Bad Habits

But then the U.S. Surgeon General, who is the highest-ranking surgeon in the Army, decided that cigarettes are bad for people, and recommended that the manufacturers put little warnings on cigarette packs. Congressmen from tobacco-growing states offered to help with the wording, so at first the warning was a bit vague:

NOTE—The U.S. Surgeon General thinks that cigarettes could possibly be somewhat less than ideal in terms of your health, but of course he could be wrong.

But over the years the warning has gotten stronger, so now it says:

WARNING—Cigarettes will kill you, you stupid jerk.

These days the government won’t even allow cigarette manufacturers to advertise on television. All you see are those public health commercials in which smug ten-year-old girls order you not to smoke, to the point where you want to rush right out and inhale an entire pack of unfiltered Camels just for spite.

Some of you may be wondering why the same government that goes around warning people not to smoke also subsidizes farmers who grow tobacco. The answer is that the government is afraid that if it stops paying the farmers to grow tobacco, they’ll start doing something even worse, such as growing opium or beating crippled children with baseball bats. So the government figures the wisest course is to pay them to grow tobacco, then warn people not to smoke it.

The anti-smoking campaign was such a hit that the government decided to investigate the chemicals that make diet soft drinks taste sweet. Researchers wearing white laboratory coats filled a huge vat with Tab and dropped rats into it from a sixty-foot-high catwalk, and they noticed that most of the rats died, some before they even reached the vat. So the government ba

Nowadays, Warning the Public is a major industry. Every schoolchild knows the hazards associated with cigarettes, caffeine, diet soft drinks, sugar, alcohol, dairy products, nondairy products, electronic games, air, league bowling, and chemicals in general. Any day now, you’ll pick up the newspaper and read:

BOSTON—Laboratory scientists at a very major scientific university a

Until we get that Final Warning, we’ll all have to make do as best we can. I, for one, plan to consume nothing but filtered rainwater. For amusement, I may take a chance on some smutty books.

Taxation Without Reservation

A Taxing Proposal

Here it is again, income tax time, and I imagine many of you readers, especially the ones with smaller brains, are eagerly awaiting my a

But this year we have an entirely new plan, taxwise. This year, President Reagan needs all the money he can get, because he was going over the figures recently with his aides, Huey, Dewey, and Louie, and they noticed that the government was going to be short by something like $200 billion. “Gosh,” chuckled the President. “That’s even bigger than those humongous deficits the Democrats used to run up when I went around making fun of them on the radio! Why, for all the difference I’ve made in the past two years, the nation might just as well have had Ted Ke

billion a year.

The Democrats are happy as clams about raising taxes. The Democrats believe that if God did not want them to raise taxes, He would not have created the Internal Revenue Service. So finally, after two years of bickering, the President and the Democrats are begi

CONGRESSMAN ROBERT “BOB” LUNGER and the United States Department of Transportation are pleased to a

But the $50 billion won’t be nearly enough to allow Congress to create jobs on the level it would like. And on top of that, President Reagan needs money to buy additional exploding devices to defend you with. So what can you, the ordinary taxpayer, do to help? Here’s what: this year, when you prepare your income tax return, I want you to lie in the government’s favor. I want you to declare more income than you actually received, and I want you to deliberately fail to report large numbers of legitimate deductions.

Some of you will be caught, of course. Some of you may be called in to face IRS audits. You may even be forced to accept a large refund, thus depriving the government of money it could have used for your benefit. These risks are unavoidable, but they can be minimized if a few of us continue to cheat, so the IRS will be less likely to see any particular pattern. I’m willing to volunteer to be one of the few. It’s a dirty job, but somebody has to do it.