Takka Takka and other city-enamored borough dwellers may have to kiss their indie digs goodbye soon if Governor Patterson and Mayor Bloomberg have their way. In case you hadn’t heard, New York is in the midst of an epic crisis on scale with the infamous Stay Puft Marshmallow Man incident of the 80′s. Unfortunately, proton packs and sheer bravado can’t fix things again, because the form The Destroyer has chosen to take this time is massive debt. In other words, New York State is fuckin’ broke, and the bookies are starting to call about their money.
Rather than take a few shattered kneecaps for their constituency, our fine governor and power-crazy mayor–who, I might add, were in charge of the failed budgets and ridiculously wrong projections that got us into this mess–have decided to pass the burden onto a public who are already being squeezed like Kirstie Alley in a size two dress.
If the bureaucrats get their way, subway and bus rare will rise to a ridiculous three dollars per one-way trip, school funding will be slashed, tuition for city and state universities will skyrocket, taxes will go up on everything from property to clothing and layoffs will become as common as the stench of stale urine on an uptown C train during morning rush hour.
So an already overburdened citizenry, on the brink of financial collapse as it is, already struggling to pay off either their bad mortgage or ridiculously inflated rent, is getting another big shovel of city shit lumped onto their brittle backs. The government bigwigs say these heinous actions are necessary for the city and state to survive, and that they’ve explored all other alternatives already.
I call bullshit–there’s one BIG alternative no one’s mentioned yet that could save us from all of this grief:
TAX THE HOMELESS
Now I know this sounds unfathomably cruel and extreme, even for a sick bastard like myself, but hear me out on this one before you use the Freedom of Information Act to find my address so you can personally kick me in the balls.
According to the New York City Department of Homeless Services, there are 100,000 homeless people living in New York City every given year. Figure that with the recent downturn in the economy, that number is set to rise dramatically over the next few months. What’s one thing that homeless people do that ordinary people don’t, besides shit themselves in public? Not pay taxes (besides sales tax, of course). If we changed that, we could conceivably fill in a large portion of the projected $1.2 billion budget gap for 2009. Here’s the math:
Homeless people DO make money, whether it be by begging for change, singing and dancing on the subway, or just good old fashioned robbery. Figure that your average panhandling bum makes around eight per hour (calculated by estimating a one dollar per train car average on a moderately busy eight-car train in Manhattan). If he begs for just five hours a day, that’s around 50 dollars (adjusted for busy rush hours) of tax-free cash.
If we apply a generously modest tax rate of 20 percent to that, we get 10 dollar a day per bum in tax revenue. Multiply that by 80,000 (we’re assuming at least 20,000 homeless to be children) and that’s a whopping $800,000 per day in new tax revenue. In just three months, we’ve closed the budget gap by $72 million. That’s enough to keep quite a few firehouses and public schools from closing, the same firehouses that will one day likely save or resuscitate a homeless person, and the same schools that will educate homeless children to better themselves.
Over a year’s time, that number would rise to nearly $300 million–money that will keep layoffs to a minimum, which, in turn, will ensure fewer instances of new homeless families, which in turn, means more people on the trains during rush hour to give bums money.
Now some of you may say “but these poor people barely have enough to feed and cloth themselves each day. Now you want to take away what precious little they have?” Actually, that’s not entirely the case. While I do take pity on the poor souls who have been dealt a shitty hand in life and are truly struggling to dig their way out of the pit of poverty, let’s face it: most homeless people use their daily take on two things–food and alcohol.
They’re not exactly investing in high-yield CDs to hopefully one day better themselves. Taking a small amount of discretionary income (read: booze money) away from invalids won’t cause them to miss a meal or die of frostbite on the streets. Hell, it might even help to curb dangerous drug and alcohol addictions that probably landed them on the streets in the first place. It’s a win-win situation.
TOPICS: theshark