These are my calculations. The USPS will lose $4.6 billion in 2014. There are 122 million households in the US. Just send every household a tax bill for $37.70. See how long we keep losing money to support the catalog and third class mail lobbies. The emotional reasons for keeping the post office will either be cost justified or go away. Reasons like: I like my postman, he’s really nice. Or, we meet at the post office every morning to get our mail, or I’d really miss those 25 catalogs I get every day.
Amtrak will need $1.62 billion for the next fiscal year. This will cover the $330 million in operating loss and the capital requirements for the fiscal year. That’s a $13.30 bill to every household.
In 2011, the IRS found 312,000 federal employees and retirees were delinquent on their federal income taxes, owing a total of $3.5 billion in unpaid federal income taxes. This represented an 11.5% increase in the number of federal employees failing to pay their taxes and a 2.9% increase in the total taxes owed to the Treasury by these public servants. The 2011 figures (the most recent year for which data is available) include 107,658 civilian federal employees owing more than $1 billion in unpaid taxes; 141,980 military and civilian retirees owing $2.1 billion in taxes; and 61,928 current military with $329 million in outstanding taxes. Why should government employee tax cheats continue to have the rest of us pay their salaries and benefits? Let’s bill every household $25 to kick in for government workers who don’t pay their taxes.
The next few I will itemize like the IRS would like and then we can add them and send one bill to every household for the lot.
Yup. Fort Hood Shooter Major Nidal Hasan continued to receive a federal salary, since the Military Code of Justice doesn’t allow a soldier to be suspended until they are found guilty. He made $53,000 in 2013 and a total of $278,000 since 2009, when he killed 13 and injured 32. The Army defended the payments, noting that they stopped once Hasan was convicted by a military jury finally rendered a guilty verdict last summer. “He is innocent until proven guilty,” Army spokesman Troy Rolan said.
The cost to build Healthcare.gov is estimated at $319 million so far, and we’ve all seen the results. The total amount to be spent nationally on publicity, marketing, and advertising will be at least $684 million (according to data compiled by the Associated Press from federal and state sources), meaning twice as much money will be spent on the PR campaign then the actual budget of building the website. So, we have a couple of billion to bill.
Here’s one where I’m all in.
If your wife is angry at you and you don’t want her to stay that way, you might want to avoid passing along the findings of this government study: Wives would find marriage more satisfying if they could calm down faster during arguments with their husbands, according to government-funded research.
The researchers observed 82 married couples. “The marriages that were the happiest were the ones in which the wives were able to calm down quickly during marital conflict,” explained one researcher. “When couples encounter strongly negative emotional events (e.g., anger arising from disagreements, disappointments, and perceived betrayals) they often fall into primitive, survival-oriented mode of interaction,” the study says. “In these interactions, spouses repeatedly attempt to justify their own behavior; criticize the other spouse in a harsh, contemptuous ways; make broad, negative attributions; and engage in unproductive cycles of demand-withdraw behaviors.”
The National Institutes for Health (NIH) spent $335,500 to conduct the study. So remember fellas, the next time your wife is mad at you, tell her the NIH says to keep calm and carry on!
This is it. I can’t go beyond this one.
$385,000 to study duck penises
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Yale University launched a project in 2005, with funding from the National Science Foundation (NSF), to study the oddities of the duck penis. In 2009, the school received an additional $385,000 to continue its work. The grant will expire in 2013. The key finding of the study was that he duck penis has a corkscrew-like shape. When asked by one news outlet why NSF decided to support an inquiry into the length of duck penises, a spokesperson responded, “Government funded grants for research have assisted in creating the bar code and Google.”
Let’s just lump these all together and call them a miscellaneous tax. The bill: Just $30 per household.
These taxes are for voting violations. Just like a traffic violation, the cop doesn’t care if you are on food stamps, you pay the ticket if you want to drive. If you want to continue to vote for people who do this sort of thing, you pay the ticket. No exceptions.
I’m betting we get better government, and soon.
