Oppressive Tax on Loathed Minority Set for Easy Passage

Facing an unprecedented $9 billion budget shortfall, legislators in Olympia are scrambling to find new sources of revenue to sustain the drunken spending spree of the past four years.

Now thanks to some quick thinking by Senate Majority Leader Lisa Brown, cuts in popular programs such as after school basket weaving for inner-city toddlers will likely be avoided as an oppressive tax on an unpopular minority heads for easy passage.

“It’s so obvious, I don’t understand why we didn’t see this before,” said Brown, referring to her proposal to impose a one-percent income tax on the “super-rich.” “Nobody likes snooty rich people, and they only make up something like one percent of the population, so even if they all voted against this, there’s really no way they can stop it.”

While the idea of an income tax has been brought to the table in Washington State in the past, previous iterations have asked every taxpayer to pay a share, resulting in repeated and resounding defeats. In order to avoid a nasty repeat of this scenario, Brown’s proposal puts the decision to impose a despised income tax in the hands of those who will likely never be personally affected by it.

“We already know that implementing an income tax is going to require either a public vote or a two-thirds majority in the House and Senate,” said Brown. “I just figured that the easiest way to get voters to pass this thing is to impose it on the one group of people that most of them already hate: the rich.”

Brown’s proposal opens dozens of new avenues for government-sponsored oppression of despised minorities. In addition to her selective tax on the rich, Brown is also introducing bills that will raise money by allowing scientists to experiment on prisoners, as well as suspend government spending on public art, instead authorizing the seizure of works of art directly from artists.

“Those hippie artists can always make more, after all,” explained Brown. “It’s not fair that they should have an unlimited supply of art while the rest of us have to pay them for ours.”

New taxes are also being considered for a wide range of other unpopular minorities, including tuba players, bank tellers, radish farmers, and libertarians.

Washington State’s tax structure has long been decried by politicians as one of the most regressive in the nation, with the downtrodden poor spending an average of three hundred percent of their income on taxes while the rich are paid generous government benefits of hundreds of thousands each year just to live here.

When asked why she would push for a new one percent income tax on the rich instead of something like the Fair Tax that would bring some actual fairness in the state’s taxation structure and ease the burden on Washington’s poor, Brown quickly changed the subject.

“I think you’re missing the important thing here,” said Brown. “Here’s what we can all agree on—the rich need to be punished, and this tax would be a good start.”

Naked Loon reporter Jaime Rodriguez also contributed to this story.