on taxing horses

In keeping with efforts to make up for taxes that are no longer being collected due to technological innovation, the U.S. Congress is debating a novel solution. Colloquially known as Horse Obsolescence Recovery Sequester Enactment, or H.O.R.S.E., HR-23.9947 (F) will require motor-vehicle-owners to pay a tax on each ‘horse’ of ‘horsepower’ their car or truck can muster.

“Not that long ago,” said Thorsten Hilddebrandt, congressman from New York (D), “one would have needed to employ scores of groomsmen and stable-boys to keep two hundred horses healthy, strong, and ready to go at a moment’s notice. With modern automobiles, however, all of those jobs and tax revenues vanish.” An apparently bipartisan issue, H.O.R.S.E. seems to be gaining traction on both sides of the aisle. “The tax burden must fall equally, no matter if people choose to drive a car or ride a horse,” said Barbara D. Geirhoff-Ferd, a Republican congresswoman from Florida. “Taking care of horses was a good, taxable job for many unskilled and lower-class individuals. America can no longer afford to let people who drive cars not shoulder their fair share of society’s burdens.”

Unsubstantiated rumors indicate that laws will soon be passed to steeply tax a wide array of cell-phone applications that take taxable jobs away from human calculators, map-makers, telephone-switchboard personnel, camera operators, board-game makers, notepad and pencil manufacturers, FM radio broadcasters, astronomers, filmmakers, and many others.

americanifesto / JPR / whorphan / 場黑

$7 a day

Nanjing – On an otherwise nondescript Wednesday morning earlier this year, 13 year-old Chinese national Zhou Fu Shi changed into a set of worn coveralls and headed to work. Earning the equivalent of seventy U.S. cents an hour, and working ten-hour-long days, Miss Zhou makes roughly seven (7) dollars a day fabricating cellphones and other electrical devices for export to markets in the Europe and America. “I used to spend summers working in my grandparent's rice paddies or tending the local communal forests and gardens with friends from school,” Fu Shi said while sprinting to the bathroom during her single, ten- minute-long daily break. “Things were better then, I think. It is hard to remember, even though it was not that long ago, but I think that despite having less physical money in hand, I was creating bonds with the land, with my family, and with the people in my community.” We continued to speak with Miss Zhou on her way home from work until a pair of censors overtook us, demanding to see our passports and grilling us about our involvement with an innocent factory girl. By the time the censors had left (taking many of our yuan with them), our new friend had vanished into an enormous tenement-housing block.

“I don't want to work, but the state forces me to work,” Fu Shi was saying just before the censors' arrival. “I don't want to work because I don't really need to buy anything. I see the new advertisements, I listen to them on the radio and television, but I don't need any of those useless things. And speaking of useless, who is buying all of the mobile telephones that my fellow workers and I are making? A friend of mine has an illegal, uncensored Internet connection, and he and I were looking up prices for the things that we make, and the phone we are making right now costs almost two hundred American dollars. Two hundred dollars? I assembled one hundred models after lunch today, for which I was paid roughly three dollars and fifty cents. Last week, when a friend was blinded at work by corrosive gases, she was fired, and is now very, very poor. Is there any justice in this world? Somewhere, someone is making a lot of money on the backs my factory-sisters and me.”

Upon reading our story, two American politicians – a Senator and a Congressperson, who both asked to remain anonymous – contacted us, saying derisively that the girls in our story should be happy that they have jobs at all, let alone paying jobs, and that they should see those jobs as stepping-stones of opportunity, and not worry so much about how much they might be getting paid right now, or who might be profiting immensely from their hard and continuous labor.

場黑麥 mentiri factorem fecit