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Once again, our legislature struggles to solve our problems. As always, they need money for highways and prisons, so they should consider some new taxes:
·Migration Fee. More people now leave Colorado than come in. To discourage this, we need an exit fee.
It would be fair. If you lived here for a while, Colorado made a place for you. There was a desk in school and a teacher in the room. The water and sewage treatment plants had capacity for your needs, and so forth.
Even when you move away, that costly capacity remains and still must be paid for. Those who stay get stuck holding the bag, while those who escape get off scot-free. One way around this glaring inequity is to charge a substantial fee for the right to emigrate.
Administration might be difficult in normal times, but through a fortunate quirk of history, many experienced exit-ransom commissars just lost similar jobs in East Germany.
· Bogus Worry Assessment. The way to get rich in America is to invent a disease and sell the cure. Lately, since Colorado has too many hospital rooms, especially psychiatric rooms, you often see these touching ads:
Concerned about your teen-aged child? Does he argue
with you? Hang out with undesirable friends? Stay out later
than she should sometimes? Threaten to leave home?
To close the gap between the hellion you have and the
docile creature you really wanted, call the caring
professionals at Gouger-Makework Psychiatric Hospital of
Commerce City.
You begin to believe that a normal kid will turn into Charles Manson Jr. unless you mortgage the house to get him into therapy. We have enough problems without inventing new ones; tax these ads at $10,000 a pop. If we can't stop hospitals from scaring up business, then at least we can get some money out of them.
·Intellectual Property Tax. Wealth once came from real estate, and the property tax insured that the owners of the sources of wealth contributed proportionately to support local government.
Now there are many ways to generate money besides owning a coal mine or a tenement house. But our tax system hasn't recognized that the ownership of certain forms of knowledge is far more profitable than ownership of tangible property.
For example, if you know how to write TV sitcoms (I wish I did), you get a minimum of $12,500 per half-hour script. If you wrote one a month, that would be $150,000 a year, almost all of it free and clear before income taxes.
To do as well with real property, you'd have to own an office building worth about $1.5 million.
Yet the office building would pay about $30,000 in annual property taxes if it sat down the street, while the sitcom knowledge produces no property taxes to support our schools and libraries.
Clearly we must remedy this unfair and outdated situation by taxing valuable knowledge and productive skills. Such a tax should pass readily, since a majority of our legislators would find it easy to support; if the intellectual property appraisal is at all sensible, most of their assessments will be quite low.
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