By The Beachwood Sin Tax Bureau
Whenever a city, county, state and federal government faces seemingly insurmountable budget problems, our fearless leaders turn to sin taxes – namely boosting the assessment on booze, tobacco and sometimes gambling. In other words, fun. What’s next, condom taxes? Of course, if everybody stopped engaging in vices, sin taxes wouldn’t deliver anything to the bottom line. Makes us want to stop boozing just out of spite.
But we here at the Beachwood Sin Tax Bureau think immorality is in the eye of the beholder. We propose these new sin taxes.
* A new tax on bad taste, starting with music. Every purchase or download of a work on our list will be assessed at 5 percent. Six percent for Coldplay, Justin Bieber, Lana Del Rey and the Jonas Brothers.
* Overuse of memes, catchphrases and words of the moment shall be assessed at 3 percent to make up for the degradation to civil discourse that costs us productivity and damages our morale. Start with the destroyed word “hipster.”
* Visual and mental alienation and soul-drainage shall be assessed at 3 percent. Start with every blue-shirt, tan-pants combo.
* Stenographic reporters will be assessed a fee of .001 for every word of a story determined to have actually been “purchased” through fame and/or power in combination with intimidation, flattery or just plain laziness.
* Sales will no longer have to be completed to qualify for sales taxes; aggressively attempted sales are a drain on our economy and will thus become cause for collection via the new Form BS-1.
* A punctuation tax will now be assessed on overuse of punctuation marks in short supply and in need of protection, such as the umlaut and interrobang.
* A tax on fine print will be assessed according to the degree of fineness and the degree of lawyerly bullshit aimed at ripping people off.
* Similarly, “mumbo-jumbo” will be assessed according to the degree of mumboness and jumboness.
* Appointment tax: All cable television providers, utility service people and doctors will be assessed one dollar for every minute they are late for an appointment.
* Fact tax. All demonstrable lies will be now be assessed on a progressive scale starting at $100 per for those in the lowest tax bracket and scaling up accordingly.
* Electronic invitation tools such as Evite will now be subject to a new annoyance tax of 1% of all event expenses per person annoyed.
* Sequels and franchise extensions: All movie sequels and television franchise spinoffs and extensions shall be taxed at 1% of box office and advertising revenues yearly. The Cleveland Show will be taxed twice because it also falls under the subsection governing “completely unnecessary annoyances.”
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Comments welcome.
Posted on February 26, 2012