Bathroom Monologue: No Taxation

At age 11, John proposed a tax plan where you only paid for what services you wanted...

For a while they institutionalized a “get what you pay for” system. It was supreme democracy. On your taxes everything was itemized. Don’t want to support deadbeats? You don’t pay for welfare. Who wants to build schools in Afghanistan? Cut that.

There was a surprising number of people who thought they could get by without police. Naturally you had minorities who were historically abused by them anyway, but there were many middle class and upscale people who didn’t check the box. There wasn’t going to be a sign on your lawn that you didn’t get 9-1-1 service, so nobody would know your house was vulnerable to robbery. The appearance of protection should have remained the same.

Hacktivists made a list. The same kind of people who, in the name of privacy issues, published whenever somebody said they were leaving home via Facebook or Twitter, got ahold of tax lists. There was an app to modify Google Maps (called “CopMap”) so that you could see all the unpoliced homes colored in ironic blue.

Robberies went up. They also went down. Statisticians still debate over the charts. Homes were more likely to be targeted for vandalism within 72 hours of a CopMap posting in most major east and west coast cities. Decreases in crime stats were pegged to all the people who realized nobody would come if they called for help; why report it when no one cared? And the complexity of the debate over drops in police misbehavior and brutality reports remains staggering.

It was worse for the people who paid. They expected all the same services. In fact, they expected better than the same, because a) they’d elected to pay, and b) people always over-expect from the government. But police departments tanked. They couldn’t fix vehicles or afford overtime. They couldn’t afford half-staff and there were major layoffs. Police Unions went on strike, but against who? Federal, state and city governments did not have the money they wanted.

Applications for security guards and security-related jobs shot up by 1,100% in the first year.

The people who paid actually didn’t get what they paid for, because they didn’t have enough money to support the system. Most systems had already malfunctioned on their meager fully-taxed budgets. On fraction-taxed budgets?

Gun sales went up, for personal and home defense. The profligation of firearms was not the deterrent the NRA wanted it to be. While there weren’t many police to take reports, people who arrived at ERs for “self-inflicted” or “accidental” gun wounds skyrocketed. They were furious to learn that funding for ERs had been consolidated under one of the boxes they hadn’t checked, and that most hospitals were no longer honoring uninsured emergency walk-ins.

The ER fiasco got a lot of attention. So did the collapse of the single-payer insurance system, which we’d only established recently. Only the military maintained operations, built on years of doing outrageous things with outrageously less money than you thought they were getting. So many things went awry that the police became a secondary issue, because they were who you called when something else broke.

The Weisman/Gladhart ticket rode to the presidency on the first-ever successful campaign of tax increases. They proposed them as small and strategic. They promised parts of tax forms would still be itemized. They lied. They had to.