Life is filled with impossible things. Doing my taxes is definitely one of them.
I once owned a copy of this Will Eisner comic and got a good barrel of laughs out of it back in the day when I was young and full of life and the grim reaper wasn’t standing just outside the kitchen door like he is now.
It had a bunch of useful suggestions on what to do in the face of the two most unavoidable things in life. I wish I could find it once again, but I fear it disappeared when my parents moved from Texas back to the farm in Iowa in the 1990’s. It was probably stolen by someone who wanted to learn the valuable secrets it contained. I accuse Donald Trump. Surely that would explain all those years he paid zero dollars in taxes. And I believe I spotted something with pale orange hair lurking behind the trash bin when my parents were loading the moving van. Of course, it may have been only a dried out tumble weed.
Now, I am not saying that I don’t want to pay my taxes. I have always felt that it was an important part of being a citizen to pay my fair share. And if you want the benefits of government services like schools, fire departments, police forces, court systems, garbage collection, and all those other things we really can’t do without… well, somebody has to pay for them.
But it often seems to me that the whole matter could become considerably more equitable if those people to whom life and the economy have been more generous could see their way clear to pay a little of that good fortune towards common goals. And I am not referring to the Koch brothers spending a billion dollars on elections, either. That’s a transaction where they come out ahead, making more money back than they put in. After all, they got the whole State of Kansas to pour their State funds directly into Koch Industries pocketbooks via tax breaks, effectively allowing them to rob all of Kansas’s public school children of their textbooks and lunch money. How is that equitable and fair?
And paying taxes this year means probably paying far more than my fair share. I recently completed a debt-reduction program to get out from under two decades worth of maxed-out credit cards at 25% to 29% interest rates. And as a further punishment for trying to get free of the burden, credit card banks get to report the forgiven debt as income for me to the IRS. And all of the banks decided this was the year for me to pay that off. Well, except for Bank of America who are petulantly suing me for more money than I owe them. I will probably end up mired back in credit card debt in order to survive the IRS. So how does that square with Mitt Romney paying less than 15%? Or Donald Trump paying nothing?
The only out for me, it seems, is to shake hands and make a deal with old Grimmy. He has patiently waited for me for sixty years, through times when my six incurable diseases definitely gave him hope. The only way to really escape the tax man is to take the really long dirt nap. But I shall scrape funds together and give it one more try. I just wish I could find that book.
(Note *** All the illustrations in this essay except for Mr. Flagg’s Uncle Sam were provided by the late great Will Eisner, the cartoonist so grand that the highest award for cartoonists is named after him. But I am not paying any royalties for these images since I owe my soul to the IRS.)
Catch a Falling Star 
Truly Terrible Trump Tricks
Yep, I have tried thinking about the many uses for barbed wire and dead cats rather than have to think about what Trump has been doing, and it just isn’t working. After looking up the tensile strength of various common barbed wires from different barbed wire companies, I could not find one appropriate for a cat-a-pult, and it turned out that the whole idea was a joke anyway. But he just keeps getting worse.
Here is John Green, an author I love and listen to, explaining the Immigration Boobilly Boo-Boo;
The Trumpinator has gotten the idea that he can hammer the world into a shape he likes using mallet-like executive orders. But no amount of hammering is going to turn the globe into a giant banana. His executive orders are not put through a review process, and so, are often nonsensical, inappropriate, and even dangerous.
The fact that you had to take a moment to decide if you needed to ask me if this photo was real or not tells you a lot about what you already know about Trump. He is petulant. He is childish. He throws tantrums at the drop of a hat, or the smirk of an underling, or the comments of a celebrity… I wonder if he throws tantrums about barbed wire and dead cats?
“Oh, no! Thinking about Trump made me accidentally strangle Mr. Tinkles.”
And even worse are some of the detestable deplorables that he has working for him. A man like Steve Bannon with his Breitbart background and his white supremacist crossword puzzles of racism, antisemitism, and nihilism would never have gotten power in the first place if it hadn’t been for Trump. And now he is at least the second most powerful man on Earth. Arguably, he’s the first, depending on how much his Wormtongue skills are affecting the baby mind of President Babyhands.
So, here is my pitiful attempt at mocking the evil Steve, Darklord Bannon;
I know, the angry eyebrows are simply not enough. Let me try again;
Okay, I know it’s not good enough. I promise you, if I can find a cartoon way to harpoon the great white whale, Moby Steve, I will, and then post it for all to see. I would like to be able to make a single cartoon so snarky that Bannon’s pet snake would drop over dead at the shockwaves from little old Republican ladies laughing at it and changing their opinion of Trump forever. Of course, I know, better cartoonists than I have tried and failed. That doesn’t mean it is not worth the effort.
You have probably discerned by now that I did not vote for Trump. And I have given him more than enough chance to prove what he will do for this country. I will never call him President using his proper name. He is not my president. And I do not want to live in Trump’s idea of America. This I will probably achieve sooner than expected because what he is doing to Obamacare will undoubtedly kill me.
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Filed under angry rant, commentary, grumpiness, humor, Liberal ideas, memes, politics
Tagged as Donald Trump, immigration, politics, Steve Bannon, the power of cartoons.