Creative Taxes

Creative tax plans are ingenious

Our government has been getting pretty creative lately with finding new ways to impose taxes —only they don't call them that. (I did an article a few weeks ago pointing out that whether you call a cat a “cat” or a “feline,” it is still the same animal. It meows and eats cat food. It has baby cats and may or may not catch mice. But changing the name does not change the nature of the animal.)

So any method of collecting money from you or me and transferring it to a government entity is probably a tax. Whether it is called something else like “cap-and-trade” or a “medical device surcharge,” by my definition, it is a tax. So when congress passes a law which costs money but is going to be paid for from “other revenues,” you might smell a rat—not a cat—a rat.

And this may look like an article complaining about taxes, but it's not. It's an article complaining about tribute monies. By the way, you may have heard that people who complain about taxes can be divided into two classes: men and women.

The tax czar has my respect. There are some innovative plans being talked about, and those backdoor plans have to be tricky.

For instance, someone developed this idea and called it healthcare reform: Congress will tax health care to subsidize people to buy health care that new taxes and regulation will make more expensive. Whoever dreamed up that plan certainly has my admiration. I don't like it, but it is creative. I could think for a year and not come up with that.

My grandkids think I am creative. They think I can make anything. Well I ran into a brick wall when I tried to think of some tax programs that could equal that one in ingenuity. I tried not to disappoint my fans though.

By using the same logic, I came up with the short list of my own. (There never was a long list.) I assume that what happens in Vernal stays in Vernal and will not end up on the tax czar's list of Possibles. He doesn't need encouragement.
1. Impose a crop tax on sagebrush growers to help pay for zerascape projects.
2. Increase the use fees at national parks to pay for visit-your-national-parks advertising campaigns.
3. Collect a consumption tax on milk to pay for the cost of methane gas reduction research.
4. Tax cosmetic surgeries to help pay for Congressional health care insurance.
5. Collect revenues from pet owners to help pay for homeless animal shelters.
6. Tax automobile manufacturers to fund the down payments for new car buyers. Wait. Someone already thought of that.

Okay, I don't have what it takes. I wish I could say that that is because everything has already been thought of, but I expect to see innovations in the kinds and quantities of tribute monies increase at roughly the same rate as the national debt.

The problem is that I don't dream up tax schemes for a living. I just spend my living on tax schemes.