As I interpret this statement, Roscoe, by using the word “voluntary,” is saying that even though your government finds itself in serious financial trouble owing to the fact that every time an Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Something changes offices, he spends more on new drapes than your whole house is worth, the IRS does not require you to send in extra money, beyond what you actually owe. No sir. You also are allowed to send in jewelry, stocks, canned goods, or clothing in good condition. Roscoe is a 42
regular.
Everything else about the tax form is different this year, but it shouldn’t be too much trouble as long as you avoid Common Taxpayer Errors. “For example,” reminds IRS Helpful Hint Division Chief Rexford Pooch, Jr., “taxpayers who make everything up should use numbers that sound sort of accurate, such as $3,847.62, rather than obvious fictions like $4,000. Also, we generally give much closer scrutiny to a return where the taxpayer gives a name such as Nick ‘The Weasel’ Testosterone.”
With those tips in mind, let’s look at some typical tax cases, and see how they would be handled under the new tax code. TAX CASE ONE: Mrs. Jones, a 7 1—year-old widow living on social security with no other income, is sound asleep, one night when she has an incredibly vivid dream in which her son dies in an automobile crash in California. Suddenly, she is awakened by the telephone; it is a member of the California Highway Patrol, calling to remind her that she does not have a son. Stunned, she suffers a fatal heart attack.
QUESTION: Does Mrs. Jones still have to file a tax return? ANSWER: Yes. Don’t be an idiot. She should use Form DPFS-65, “Dead Person Filing Singly,” which she can obtain at any of the two nationwide IRS Taxpayer Assistance Centers during their normal working hour.
TAX CASE TWO: Mr. and Mrs. Smith, both 32, are a working couple with two dependent children and a combined gross net abstracted income of $27,000. During the first fiscal segment of the 1984 calendar year, they received IRS Form YAFN-12, notifying them that according to the federal computer, they owe $179 billion in taxes. They have a good laugh over this and show the notice to their friends, thinking that it is such an obvious mistake that the IRS will correct it right away and they might even get their names in the newspaper as the victims of a typical humorous government bonehead computer bungle.
QUESTION: Can the Smiths deduct the cost of the snake-related injuries they suffered when they were fleeing the federal dogs through the wilderness? ANSWER: They may deduct 61 percent of the base presumptive adjusted mean allocated cost that is greater than, but not exceeding, $1,575, provided they kept accurate records showing they made a reasonable effort to save little Tina’s ear. Except in states whose names consist of two words.
TAX CASE THREE: Mr. A. Pemberton Trammel Snipe-Treadwater IV has established a trust fund for his six children under which each of them, upon reaching the age of 21, will receive a subcontinent. One afternoon while preparing to lash a servant, Mr. Snipe-Treadwater has a vague recollection that in 1980—or perhaps it was in 1978, he is not sure—he might have paid some taxes.
QUESTION: What should Mr. Snipe-Treadwater do? ANSWER: He should immediately summon his various senators and congressmen to soothe his brow with damp compresses until he can be named ambassador to France.
Yup The Establishment
Obviously, we—and when I say “we,” i mean people who no longer laugh at the concept of hemorrhoids—need to come up with some kind of plan for dealing with the yuppies. In a moment I’ll explain my personal proposal, which is that we draft them, but first let me give you some background.
If you’ve been reading the trend sections of your weekly news magazines, you know that “yuppies” are a new breed of serious, clean-cut, ambitious, career-oriented young person that probably resulted from all that atomic testing. They wear dark, natural-fiber, businesslike clothing even when nobody they know has died. In college, they major in Business Administration. if, to meet certain academic requirements, they have to take a liberal-arts course, they take Business Poetry.
In short, yuppies are running around behaving as if they were real grown-ups, and they are doing it at an age when persons of my generation were still playing Beatles records backwards and actively experimenting to determine what happens when you drink a whole bottle of cough syrup.
NOTE TO IMPRESSIONABLE YOUNG READERS: Don’t bother. All that happens is you feel like you could never, ever cough again, even if Professional torturers armed with X-acto knives ordered you to, then you develop this intense, 10-to-12-hour interest in individual carpet fibers. So it’s not worth it, plus I understand the manufacturers have done something wimpy to the formulas.
What bothers me about the yuppies is, they’re destroying the normal social order, which is that people are supposed to start out as wild-eyed radicals, and then gradually, over time, develop gum disease and become conservatives.
This has always been the system. A good example is Franklin Roosevelt, who when he was alive was considered extremely liberal, but now is constantly being quoted by Ronald Reagan. Or take the Russian leaders. When they were young, they’d pull any kind of crazy stunt, kill the czar, anything, but now they mostly just lie around in state.
So I say the yuppies represent a threat to society as we know it, and I say we need to do something about them. One possibility would be to simply wait until they reproduce, on the theory that they’ll give their children the finest clothing and toys and designer educations, and their children will of course grow up to absolutely loathe everything their parents stand for and thus become defiant, ill-dressed, unwashed, unkempt, violently antiestablishment drug addicts, and society will return to normal. The problem here is that yuppies have a very low birth rate, because apparently they have to go to Aspen to mate.
So we’ll have to draft them. Not into the Armed Forces, of course; they’d all make colonel in about a week, plus they’d be useless in an actual war, whapping at the enemy with briefcases. Likewise we cannot put them in the Peace Corps, as they would cause no end of ill will abroad, crouching among the residents of some poverty-racked village in, say, Somalia, and attempting to demonstrate the water-powered Cuisinart.
No, what we need for the yuppies is a national Lighten Up Corps. First they’d go through basic training, where a harsh drill sergeant would force them to engage in pointless nonproductive activities, such as eating moon pies and watching “Days of Our Lives.” Then they’d each have to serve two years in a job that offered no opportunity whatsoever for career advancement, such as:
–bumper-car repairman; —gum-wad remover; —random street lunatic; —bus-station urinal maintenance person; —lieutenant governor; —owner of a roadside attraction such as “World’s Largest All-Snake Orchestra.”
During their time of service in the Lighten Up Corps, the Yuppies would of course be required to wear neon-yellow polyester jumpsuits with the name “Earl” embroidered over the breast pocket.
Pain And Suffering
As an american, you are very fortunate to live in a country (America) where you have many legal rights. Bales of rights. And new ones are being discovered all the time, such as the right to make a right turn on a red light.
This doesn’t mean you can do just anything. For example, you can’t shout “FIRE!” in a crowded theater. Even if there is a fire, you can’t shout it. A union worker has to shout it. But you can—I know this, because you always sit right behind me—clear your throat every 15 seconds all the way through an entire movie, and finally, at the exact moment of greatest on-screen drama, hawk up a gob the size of a golf ball. Nobody can stop you. It’s your right.