Spending other people’s money is something he does a great deal of, given the data I have uncovered detailing his administration’s expenditures over the past ten years. The economy was in trouble, a decade and a half ago. It is now stuttering toward total collapse. The legislation pending in Jefferson’s Assembly involves a restructuring of Jefferson’s tax codes, which have been modified five thousand, one hundred eighty-seven times since Gifre Zeloc came to power. These alterations, which have placed a disproportionately large tax burden on Jefferson’s middle-class business owners, white-collar workers, and agricultural producers, have resulted in widespread bankruptcies, both personal and entrepreneurial.
I do not understand the strategy whereby businesses are stripped of profits and incomes are taxed into “levels of parity” which force closure of factories and retail outlets, throwing more people out of work and swelling the ranks of the unemployed, who must then be fed and housed via public subsidies. There are, at present, too few people gainfully employed to provide the tax base necessary to continue the public subsidy programs already in place. If drastic measures to undo the damage to private-sector business are not undertaken, I project economic collapse in approximately ten point three years. Unless tax relief and capital investments are granted to Jefferson’s agricultural producers, I foresee starvation conditions within six point nine years.
Taken together, the indicators are grim.
The legislation due to be voted upon later today addresses this serious situation, but not in a way that is likely to prove effective. It proposes neither tax relief nor capital investments in Jefferson’s agricultural future. It reads, instead, like the ranting of a madman:
“Insofar as monopolistic agricultural interests have placed the public welfare in jeopardy, through refusals to provide the basic subsistence provisioning required to maintain health and public safety, the Assembly of Jefferson hereby establishes a code of tax rules to ensure fair distribution of critical food supplies currently hoarded by agricultural producers; establishes urgently required price caps to regulate the amount lawfully chargeable for wholesale and retail sale of agricultural products, which are necessary to end socially unjust practices perpetrated upon a helpless public by sole-source producers; and provides a framework by which perpetrators of social injustice will be tried and punished, including reparations payable for any and all damage caused to the public welfare by said unlawful practices.
“The following are hereby outlawed and made punishable by incarceration in a planetary security facility and by immediate confiscation of all private holdings of the guilty parties, said holdings to be redistributed fairly to the public upon conviction for tax evasion or upon procurement of evidence of prohibited activity. Prohibited practices include: price gouging above government-mandated, maximum allowable market prices for agricultural products; and hoarding of agricultural products to avoid participation in legally mandated, socially just distribution systems.
“To ensure the continuing availability of critical food supplies, to prevent the loss of critical farm labor, and to remunerate the people of Jefferson for decades of monopolistic price-fixing, widespread environmental damage, and the wanton destruction of shared resources, the Assembly of Jefferson hereby establishes a new Populist Support Farm system of government-run collectives. All agricultural operators are hereby required to donate no fewer than fifty hours per week of labor on a PSF collective as their fair share of the burden necessary to feed the burgeoning urban population. The produce, grain, and meat provided from these collectives will be distributed at no charge to recipients of public subsistence allotments, thus easing the burden on Jefferson’s neediest families while providing high-quality foods to the economically disadvantaged.”
The bill’s thirteen-hundred provisions continue in much the same vein. This “societal fairness plan” for feeding the unemployed is nothing less than insanity. It ensures massive public support for POPPA, given the urban population that will begin receiving food at no cost to themselves, but it will destroy the economic system governing sale of the remaining food produced on privately held acreage. The government is the largest market segment currently purchasing food from those farms. If the PSF legislation goes through, the loss in farm income will send a downward economic spiral through the entire food industry, sending it into bankruptcy that will spread from producers to packers to suppliers and shippers and retail outlets. The PSF plan will literally send Jefferson headlong down an unstoppable road to starvation.
The secondary effect seems almost paltry, by comparison. In exchange for backbreaking labor conducted without pay or proper equipment, using inferior seed, and banned from using the only effective chemicals necessary to bring in a healthy, edible crop, Populist Support Farm system workers will earn a grudging promise that they won’t be jailed for their many supposed crimes against the people.
Most of these, evidently, are crimes committed by the mere act of growing food, while others consist of promulgation of a creed of intolerance to anything or anyone in disagreement with programs developed to ensure public well-being. These programs include such provisions as the confiscation of land currently underway, which was initiated three point eight years ago. Some of the “environmentally sabotaged land” is forcibly returned to its “pristine, natural state,” a process which appears to be seeding the soil with toxic substances that kill every Terran life form growing from it, in order to allow the return of indigenous species.
The threat of jail appears to be the only effective means POPPA has found to induce “voluntary” compliance with such edicts, since no rational person would support them. It would seem that Jefferson’s cities are inhabited by millions of irrational people, all of whom are indulging in behaviors that would shut a Bolo down, if a Bolo exhibited such wildly illogical thought processes or actions. I find myself wondering if humanity would be better off, if each human being were equipped with its own biological version of the Resartus Protocols?
That is a question I am not designed to answer.
Chapter Seventeen
I
When a knock sounded at her office door, Kafari looked up to find a teen-aged boy dressed in a courier service uniform. “Mrs. Khrustinova?”
“Yes.”
“A letter for you, ma’am.”
He handed over an old-fashioned, formal paper envelope, then left before she could reach for her purse to give him a tip. She turned her attention to the envelope, which she opened to find a beautiful invitation card. The inscription bought a smile to her face.