What would Donald Duck owe in taxes today?

In this cute animated short from 1943, Donald Duck pays his 1941 federal income taxes. Converted to 2011 dollars, he earned $38,270 as an actor in 1941, and got a deduction of $12,242 for Huey, Dewey, and Louie. Of the remaining $26,029 he paid taxes of $199 for a marginal tax rate of 0.8%. Obviously the animators and writers weren't working from the actual tax tables.

If Donald were filing today, he'd have paid $3,296 on that $26K net income for a marginal tax rate of 12.7%, but that's not taking today's more generous deductions and Earned Income Credit into account. Just for fun (because this is how I define fun) I decided to fill out Donald Duck's 1040.

After the standard and dependent children deductions he wound up with a taxable income of $14,970 on which he'd owe a tax of $1,639. However, because he can take a $3,000 Child Tax Credit on Huey, Dewey, and Louie, he winds up owing nothing. But wait, there's more!

Donald can also take the Earned Income Credit which means in the the end the IRS owes Donald $1,205. Oh boy!

Yet everybody thinks we pay too much in taxes today. I wonder why?

View Donald Duck's 2011 1040: http://goo.gl/yda3a
Note -- I used the BLS's inflation calculator to convert the 1941 dollar amounts to 2011 dollars: http://www.bls.gov/data/inflation_calculator.htm