Tax Time is Quality Time

Income Tax Returns: The most imaginative fiction being written today.

                                     Herman Wouk

          Everybody has to pay less of it than you do but they can afford to pay it more than you can. It isn’t fair, it isn’t right, and it isn’t done and sent in to the IRS yet.

          Income taxes are the price we pay so the government will leave us alone and go rob someone else. Most people operate on the theory that if they pay their taxes and don’t quibble too much about the amount, the people in baggy suits with bad haircuts will move on to another citizen and put a bigger financial squeeze on them.

          This is true, up to a point. We have the advantage in our country of not being drug out and shot for non payment of taxes. The worst we face would be a long prison term and the confiscation of everything we own should we balk at paying what is considered our fair share.

Am I writing my manifesto?

          I’m not sitting in a cabin in the back woods as I write this. As a matter of fact, I am all for paying your share of the tax load when the time comes.    We do get some value for our money. Our military isn’t going to fund itself – and by the looks of things -- Congress isn’t going to fund it either.          When I write my yearly tax check, I do so imagining that I am paying for a Marine Corps Rifleman’s salary and benefits. If I thought I was funding foreign aid for Turkey, I’d be physically ill.

          Having said that, we should all go out and pay our taxes, I have to add that I think we would have to pay a lot less of them if we as a nation didn’t throw so much moola around and away.

          Take the billion dollars in cash that conveniently disappeared in Iraq. It was so much money that the pallets of one hundred dollar bills had to be transported in a C-130 transport. The intent was to “jump start” the war-torn (war torn by us, I might add) economy. It didn’t exactly work and now the money is missing in action.

          As you probably know, I’m a life-long pilot, aviation buff, and NASA supporter to the point of wonkiness. I grew up during the moon mission days and even met a few of those astronauts when I was a kid. I delivered John Glenn’s underwear to his hotel room for goodness sakes.

          Still, I think NASA is totally on the wrong track and is burning money like nobody’s business. The International Space Station is a great example. The original intent of the station was to be a platform where scientific, zero-gee experiments could take place. You’ve probably seen some of the TV shows talking about this.

          The ISS was envisioned as a stepping stone to interplanetary exploration. What it has become is a place where no science takes place that is used for multi billionaires to use as a vacation dacha, courtesy of the former Soviets. There have been so many set backs, gaffes, outright onboard fires and the like that the ISS is now a survival station for whoever happens to be doing their in-space tour. Almost no science is being done up there. This is because the whole concept was obsolete before the first part of it was launched.

          The Man (and probably Woman) on Mars goal set by Bush is laudable, but why do we have to send people to do what a relatively cheap robot can do better? I know that the movies have shown us how sexy alien females can be right about the time their eggs ripen, but face it, all of our space exploration in the near future is really getting done by robots and radio telescopes. Robots don’t drink, eat, breathe oxygen, long for home, poop, pee, sleep, or wear diapers and try to kill each other.

          The United States can’t be all things to all people. Darfur is a terrible thing but it isn’t our fault. The economy of Turkey is a terrible thing, but it isn’t our fault. Astronauts in diapers are potentially terrible as they cruise our interstate highway system in search of revenge, but really, it isn’t our fault.

          New Orleans was totally destroyed almost two years ago and most of the people forced out of their homes are still out of their homes. Most of the rebuilding has yet to start – or to even be funded. That is our fault.

          If we can’t spend the money and time necessary to rebuild one of our finest cities after it is destroyed, what are we doing paying for space vacation homes for billionaires?