Your friendly neighborhood columnist was once taken to task for, no, not comparing himself to Art Spiegelman’s famous crucified Easter Bunny dressed up as a suit-wearing and bespectacled American taxpayer on the cover of The New Yorker. (That was back in 1995, when the celestial forces conspired to align Holy Saturday and Tax Day.) And, no, not for suggesting the image was funny or even a good idea. But merely for daring to say he had been put in mind of it.
“Government do take a bite, don’t she,” Nicolas Cage as a greased and miserable working stiff is laughingly told as he collects his paycheck in the Coen brothers’ “Raising Arizona.” This year, what seems a pathological exercise in unfairness was again in head-spinning alliance — with Patriots Day, when New Englanders like to pretend their 1776 tax revolt did any good.
Still, it’s the bunny image that sticks. Particularly as I write just before midnight on Monday, April 15, only an hour after hitting send on an electronic transfer of funds upward, into the ether, never again to be accounted for.
“Theology of the Tax Cut” is what Spiegelman titled that cover, hitting the lasting reverential treatment of Milton Friedman and Ronald Reagan and their dogma. One almost wonders what they would have said about the income inequality that’s gone on to reach extremes even they could not have imagined.
Meanwhile, if the lot of us “little people” is to pay up, as Leona Helmsley had it, the inevitability could be leavened with a single innovation borrowed from something Friedman and Reagan preferred to taxation — the world of gifting and free-will donations. Call it targeted funding. You know, like when your alma mater asks how you’d like your thoughtful contribution directed. Physical plant? Scholarships? Salary for that new hire in the philosophy department?
We’re talking newfound agency for John Q. Taxpayer. It could be as revolutionary as the automatic payroll deduction. Me, I’d go ahead and skip the funding of worldwide munitions. Because hey, my skills behind the wheel were seriously put to the test in slaloming all the way to Lewisburg, Pa., over the weekend, such were the potholes. I-80 needs work.