Death And Taxes - The Tale Of A Renegade Woman Who Tried To Cheat Both

Deborah Fine had always been a good progressive - the black man, the environment, gender tolerance, and peace - but she drew the line on taxes.  It was one thing provide for a strong military and transportation infrastructure, but another thing altogether to finance a range of senseless, idealistic, feel-good projects.  

Government had gotten too big, too influential, too intrusive, and taxes had gone up proportionately.  Deborah was now paying federal tax, DC income tax, property tax, sales tax, and a bevy of tax add-ons to defray 'rising costs'.  There was seemingly no way out.  

Deborah was in a fortunate position.  An estate lawyer, the daughter or a Wall Street accountant and a real estate player, she had learned how to advise clients how to pay the fewest taxes while staying within the law. 

'Within' was a debatable term.  There were some who felt that those who avoided taxes altogether, concocting financial instruments as tricky as Jeffrey Skilling and Enron, bundling investments, trusts, mortgages, interest, wills, and charitable donations into indecipherable packages, might be within the law but were on its moral edge.  Given the state of the world, one had an obligation to provide the resources to make it better. 

 

Although the string of tax liabilities in Deborah's bracket were significant, taxpayers in the wealthy but still progressive wards of the city felt they were doing the right thing by going straight down the line, taking legitimate deductions, doing the needful to protect against probate court, but in general taking no extreme measures to shelter their wealth. 

This riled Deborah who thought it was imbecilic to avoid the breaks available to the savvy taxpayer. Outrunning the revenuers was not just for Bonnie and Clyde.  It was for the average American who felt the government's hands in their pockets and nothing to show for it. 

 

The Founding Fathers felt that the federal government's only Constitutional duty was in the defense of the Republic.  It was never meant to be a caretaker, an arbiter of social values, or a monitor.  If anything it was to be a cheerleader, patriot-in-chief with eyes to the future prosperity of the nation.  Jefferson sponsored Lewis and Clark, successive governments platted land bought from Napoleon in the Louisiana Purchase and offered it to American pioneers for little more than a promissory note. 

Municipal governments followed suit, mapping, platting, and providing the legal, fiduciary basis for land purchase, mortgaging, and eventual profit.  

Public and private sector were well in tune in the early days of the new nation.  Each knew its place, its responsibilities, and its risks. 

If one were to look carefully at today's Washington, DC, Deborah's home, they would see a sinkhole of government misuse, corruption, reverse racism, predatory, punitive taxation, and a socialist agenda to redistribute the wealth, taking it from the most productive sectors of the city and giving it to the least productive while taking a big bite along the way. 

Deborah, one of the residents who did indeed look into municipal affairs and came up with nothing but a handful of feeble excuses for governance, a budget outlay that produced nothing in return, and a Democrat Socialist mayor bound and determined to turn the city over to 'black folk'. 

So, hammered on one end by the insanity of federal spending and the venal, minority insider corruption of the municipality on the other, Deborah decided the best and most obvious choice was to stretch both the legal and moral perimeters of tax law. She would be the honest Jeffrey Skilling, someone as financially astute as he, ingenious in creating sub-prime mortgage bundles, credit swaps, and fictious holding companies, but would skate close to the edges of propriety and never go beyond. 

Or so she thought. However when she and her claque of high-powered, financially brilliant, and fiscally savvy men assembled to make her tax free dream come true, saw every public-minded exemption as an opportunity to print money, they drifted beyond the pale and entered Enron country. 

There is nothing wrong with taxation, Deborah said, as long as there is a commensurate, visible return.  If there is not, and particularly if lawmakers know the financial chicanery of their decisions but make them anyway, then edging past or avoiding the laws they enact is both moral and patriotic. 

The new, conservative, democratic, post-Communist government planners in Poland knew they had a big problem to overcome.  Cheating, lying, stealing from the Communists during their penitential regime was moral, for it would lead to its ultimate rot and self-destruction.  

In other words sometimes wrong can make a right, and Deborah was convinced of her own deeply moral insurrectionism. 

So, she proved wrong one part of the old adage - 'There are only two certain things in this world, death and taxes'.  In her world, there were no more taxes.

Which left death, the most undeniable eventuality of every living creature.  Yet Deborah, perhaps because of her brilliant success in avoiding/evading taxes and keeping the revenuers on the run far longer than Bonnie and Clyde, John Dillinger, Baby Face Nelson, or Al Capone ever did, thought she could outsmart death. 

 

Not in any mythical, knights in shining armor, medieval way - i.e. actually do it - but simply hold it off longer than anyone could imagine.  The number 122, the number of birthdays which cannot be exceeded, is simply a product of today's limited science.  Recombinant DNA, genetic engineering, and the coming post-human generation promise if not eternity, then something close. 

While these remarkable innovations matured in the laboratory, there was something one could do to prepare for the future. Deborah became a pre-survivor.  She explored every alternative medicine, from shadow theory to gum Arabic infusions.  She was one for faith healing, spiritual renewal, colon cleansing, the Paleolithic diet, sex on the hour of every sixth day, candomblé, Haitian voodoo, and ayurveda.  

Between this all-in for health and keeping an eye on her 'magnificent accounts', she was a busy woman, and as fulfilled as any daughter of Eve could ever be.  

Of course she was labeled a compulsive-obsessive, a woman no fun to be around, wealthy to be sure, but on a rocky road, someone to stay clear of.  The irony of it all was that Deborah became evangelical on both fronts - government overreaching corruption and human longevity - and indeed became a wild-eyed, wild-haired Cassandra or one of Macbeth's Wicked Sisters.  Her prime accountants were worried that she was going to spill the beans and send them all to jail, so around the bend was she on her health hejira, but she kept the two separate and the secret safe. 

 

She offered to be in Elon Musk's first panzer division as it made its way down Independence Avenue to take town the federal bureaucracy, she volunteered for Nick Shirley in his campaign to expose government waste, fraud, and corruption, and she went on stage to promote the wildest and most unearthly health cures imaginable; but both sides of her persona were kept separate. 

As of this writing, she has never been caught by the feds and is as strong as an ox despite her advancing age, so perhaps she is one of a kind and an honorary pre-citizen of the coming post-human generation.