It’s Tax Day, which is a bummer. Taxes are a bummer. Can they do good things? Sure. But anytime somebody silently takes money from you for a year and then makes a big deal about giving a portion of it back if you hand over all sorts of personal information, and that somebody has the most lethal weapons in the world at their disposal, it’s a rough situation. So, here are a few suggestions to make Tax Day better:
Add a Pitch Clock
We are at the onset of the best baseball season in a long, long time. What’s responsible? In large part, the pitch clock. It’s a little bit uncomfortable to acknowledge this—it’s like admitting World War II had more to do with pulling us out of the Great Depression than the New Deal did—but it’s the truth. Could it have the same effect on taxes? There’s only one way to find out.
Kill Osama Bin Laden
You know what people like? Osama Bin Laden’s death. No single event has gotten America more collectively amped these last fifteen years than the killing of the man responsible for the attacks on September 11th. If the federal government figured out a way to do this every Tax Day, it would not only rock but would also go a long way towards showing why we pay the big bucks.
Make a European Talk to the Class
Perspective can go a long way, and if Tax Day was always accompanied by well-off Europeans talking about how high their taxes are while their standard of living sits comparably to readers of this blog, we all might feel a little better about our situation. Make the German kid do show and tell with his tax return, then ask him how cool his TV is (it isn’t gonna be that cool).
Don’t Make a Second Season
You want to make people love something? Leave them wanting more. As countless cult classics have shown us, the earlier you cut off a television show, the less chance there is anyone could get tired of it. Honestly, this really would work with taxes, but I guess it would sort of defeat the purpose.
Institute a 50/50 Raffle
Hear me out: What if instead of each of us getting our refund, the IRS just put all that money into a pot and gave us raffle tickets in proportion to how much cash we would’ve gotten? Given the average tax refund is roughly $3,000 and there are more than one hundred million taxpayers out there, this would do absolutely nothing for the national debt, but somebody would get $150 billion and we’d all get to look at those fun little tickets for a few days while we waited for the results to be announced.
