Admiring Creativity (not) I always admire creativity and it would be remiss of me to not give a nod to some of the most obnoxious yet creative ways some politicians have cooked up to tax their citizens out of yet more of their hard earned money. Our esteemed governor, Jon Corzine, while a prolific taxer, hasnt mastered the art of Creative Taxation. He just raises sales tax and tolls and stuff like that. Booorrringg!! Look at our neighboring state, Michael Bloomberg who comes up with Creative Taxation. He wants to charge a six cent tax on plastic shopping bags. Every shopping bag you walk out with at the grocery will cost you six cents. I wonder how they will enforce this. Will the city have to hire an army of bag counters, who will stand at the exit of supermarkets, etc. and count bags?
"So, what do you do for a living?"
" I am a B.C., a bag counter, and i belong to Local Union of Bag Counters NO 168. No one gets past me- yesterday I counted 1, 145 bags!"
And here is another idea, which aside from its creativity (ten points) also scores high on the obnoxiousness scale (an easy ten points) and is also extremely dangerous to our civic liberties
and in fact, although I am no lawyer, I cannot imagine how this can be legal.
Someone in Seattle is proposing a new idea - they want to tax people on the miles they drive. every car will get a sort of GPS type device installed in their vehicle, and they will count how many miles you drive and tax you per mile. If this is not the most horrific idea that impinges on personal liberty to come and go, I dont know what is. This is so much worse than anything the KGB could ever come up with. Where are we headed as a country???
6 Comments:
The bag law could be enfored by counting how many bags a retailer buys and then taxing that amount.It would require the wholesaler to submit their customer list.Yuck.Or they would make the manufacturer charge the to be passed on tax.As far as mileage tax they would just make a yearly odometer reading and tax it.
A real creative revenue idea would be to cut waste.so far I've never heard of anyone propsing such an idea.
BTW how is your book coming along?
wow - cutting spending? what a novel idea! Do you know how much money the govt spends on pensions for idiots who worked in congress for a couple of terms, etc.?
and my book? thanks for asking. I sent it to four publishers, two said no, two havent gotten back to me (yet). I dont know what I will do next.
You already pay a mileage tax of sorts in the form of gasoline taxes.
The advantage of a mileage tax that you're describing is that I would pay the same rate for my old shmatte of a minivan as someone with a Prius.
But the gov't is usually in favor of disincentivizing (if that's a word) gas-guzzling, so this proposal doesn't seem to make sense.
what kinda book?
David-
a historical novel about a young girl living in Europe before the war. (based on my grandmother's childhood)It is very nicely written, (I think) warm and cozy, with an emphasis on how little those kids had in the way of toys and other basic stuff we take for granted nowadays, yet they were very happy content.
why do you ask?
It's a childrens book?
Sounds interesting..
cuz I've been considering publishing something myself..
Post a Comment
<< Home