taxes suk!!

06 Aug 2005

I felt bad for picking on Troy last time, when for a while that post became the top hit for his name on google (it’s not anymore). But, this essay is so bad. It’s beyond funny. I wasn’t originally going to post anything about this, because I didn’t feel I had anything valuable to add but virulent mockery, but since when has that ever stopped me?

Allow me to just quote a snippet:

If stretched end-to-end, the 70.41 million one dollar bills the state government spends each day would reach from Chattanooga to Fairbanks, Alaska—with enough left over to go from Fairbanks back to Boise, Idaho. A total of over 6,800 miles.

I’m sorry. This is “policy research”? I can’t even come up with mockery that does this justice. Its existence mocks itself.

The best part, though, is the final sentence:

There’s no shame in keeping state government well-oiled, but as these examples show, legislators owe it to taxpayers to consider going a little lighter on the grease.

What? Come again? “as these examples show”? What examples? The length of dollar bills end-to-end? I am sorry, but this policy research is inconclusive. He didn’t even take into account the fact that the length of the dollar bill has changed considerably over the years. In 1929, for example, the dollar bill was shrunk as much as 25% in order to save paper costs. Is this included in Troy’s analysis? Hardly. So how do we know the length doesn’t merely stretch from Fairbanks to, say, Des Moines? Clearly, we cannot rely on his painstaking, but flawed, economic justification for a Taxpayer Bill of Rights.