Taxing Turkeys

In San Francisco, they want to spend about a half-billion dollars more than necessary to build a PRETTY bridge to replace the earthquake sensitive Bay Bridge. Everyone who is paying for it vote for that right now. Everybody in SF votes yes, and the rest of us SANE people vote for GO TO WORK ON UGLY BRIDGE. We’ve got better uses for half a billion dollars than to make a bridge look pretty.

So…

Let's stop paying taxes. No more taxes. Right now. Death is no longer a sure thing, so drop the taxes part. And I'll tell you why: Toll Roads. You may think you’ve ALREADY PAID money for the highway system and you should get to drive on ANY DAMN STREET you want, but the government in its stupidity brilliance built exclusive highways on which you stop your car every 300 feet to pay a dollar to use a road because it's CONVENIENT. It’s called screwing the taxpayer pay as you go.

Pay as you go. Let’s do that with everything. Like garbage collection. Instead of the government forcing me to give them money so they can haul away my garbage when THEY feel like it, I could pay a service tohaul it away when I want it gone. If I’m on vacation, I could skip a couple of weeks and do something crazy like NOT PAY for a service I’m NOT EVEN USING.

Or I could pay little Johnnie Dolittle down the street. He cuts old Mrs. Warwidow’s lawn with his dad’s Electro 9000 Lawndonkey. Little bastard charges $18 and then runs down the gophers as a game.

Or I could DO IT MYSELF. But that would mean I might have to be efficient about my waste because I’m to damn lazy to trek down to the dump twice a week. I’d have to start being ENVIRONMENTALLY CLEAN. Ick.

And screw the environment, because I’m planning on buying the new 2006 Canyonero (Simpsons fans, calm down) because there will be no money to repair the roads. Which will be AWESOME off-roading every day to work.

I could finally stop paying for water I DON’T DRINK to be delivered to my home.

No more court system = no more lawyers. Sweet.

Howard Stern anywhere you want him.

And we’ll end programs we DON’T use, like social service programs, because we’re smart upright citizens who don’t have diseases, crack babies, or drug problems. Of course, I’m going to have to exercise my ex-constitutional right to by a couple of pistolas, 16 semi-automatic guns, a box of grenades, some TNT, and a small nuclear device. That’s because it will be my responsibility to defend myself against the huge wave of crackheads and assistant crackheads bearing down on my house since the police disbanded.

There will, of course, be no agency to help anyone out when the next hurricane hits. Like there is now.

We’ll finally be out of Iraq. With no taxes to pay them, we’ll have to bring our boys and girls home. Of course, we’ll have to develop our own personal army to protect the homefront. There are a couple of guys down the street who seem interested. They like weapons. We’ll have to pay them, though. We might need a system to do it. Maybe a penny out of every $20 so that we can get enough of these guys to keep the Mongolian Hordes from sneaking in over the border.

You don’t mind, do you? It’s just to make sure you don’t die. Small price.

Maybe we should do something to stop MicroSoft while we’re at it. I mean, with absolutely no controls, they’ll take over the earth. Every time someone comes up with a great idea, they’ll either buy it or give it away free after reverse-engineering it. Unless you don’t mind Bill Gates in your living room, bedroom, bathtub. How about a penny to stop that from happening?

And maybe it's worth a penny to keep a couple of parks around. Because I might like to take my date/kid/old mother to some place where there are a few trees, stream, rocks, and dirt instead of the Hair-n-Nails-n-Mufflers Plaza.

And one more penny to be able to send a letter to Aunt Totter without having to give FedYucks $8.95.

So, a few pennies here, a few pennies there. We should have a group of people who watch out for how it’s spent. We could elect them. Most of them will be turkeyheads, since most of us are turkeyheads. But we’ll hold them accountable. Maybe even put in some kind of RECALL vote if we need to.

Shoot, we may need a lot of money. Some way to take care of sick people. Because it's better to keep people working than have them get sick and die while they're trying mow your lawn. And some way to educate people. Because it's better than having a bunch of dumb people trying to rob you rather than mowing your lawn. And somebody to put out the fires. Because the guy who does your lawn keeps his equipment in a wooden shack.

That will be expensive. Maybe we should pay MORE than we're paying now. And maybe we should have a word for the money we give them to spend. A word for paying out a little bit to make sure we don’t get eaten by a bear, or don’t get beat up by an anarchist, or have a football team that sometimes wins.

How about Baxes?