Friday, March 14, 2008

Tax chip


Bill Gates, here's a challenge for you. Save us from the annual drudgery of assembling all those wadded up receipts, ciphering all those confusing totals and saying all those prayers that we aren't gonna screw up on our tax statements this year.


There must be an easier way to fork over our money to the Federal government so that the Feds can send it off to wars, refund it back to us so we can jump start the economy by paying $4 a gallon for gas or even hand some of it over to the banks who screwed up by lending too much money to people who were never able to pay all that money back in the first place.

Seems like the computer geeks could come up with an efficient chip to implant into the ear lobes of all tax-paying Americans whereby the tiny techno-brain, complete with spy camera, would automatically record every time we wrote a check, signed a deposit slip or even hid cash under the picnic table in hopes the Feds wouldn't find out.

This chip could monitor and calculate all our financial dealings automatically and then figure out, through computer wizardry, how much we owe the Feds and how much we get back. It could take care of the whole matter while we go about our business using our early spring months more efficiently by trying to figure out how we lowly peons can earn more money so we can pay more to the government to take care of financial scandals precipitated by the high and mighty.

This trend for higher-ups to do really stupid things with other people's money seems to be getting more and more expensive all the time as we witness these three-piece suit creeps, who screwed up royally, getting paid bigger and bigger bucks for their severance packages----all thanks to their failures and because the company wants to diminish the financial pain they've inflicted on others by getting rid of them.

It seems to me that we're educating our young upside down these days. To heck with those old notions most of us pea-brains have collectively tried to follow to make this country great: failure's in; success is out.

I guess it's time for a new paradigm in education-----did I use that word right? Let's start training our young to emulate those who steal, cheat, lie and betray because that's what makes headlines and that's certainly what makes big money.

Now, back to the tax statements. Bill and I waded through the 2007 receipts and forms over the past month and turned them over to the accountant yesterday. As with every year, the tedious preparation was a headache, and the headache will not end until Bev checks and double checks every total, questions every expenditure and uses her calculator to see what this year's punishment for our few dollars adds up to for the Feds.

Like any good American who scratches her head more every day in wonderment, I still want to do my part to help the government---but I want a simpler, more user-friendly way to estimate my annual "good money after bad" Federal tithes. Just thinking about the amount of clutter we could all eliminate from our homes by not having to keep receipts for five years would be incentive enough to consider a paper-free method.

So, on this pre-Ides of March morning, I'm sending out the word to Bill Gates or any other computer geek who's willing to take on the challenge that it's time to come up with a better government mousetrap for smacking us every April and snatching up our money to be used for the "good" of the people.

And, when you come up with it, I'll be first in line for the chip implant.

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