WASHINGTON -- If your motto is "better government through citizen understanding," and you study the U.S. federal tax code for a living, you know you're in for some very long afternoons.


Consider this: The Internal Revenue Code today is 1,339,000 words long.


But that's just for starters. There are also 5,757,000 words of regulations, which is what you need so you can understand the code.


And these are the people that the Russian government is seeking out for advice on establishing a tax code.


These and other monstrous statistics have emerged from the darkest reaches of the federal bureaucracy courtesy of Arthur P. Hall, senior economist for the Tax Foundation, a public service organization that promotes "citizen understanding" by disseminating the terrifying truth about taxes in hopes the public will learn from them.


Learn what?


"Nothing, really," Hall said. "We don't take a stand. Our mission is simply to inform the public about taxes.''


As everyone knows, it doesn't take a Ph.D. to realize that tax law is incomprehensible, boring and dangerous. Who can understand it? Who wants to take the time? But who wants to go to jail?


Well, Hall says, help is not on the way. In fact, he adds, the tax code has become so Byzantine that it has created a burgeoning "tax industry" within the federal government.


The tax industry will employ 136,155 people in 1995 at a cost of $13.7 billion, Hall has calculated. It includes entire agencies like the IRS (109,656 people), congressional entities like the House Ways and Means Committee (143 people) and service organizations like the Government Printing Office -- which, by Hall's estimate, needs 1,095 employees to work on tax matters alone.


Hall said the reasons this has happened -- and the reasons it is not going to get any better -- are rooted in the government's determination in 1954 to reorient the revenue system with income tax "at the center."


Before that, Hall explained, people paid plenty of income tax (it was invented here in 1913), but the main source of government revenue was excise taxes (like sales tax, gas tax and cigarette tax).


The nice thing about income tax is that it's progressive (the more money you make, the more taxes you pay), and therefore fair (despite what you may think). Excise taxes, where you pay the same money no matter how poor you are, are regressive.


The bad thing about income tax, Hall said in a recent Foundation Special Report, is that it is "inherently complex" because of "the ambiguity associated with defining taxable income."


For this reason, the federal government has felt it necessary to give the Tax Code a major amendment tune-up every 1.3 years since 1954. Had George Bush known about this during his 1988 presidential campaign, he never would have asked America to "Read my lips -- no new taxes."


Anyway, once the amending began, the explaining had to follow, rendering everything still more complicated, which necessitated another amendment. "Every time you change these laws, you have a new reason to rewrite the regulations," Hall said. "But the more it grows, the more you want to change it."


And of course in the United States, where more is more, you never subtract anything. You just add new stuff, and soon you need a whole new class of scholars to interpret.


In 1986, Congress passed a sweeping tax reform in an effort to close loopholes and simplify the process -- a "good initiative," Hill said, which unfortunately "just failed." This is because loopholes, once closed, are circumvented. "Whatever your business is," Hill said, "you have to have something special." So once you start making exceptions for particular constituencies, you need new regulations. And then still more changes.


"One issue in the tax code is fairness, one issue is simplicity, and another is the government's need for revenue," Hill said. "As it turned out in 1986, fairness and the need for revenue far outweighed the need for simplicity.''


And the really great thing is that there is always something new.


As of July, Hill said, the IRS had 597 pending regulations in the pipeline, many of which should dribble into the tax code in plenty of time to drive American taxpayers crazy next April.