The Tax You Love to Pay (standard:Editorials, 1853 words)
Author: GXD	Added: Jul 31 2007	Views/Reads: 3159/2056	Story vote: 0.00 (0 votes)
Suppose you could choose precisely where each and every penny of your sales tax goes, and specify how it is to be spent. Well, now you can!

THE TAX YOU LOVE TO PAY 

About thirty years ago, when taxes were relatively low and a hundred
dollars a week was considered a pretty good salary, I proposed this 
procedure for creating revenue for funding all sorts of useful things, 
from social security to repairing potholes in side streets.  The 
suggestion fell on deaf ears.  Today, the situation is a little 
different, and perhaps some people out there might find some merit in 
the idea.  I've presented a few details here, but you may want to 
alter, improve, upgrade, polish, refine, expand, develop, or otherwise 
enhance and simplify the concept, so it can be put to use in the best 
of human interests. 

To begin with, here is what you see:  As you leave the drugstore with
some shaving cream and toothpaste, the clerk tears a receipt out of the 
register and puts it in your bag.  The receipt shows that 14 cents in 
tax was collected on your purchases.  Immediately, you take out your 
pencil and look on the back of the receipt.  Right there, in small, but 
legible print it says: 

[ ]repair of local streets 

[ ]support U.N. representative Koch 

[ ]state school program - teachers' raise 

[ ]anti-terrorist fund (world) 

[ ]re-open local playground; new paving under swings 

and you check the issue (or two) dearest to your heart.  Fourteen cents
will go into that fund.  Next to you, your neighbor has gotten a 
similar receipt.  Everything it says is different, and she checks off 
something else.  You both drop the receipts in a collection box near 
the register and forget about it.  But your money is already on its 
way, doing something useful and positive - something  YOU  want done to 
improve your society, your world. 

How does this happen: what is behind the scenes?  Where do the issues
arise? How much of your purchase goes to support them?  You might 
notice that the front of your receipt lists only the total amount of 
your purchase, plus any other current taxes (which, of course, could be 
removed if you really wanted to). 

Let's first track down that receipt and see what happens to your "vote".
First, an employee of the special branch of the postal service collects 
the receipts and deposits them in the same way as mail is collected and 
deposited today.  At fixed hours, the receipts are picked up at the 
collection boxes and brought to a local center for processing.  Tens of 
thousands of marked receipts go into the sorting equipment, which turns 
them the right way, feeds them to the scanner, and records your "vote". 


Simultaneously, a scanner underneath detects the amount on the face of
the receipt.  The information goes into a processing computer at the 
post office which determines whether you checked a "local" box (rated 
at 2%), a "county" box (rated at 1%), a "state" box (rated at 5%), a 
"national" box (rated at 3%) or a "world" box (rated at 2%).  It 
computes that percentage of the price you paid, picks up the store 
identification (imprinted in the receipt using an ultraviolet 
detectable ink), scans for evidence of forged receipts and transmits 
the information package electronically to the agency which originated 
the item you checked: the local town council computer, the county 
computer, the state computer, the national computer, the U.N. data 
center, etc. 

Each time a receipt carries the box "fix potholes in local streets" and
that box has been checked, a few pennies get credited to that budget.  
When the budgeted amount has been reached, the computer makes a number 
of preprogrammed choices: it dumps the overflow into a "General Fund", 
which can then be drawn on to complete missing funds for other 
essential projects which have received less support (like "clean out 
the sewers").  It notifies the register-tape machine to stop including 
the fulfilled item on the back of the register tape rolls which it has 
been printing.  It notifies the highway maintenance office that "Public 


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