Wheel! Of! FISH!

Death to Taxes!

2002-04-15 - 3:14 p.m.

I paid my taxes, good citizen that I am.

And of course, after wading through mounds of ridiculously recursive and invasive and obstreperous and burdensome and wretched and soul-crushing paperwork, I found out that – joy of joys – I will be receiving a fat $60 refund from the good men and women of the Internal Revenue Service!

YES! Boo-to-the-power-of-yah! In return for my forty acres of hard work and making an ass of myself, I get back ... some ... money.

My joy, you might well imagine, was quickly tempered as I realized that what I was receiving back was only a tiny fraction of what I had given up.

The rest has all vanished into various government facilities. Perhaps a bit went towards a new toothbrush rack in the lavatories of the nuclear silo just outside Bismarck, South Dakota. Perhaps I, through my backbreaking labor (or at least relentless tolerance of monotony) helped purchase a new box of laser printer toner for Printer #11E5J65 at the New York offices of the Department of Labor. A bit of my money was taken by Medicare. Fine and good. The next time I come down with a headache or break my ulna or contract a rare disease from an airborne virus being tested by the CIA I'll be sure to pop a note in the mailbox asking Medicare to please send some of my money back so I can afford to go to the hospital. Some of my money went into Social Security. That's a blessed relief. Now I know my money is snug and secure in that mythical Locked Box, where it will stay in peace and interest-accruing comfort until the day that our defense budget quintuples because we're shipping hundreds of thousands of troops to a scatter of locations across the globe in an effort to make people love us.

Fortunately, that day is far away. Far, far away. Looking backwards.

Well, still, I reasoned, it's more than DEATH gives you back, right? It's not like you undergo the Final Inevitability and then tot up the sums and get twenty minutes of free time back.

Well, no. But death is a real finality, that big black period at the end of The Sentence. It's a pleasant sort of denoument to this chaos and madness that starts when we come bursting out into the world in a triumphant spray of mucus and blood and placental fragments (prior to that, things are rather pleasant and laid-back). Yes, it's the end of all things, at least from one perspective, but it's also a nice respite.

It's the kind of eternal verity you can really sink your metaphysical teeth into.

"That's DEATH, that is. No getting around that."

What makes taxes eternal? No getting around them? Bull-hockey. This country was FOUNDED on getting around taxes. Remember the Revolution? When we decided that given the choice between paying taxes to remain part of the most powerful and prestigious empire in the world and being brutally quashed by a superior military, we took the latter choice and prayed that FRANCE would save us? Remember the 19th century, when we slowly took control of the world's economy and gained mastery over the Platonic Ideal of the Dollar?

We're a nation that celebrates frauds and liars and rebels and smugglers and robber barons and swashbuckling CEOs. We're the Land of the Free and the Home of Stomp the Other Guy's Skull Into the Ground While Grasping for the Buck.

The buck didn't just stop here; it moved in to a little bachelor apartment and bought new curtains and started getting the paper delivered. We LOVE it when someone outwits the Big Government. Whole cultures and genres have been based on this. And yet we sheep shear ourselves naked every year, like clockwork. And the government doesn't make it easy, oh no.

Forms. Forms, forms, forms. Death by a 1,000 paper cuts. A Brazil's worth of rain forest sliced and squished into enough 8405 LEs and W-2Js to blanket the Cayman Islands. A bureaucracy built up around getting the forms made and handed to a bureaucracy built around getting the forms out and back to a bureaucracy built around getting the forms in to a bureaucracy built around giving a paltry sum back to us so we can fall victim to a bureaucracy built around hauling a bunch of suckers in to have their lives broasted and served with Hollandaise sauce. All paid for with taxes.

Yes, we need the money. Because the government we've built is an insane machine which feeds on its own cogs and spinning belts and chains and grinds and sparks and spits out levers and winches and widgets and keeps spreading.

Abraham Lincoln – God bless his rail-splitting, gently- bigoted, too-tall soul – did not have this in mind when he let the idea of a direct tax of income based on property slip like a baying hound of Ares. The man just wanted his flagging government, which had been crippled by the phenomenal cost of a horrific war, to be buoyed up with a bit of funds from loyal citizens, particularly those plutocratic ravens who had swollen under their waistcoats with the carrion of the war.

In 1895, the Court had changed its tune, and declared such a tax to be unconstitutional in Pollock v. Farmer's Trust In fact, it held that the only taxes allowable were excise taxes. Then it began redefining what excise taxes were, and it found, conveniently, that more and more things could be called "excise taxes." Before it got around to completely reversing itself, the Sixteenth Amendment was passed.

The Congress shall have power to lay and collect taxes on incomes,from whatever source derived, without apportionment among the several States, and without regard to any census or enumeration.

Terrrrrific. That was a big step towards creating the sort of government we have today. Congress could not only hold up the People's Bank, but it didn't have to share its money and it didn't have to justify why it was taking it. This amendment came on the heels of the famous decisions of 1909 which made certain that corporations did not have to pay taxes.

And people waited until the 1950s to start worrying about complicity between government and business. For shame. By the time anyone noticed the machinery it was already chugging away and churning out millions of helpful products, from Levitt Homes to plutonium by-products to Spam to Silly Putty. All the results of the world famous tag team of Uncle Sam and Daddy Warbucks.

Taxes don't bloody have to be inevitable. Just beause they've been an inevitability in what we've come to accept as the civilized world for as long as we've cared to record and study history doesn't mean they're necessary. Even in America, millions of people figure out ways around the grim dragnet every year.

You might get arrested. Deported. Have your credit record scrapped. You'll never eat lunch in this town again.

Screw them. Bugger this country for the game of soldiers it is and find yourself a nice quiet island somewhere. Live as an expatriate in Europe. Expatriates don't pay taxes. Tour the jungles. Join the nomads. Find a temple. Seek enlightenment. Or just lie on the damned forms. Don't fill them out. Or claim you're seven people who are all war victims and former slaves. You're blind, married, and widowed. You're a Quaker.

Write an elegant letter to the Internal Revenue Service explaining why you feel you should not pay your taxes and what you do in your daily life that demonstrates your lack of dependence on government services. I understand the Amish and quite a few communes have gotten away with this. And what are the chances some tax-man is going to come knocking at your door to see if you REALLY own a butter churn, a solar power plant, and your own private Coast Guard?

Taxes are one thing we CAN cheat. Franklin might've just been making a wry joke, but his damned witticism has been hammered into the star-spangled skull of every American citizen for so long that now we really do think of them in the same ways.

You will depart this mortal coil. But not before you've paid your taxes.

GADZOOKS! What kind of SUCKERS are we? Sure, we're going to die! (Maybe) We might be on the Stairway to Heaven or the Highway to Hell, but there's no road signs on either path that say "STOP - PAY TOLL". The American Government might be the biggest monster in history, seething and growling and absorbing and snorting and chewing and shitting and mating and expanding and drooling all over the hemisphere, but it is NOT THE GRIM REAPER. The government might be the one to shoot you, but they aren't the ones that take your soul off to the Sunless Lands.

There's no inevitability to taxes. It's just an illusion that we've come to accept as real. Like English, Judeo-Christian morality, or bay leaves. So strike back, baby. Get on your motorcycle and rebel your way to glory.

I'll join you. Just as soon as my refund comes in and I can afford some food.

- Wheel without a Cause

"I owe much, I have nothing, the rest I leave to the poor."

Rabelais, 1553