See the amount of Federal Tax Refunds issued for the day and tell me this is not inefficient

Below is a small section of the US Treasury's daily report on various metrics.  It is a short document and has some pretty interesting numbers as they pertain to the operations of the Federal Government.  I urge you to check it out.

I was lead to it from this Wall Street Journal blog entry.

This section made me pause.  It shows on a daily, monthly and yearly basis the amount of refunds the Federal Govt sends back to businesses and individuals. Presumably this is because after filing tax forms these entities proved to the government they over-paid throughout the year in tax withholding.

You can see the numbers below.

Tax refunds issued for the day were $397 million; for the month-to-date is $5.474 billion; and for the year-to-date is $361.193 billion.

It is nice to get these checks, but wouldn't it be more efficient to not go in such a roundabout way to keep the money flowing in the first place?  Seems like a significant amount of Dead Weight Loss is created--all it is doing is moving money in a circle and creating significant transaction costs, i.e. time, tax preparation, bureaucracy to handle it, etc, ad nauseam.

A Consumption tax? A Flat Tax?  A Something Else Tax?  Just explicitly pay what you owe, no more and no less.

Maybe I am just having a bad day... :)

From US Teasury Daily Report.