No, I’m not talking about the Battle of Hastings. That’s 1066. I am talking about rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, not rendering unto William the Conqueror everything you have.  I am talking about Form 1040, the one tool left to us poor mortals to claw back our money from the rapacious government that collected too much of it last year. Why do we overwithhold? Because the hordes of the Internal Revenue Service will descend on us if we are fifteen cents short and turn our lives into a living hell for the next twenty years. So we sit docilely by the mailbox, waiting for our refund check, and when it arrives we say “Oh Goody!”

You think Form 1040 is bad. Try Form 1120. That’s the form for a corporation’s tax return. By the time you finish completing that one, including all the required supplementary schedules, it is about the size of the Manhattan telephone directory. [N.B. For those of you who are young enough not to remember what a telephone directory is, let me explain. In the days BG (before Google), you found a telephone number by consulting a thick book which had the names of the owners of the telephone numbers arranged in alphabetical order. Since you’re reading this, I assume you know what an alphabetical listing is. As a predicate, I also assume that you know what an alphabet is.]

But back to the income tax. What a wonderful word is “tax!” It comes from the Ur-Proto-Ugaritic language spoken by the Australopithecans, and translates literally as “screw the peasants.” So you can see that nothing much has changed over the past several millenia.

But things are about to get even better. Our masters are about to impose a “carbon tax.” Unfortunately, it will not be paid by the carbons. It will be paid by YOU. As you can see by looking out the window and observing the absence of glaciers, the Earth is heating up, which will have all sorts of bad consequences, like increased agricultrual production that will encourage excessive eating, fatness, and an increase in heart attacks. And we all know that this heating is produced by the burning of stuff, which releases CO2 into the atmosphere, exacerbating the greenhouse effect. [For me, the greenhouse effect is my being inundated by hydroponically grown zucchini raised by my neighbor all through the winter.] To alleviate this problem, the gummint is going to charge emitters of CO2, like power companies and airlines, a fee based on how much CO2 they emit. This will result in electricity costs going from $.04 per kilowatt hour to $400.00 per kilowatt hour, and the coach fare from Boston to Miami going from $200 to $20,000. But what the hell.

We have much more fun in store.

What else produces CO2? Why you do, of course, every time you exhale! I’ll bet they tax that next, and if you don’t pay up, they will duct tape your nostrils closed on every second Tuesday.

And there are lots of other greenhouse gases! Say, like methane, produced, as you know from your diligent perusal of the newsfeeds, by cow farts. The methane tax cannot be imposed directly on the cows, because they are unlikely to pay. So the cost will be born by the rancher, and steak will be $1,000 per pound, like it is in Tokyo today. And if you, as a city dweller, don’t want to be assessed a similar tax, lay off the beans.

But do you know what the biggest greenhouse gas is? WATER VAPOR! So you can forget about taking any more hot showers, or washing your dishes in hot water. I’m sure you have a river bank located conveniently near your house.

But back to carbon. Carbon is a chemical element. There are 117 others. We can tax them too!

We’re just getting started.