[0139] (86 lines) Lippard.Multics 02/19/87  1712.2 mst Thu misc
Subject:  Dave Barry on taxes
From: gm@trsvax
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Date: 20 Apr 86 22:33:00 GMT

		      	It's Tax Time

           Words of wisdom on how to fill out your tax forms

				     -By Dave Barry

    Here it is again, income-tax time, and I imagine many of you readers,
especially the ones with smaller brains, are eagerly awaiting my annual
tax-advice column.  Those of you who were fortunate enough to read last year's
column no doubt recall that I advised you to cheat, on the grounds that by
reducing the amount of money you gave the government, you'd be supporting
President Reagan in his program to reduce government spending.  I'm proud to
report that many of you went all out to support the President, and I'm sure
he'd thank you personally if the Secret Service allowed him to visit federal
prisons.
    But this year we have an entirely new plan, taxwise.  This year, President
Reagan needs all the money he can get, because he was going over the figures
recently with his aides, Huey, Dewey and Louie, and they noticed that the
government was going to be short by something like $200 billion.  "Gosh,"
chuckled the president, "That's even bigger than those humongous deficits the
Democrats used to run up when I went around making fun of them on the radio!
Why, for all the difference I've made in the past two years, the nation might
just as well have had a Ted Kennedy as president!  Or a toaster!" Then they
all had a good laugh and decided to jack up taxes.  The other option, of
course, was to cut government spending, but they rejected that because they
have already cut spending to the bone in the form of raising it by about $100
billion a year.
    The Democrats are happy as clams about raising taxes.  The Democrats
believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have
created the Internal Revenue Service.  So finally, after two years of
bickering, the president and the Democrats are beginning to see eye to eye on
the importance of taking money away from the public.  Recently, for example,
the Democrats supported the president's plan to have a new gasoline tax under
which the government will take $50 billion from motorists such as yourself.
This will create jobs.  See, if you were allowed to keep the money, you
wouldn't create jobs with it.  You'd just throw it into the bushes or
something.  But the government will spend it, thereby creating jobs.  In this
case the $50 billion on a major road-repair program, including several million
dollars for highway construction signs that say:

		CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER

    and the United State Department of Transportation are pleased to
    announce that for the next 86.8 miles there will be federal traffic
    cones all over the place and hundreds of friends and relatives of a
    contractor who contributed to the campaign of

		CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER

    standing around with red flags and directing traffic so casually that
    they may occasionally wave your car right into an oncoming tractor-
    trailer loaded with propane gas, so we regret this inconvenience but as 

		CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER

    pointed out when he flew in by federal helicopter to make a speech
    taking credit for this $364.7 million highway-repair project, we cannot
    allow our nation's highways to deteriorate, especially the ones that
    provide access to land owned by 

		CONGRESSMAN ROBERT "BOB" LUNGER

						      Thank you.


    But the $50 billion won't be nearly enough to allow Congress to create
jobs on the scale it would like.  And on top of that, President Reagan needs
money to buy additional exploding devices to defend you with.  So what can
you, the ordinary taxpayer, do to help?
    Here's what: this year, when you prepare you income tax return, I want you
to lie in the government's favor.  I want you to declare more income than you
actually received, and I want you to deliberately fail to report large numbers
of legitimate deductions.
    Some of you will be caught, of course.  Some of you may be called in to
face IRS audits.  You may even be forced to accept a large refund, thus
depriving the government of money it could have used for your benefit.  These
risks are unavoidable, but they can be minimized if a few of us continue to
cheat, so the IRS will be less likely to see any particular pattern.  I'm
willing to volunteer to be one of the few.  It's a dirty job, but somebody has
to do it.

  [Copyright 1985 Knight-Ridder News Service. Reprinted with permission]
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