I, for one, am tired of hearing all the cries about the sky falling. Let’s be open and admit that deficits are a fact of life and are perfectly harmless. And once we have accepted that fact, we can take the next logical step and eliminate the federal income tax.
Well, why not? According to the IRS’s web site, last years’ tax revenues were $2.2 trillion. If the government doesn’t get any tax revenue in fiscal ‘09, the deficit will simply increase from $1.6 trillion to $3.8 trillion — a little over double.
The simple fact is that the government doesn’t need any money from us. It makes its own. The president simply calls up the head of the currency printing office and says, “Hey, Marbuk, this is Barack. Run us off another trillion, will you?” Of course, you wouldn’t want to put all those thousands of IRS employees on the street, but they can be segued into the new Dept. of Health Care. And I can’t see that the employees will mind. I mean, pushing paper is pushing paper, right?
Now, here’s where my idea gets good. I wouldn’t let things float along with no income tax for a year or two — just to make sure everything was running okay. The deficit will increase by a two or three trillion each year, but no one will even notice. Then the government should start doling out money to everyone. I’m not talking about any measly $250 checks, either. I mean a cool million dollars to everyone in the country. There are 350 million of us in the U.S. A million each would be only $350 trillion. So the deficit gets into the quadrillions - we can learn to say quadrillion as easily as we learned to say trillion. (“Hey, Marbuk. This is Barack again ...”)
What about inflation, you ask? Well, yeah, we’ll have a little inflation - let’s say 100 percent a year. But here’s how we’ll solve that: Every spring when we go to Daylight Savings Time, everyone will take a Magic Marker and add a zero to the right of the denomination of all the bills they own. Tens will become hundreds, hundreds will become thousands, It’s as simple as that. Furthermore, China will continue to peg its currency to ours so the price of Chinese goods won’t change. In 2020, the price of a typical computer (which by then will be a 20 petabyte laptop with eight terabytes of RAM, 3-D display and optional aromatherapy module) will still cost only $600.
Look for my “Willis Cook for President” campaign headquarters to open soon. Sarah and I would appreciate your support.
Willis Cook is a retired electrical engineer who was born in New Orleans and grew up in the Mississippi Delta. He lives in Franklin County.
