Earnest was waiting about halfway down the hall.

“Look at this,” the police will say when they find me. “His ears are missing.”

WAY TO GO, ROSCOE!

Well, it looks like we’ve finally gotten some tax reform. We’ve been trying to get tax reform for over 200 years, dating back to 17-something, when a small, brave band of patriots dressed up as Indians and threw tea into the Boston Harbor. Surprisingly, this failed to produce tax reform. So the brave patriots tried various other approaches, such as dressing up as tea and throwing Indians into the harbor, or dressing up as a harbor and throwing tea into Indians, but nothing worked.

And so, today, the tax system is a mess. To cite some of the more glaring problems:

–The big corporations pay nothing. —The rich pay nothing. —The poor pay nothing. —I pay nothing. —Nobody pays anything except you and a couple of people where you work. —The commissioner of the Internal Revenue Service is named “Roscoe.”

This unfair system has increasingly resulted in calls for reform. I personally called for reform nearly two years ago, when I proposed a simple and fair three-pronged tax system called the You Pay Only $8.95 Tax Plan, which worked as follows:

PRONG ONE: You would pay $8.95 in taxes. PRONG TWO: Cheating would be permitted. PRONG THREE: Anybody who parked his or her car diagonally across two parking spaces would be shot without trial. (This prong is not directly related to tax reform, but everybody I discussed it with feels it should be included anyway.)

The other major plan was proposed by President Reagan, who made tax reform the cornerstone of his second term, similar to the way he made tax reduction the cornerstone of his first term. Remember that? It was back when everybody was talking about “supply-side economics,” which is the mysterious curve that became famous when an economist named Arthur Laffer drew it at a party, on a napkin belonging to U.S. Congressman jack Kemp. I’m not making this up.

What the Laffer curve allegedly showed, when you held it in a certain light, was that if the government reduced everybody’s taxes, it would make more money, and the federal budget deficit would go away. I admit that, looking back on it, this theory seems even stupider than throwing beverages into Boston Harbor, but, at the time, it had a very strong appeal. Congressman Kemp started showing his napkin around Washington and soon many people were excited about supply-side economics. it was similar to those stories you sometimes see in the newspaper about how some Third World village gets all riled up when a peasant woman discovers a yam shaped exactly like the Virgin Mary. President Reagan made tax reduction his first-term cornerstone, and Congress enacted it, and everybody waited for the budget deficit to go down, and it wasn’t until recently that economists realized Kemp had been holding his napkin sideways.

So that was tax reduction. Now we’re on tax reform, which as I said earlier is the president’s second-term cornerstone. For a while, however, it appeared to be in big trouble in Congress, because of the PACS. PACs are lobbying organizations with names like the American Nasal Inhaler Industry Committee for Better Government, which make large contributions to your elected representatives so they can afford to make TV campaign commercials where they stand around in shirt sleeves pretending that they actually care about ordinary bozo citizens such as you.

The PACs did not care for the president’s plan. They were very concerned that the term “tax reform” might be interpreted to mean “reforming the tax system in some way,” which of course would destroy the economy as we now know it. So they had all these amendments introduced, and, before long, the president’s tax-reform plan had been modified so much that its only actual legal effect, had it been enacted, would have been to declare July as Chalk Appreciation Month. And so it looked as though the president might have to come up with a new cornerstone for his second term, something like: “Ronald Reagan: He never bombed Canada.” Or: “Ronald Reagan: Most of his polyps were benign.”

And then a wonderful thing happened. The Senate Finance Committee, a group of men who are not famous for standing up to the special interests, a group of men who have little slots in their front doors for the convenience of those PACs wishing to make large contributions at night, suddenly got their courage up. They took a hard look at themselves, and they said: “Wait a minute. What are we? Are we a bunch of prostitutes, taking large sums of money from the PACs and giving them what they want? No! Let’s take large sums of their money and not give them what they want!” It was a courageous step, a step that took the senators beyond prostitution, into the realm of fraud. All the editorial writers of course hailed it as a Positive Step. And that is how we came to have tax reform.

How will tax reform affect you? It will change your life dramatically. Let’s say you’re a typical family of four with both parents working and occasional car problems. Under the new system, each year you’ll get a bunch of unintelligible forms from the government, and you’ll put off doing anything about them until mid-April, and you’ll be confused by the directions, and you’ll miss a lot of deductions, and you’ll worry about being audited. Other than that things will remain pretty much the same. Roscoe will still be in charge.

Note: This is my annual column on how to fill out your income-tax return. As you read it, please bear in mind that I am not a trained accountant. I am the Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court. Nevertheless, if you have any questions whatsoever about the legality of a particular tax maneuver, you should call the special Toll-Free IRS Taxpayer Assistance Hotline Telephone Number in your area and listen to the busy signal until you feel you have a better understanding of the situation.

There are a number (23,968,847) of significant differences between this year’s tax form and last year’s, but let’s first look at the two things that have not changed:

1. The commissioner of Internal Revenue is still named “Roscoe,” and

2. Roscoe is evidently still doing situps under parked cars, because he once again devotes the largest paragraphs on page one to telling us taxpayers how we can send in “voluntary contributions to reduce the federal debt.”

As I interpret this statement, Roscoe, by using the word “voluntary,” is saying that even though your government finds itself in serious financial trouble owing to the fact that every time an Acting Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Something changes offices, he spends more on new drapes than your whole house is worth, the IRS does not require you to send in extra money, beyond what you actually owe. No sir. You also are allowed to send in jewelry, stocks, canned goods, or clothing in good condition. Roscoe is a 42

regular.

Everything else about the tax form is different this year, but it shouldn’t be too much trouble as long as you avoid Common Taxpayer Errors. “For example,” reminds IRS Helpful Hint Division Chief Rexford Pooch, Jr., “taxpayers who make everything up should use numbers that sound sort of accurate, such as $3,847.62, rather than obvious fictions like $4,000. Also, we generally give much closer scrutiny to a return where the taxpayer gives a name such as Nick ‘The Weasel’ Testosterone.”

With those tips in mind, let’s look at some typical tax cases, and see how they would be handled under the new tax code. TAX CASE ONE: Mrs. Jones, a 7 1—year-old widow living on social security with no other income, is sound asleep, one night when she has an incredibly vivid dream in which her son dies in an automobile crash in California. Suddenly, she is awakened by the telephone; it is a member of the California Highway Patrol, calling to remind her that she does not have a son. Stunned, she suffers a fatal heart attack.