Working for the Taxman
Apr. 30th, 2012 02:52 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
blogcutter"Did you remember to lower the star wheels? If not, you could permanently damage the machine!" That dire warning comes from a training tape that I remember listening to when training to work as a keypunch operator during tax season. In fact, if one neglected to lower the star wheels, it did not damage the machine at all - it simply switched it to keypunching in alphabetic rather than numeric mode.
Keypunching was basically a minimum-wage job, but it did help to finance my university education, at a time when a degree seemed to mean rather more than it does today - though probably not as much as it had a decade or two earlier. There aren't nearly enough jobs like that around for students and others still working their way into a career these days. Instead, you have to be pretty high up on the office totem pole to have your own personal assistant - so for most office workers, even highly-educated, highly-skilled professionals and lower-to-middle level managers, that means doing your own "keyboarding" at the usual skilled-worker rate. Is that a sensible use of resources? I don't know. I guess at least it makes for a less assembly-line atmosphere in the workplace if one person gets to complete a task from start to finish.
There's a series of commercials for a well-known tax preparation firm, in which a man goes to the doctor complaining vaguely of a pain in his lower gluto-whatever. "Oh, that's tax pain!" says the doctor. "We can't help you with that." Then there's that rather right-wing think tank that laments that "Pay Yourself Day" - the day that you can stop working for the taxman and start working for yourself - gets later and later every year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if I'm paying to help set up and maintain educational and health-care infrastructure, link communities through real or virtual highways and other transport networks, ensure the quality of our food and water, and so on, then I AM working for myself and the kind of world we all want our children and future generations to grow up in!
Of course, we probably won't as individuals agree with all the projects that get financed with our tax dollars, nor will we necessarily agree about what constitutes a fair tax rate or a fairly-distributed tax structure. But can you imagine a world where EVERYTHING was direct user-pay and there were no tax-supported services whatsoever? Something to keep in mind as we approach the midnight deadline for federal and provincial tax-filing.
Keypunching was basically a minimum-wage job, but it did help to finance my university education, at a time when a degree seemed to mean rather more than it does today - though probably not as much as it had a decade or two earlier. There aren't nearly enough jobs like that around for students and others still working their way into a career these days. Instead, you have to be pretty high up on the office totem pole to have your own personal assistant - so for most office workers, even highly-educated, highly-skilled professionals and lower-to-middle level managers, that means doing your own "keyboarding" at the usual skilled-worker rate. Is that a sensible use of resources? I don't know. I guess at least it makes for a less assembly-line atmosphere in the workplace if one person gets to complete a task from start to finish.
There's a series of commercials for a well-known tax preparation firm, in which a man goes to the doctor complaining vaguely of a pain in his lower gluto-whatever. "Oh, that's tax pain!" says the doctor. "We can't help you with that." Then there's that rather right-wing think tank that laments that "Pay Yourself Day" - the day that you can stop working for the taxman and start working for yourself - gets later and later every year. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems to me that if I'm paying to help set up and maintain educational and health-care infrastructure, link communities through real or virtual highways and other transport networks, ensure the quality of our food and water, and so on, then I AM working for myself and the kind of world we all want our children and future generations to grow up in!
Of course, we probably won't as individuals agree with all the projects that get financed with our tax dollars, nor will we necessarily agree about what constitutes a fair tax rate or a fairly-distributed tax structure. But can you imagine a world where EVERYTHING was direct user-pay and there were no tax-supported services whatsoever? Something to keep in mind as we approach the midnight deadline for federal and provincial tax-filing.
