community, not our federal government, and I will continue to work with Democrats and Republicans to tip the balance of power back to “we the people” and away from Washington’s bureaucrats.