A very taxing rant
By Scott Parkinson

The demons that frighten me aren't the big and hairy ones that lumber across the landscape ripping up trees and leveling mountains. No, those are easy to see, and you can chose to stand and fight or run and hide, but at least you make a conscious acknowledgment of them as you pick your path. I know that Dole's proposed 15 percent tax cut, across the board, no holds barred, line up and get your gravy, mucho denaro for me-o, is really a veiled attempt to buy my vote and simultaneously reward all his rich buddies for being to loyal over these many-a-long year. I know that once the shock value has worn off and the voting booths have made their decisions, things will settle back down into the status quo--and that's when I get frightened.

Big promises and big noises never usher in big changes, that's just the music that is played at the Big Dance. No, big changes come crawling out of small, old, familiar holes--looking like what we thought lived in that hole, only just a little different. Something that seems familiar, yet oddly changed, but not enough so that you won't let it walk around with you. The big changes, the truly fundamental changes, happen this way and their seamless transition into our lives is what horrifies me. I'm frightened; piss-in-my-boot, run-screaming-from-the-house, blubbering-idiot scared of the little things--I live in terror of sales tax.

When I first was introduced to Sales Tax, he was a lot smaller and only a little annoying. I learned that to spend a quarter I had to spend a penny--pretty simple, at least to the mind of a five year old, and the paradigm was set. Spend money to spend money, seems so wrong when we look at it like that, but at five my reason was not quite so developed.

That was the last I thought about sales tax for a good 20 years or so. Time passed, I grew up and became a more potent consumer--very wise is the ways of her majesty Commerce--and I never even realized that Sales Tax was charging me a greater and greater rate to spend my money. Last year, there was a vote to fund a stadium, a vote the stadium lost. We still got the increased sales tax and the stadium anyway--Go Mariners, since I had to buy you that damn house--and I consciously realized that sales tax was higher. When I was introduced to him he only charged 4 percent to allow me to spend my money, now he was charging 8.7 percent. He had doubled his rates in 20 years, but I wasn't getting any more out of him.

Hey, I thought, who came up with this idea and why. I nosed about, annoying people at the State Revenue Department, and found out that sales tax is a relatively new idea. Washington has only had sales tax since the 1930's, and when it was introduced it was 2 percent. They got everybody to agree because they said it would go to build schools, roads, bridges, dams and other really big concrete things. I assume that Washington in the 1930's was a primitive place, lots of bears and yeti roaming about, and that the idea of paying a little to civilize the joint didn't seem all that radical.

They tamed the wild and made Washington safe for Bureaucracy. Rather than repeal, or at least reduce, the sales tax once the massive building projects were done they went the other direction, but in very small increments so nobody would angry. Hey, what's 2.2 percent when you're already paying 2 percent? What indeed.

2.2 percent became 3 percent became 3.5 percent became blah, blah, blah and now we have a sales tax of 8.7 percent. Whew, 8.7 is over four times the 2 that it all started at, and that's still just to spend our own money. And my state, probably yours too, finds a way to squander every last dime and then needs to come sniveling back to us asking for a little more. We ask what happened to everything they already took and they just shrug their shoulders and look sheepish, talk about how they are going to slash budgets and manage economies, then mooch another .1 percent off us.

So you save and save, because you're sick of funding $800 million stadiums and pork-barreled construction projects over school maintenance and health care. You get cheap with the dime and stingy with the penny, a'cause you gonna show 'em. Hold off, Mr. Man, not on my dime--that's what you say (at least that's what I said, and we really are so much alike--that's why I write to you). You've won this one, they gave you an out and you took it. Or did you?

I don't think so. Eventually you're going to have to spend money, if only for the basics, and that is where the inequity of sales tax rears its ugly head. So, now follow me here, the higher the sales tax climbs and the more we depend upon it in our society, the greater the burden upon the disadvantaged becomes for the rawest elements of life.

You see why I'm not frightened by nuclear winters and little children marching off to state-funded parochial schools carrying their new assault rifles--hell, those are wet dreams compared with the horror that has already been forced up our back sides. No, the real psycho mind-fuck is when you wake up after years and realize that the sweet little old lady down the block has been feasting on the souls of the damned. Radical declarations are just horn blasts to wake you long enough to vote for the prettiest tune; horror is the acceptance of institutions that are inherently unjust but casually regarded out of long familiarity.

Scott Parkinson wishes the tax measure had failed in Tampa, so the Buccaneers could have moved to San Antonio, leaving the Seahawks to fly the coop to Tampa Bay. And send the Mariners to Calgary and the Sonics to Albuquerque. Then Seattle would be a really cool town. But he'd still move away anyway.

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