Solon Economou

Guv'ner Deval Patrick to tax gonorrhea!

I'm not making this up!  Bear with me, beer-drinking lovers!

We know Guv'ner Deval Patrick wants to impose horrendous additional state taxes on gasoline, meals, room occupancy, beer, yada-yada.  As if the burden of the poor struggling taxpayer were not already sufficiently onerous, his solution to everything is to impose an additional onerous tax burden on us.  Taxing the people, not patriotism, is indeed the last refuge of the scoundrel. 

Where does the tax on gonorrhea come in?  Politicians have been trying to do this for years.  Look at Patrick's proposed 5 percent sales tax on beer.  The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta has discovered an inverse statistical correlation between the incidence of gonorrhea and the tax on beer.  Specifically, they claim that an increase in tax of 20 cents on a six-pack of beer leads to a decrease in gonorrhea by 9 percent.

They've reasoned that teenagers drinking a lot of beer are more likely to engage in sex, thereby increasing the incidence of gonorrhea.  Duh!

I wonder how many hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars those deep thoughts cost us?  Ogden Nash said it in a two-liner: 

Candy is dandy,

But liquor is quicker.

The claim is that by making beer more expensive with a tax increase, teenagers will afford less, drink less, have less sex, and therefore contract less gonorrhea. Yep, more taxes solve everything, even venereal disease.

Quite obviously then, the proposed tax on beer is a de facto tax on gonorrhea.

Now gonorrhea is not a nice thing to have.  Or so I'm told.  It is not a nice thing to pass on to a friend--sometimes they get upset, go wild-eyed and start screaming like a banshee and try to shove a fork in your neck, no matter how much you swear you don't have any idea how it possibly could have happened!  Or so I'm told.  But to tax it?  That is outrageous!  Can't a person get stuck with a case of good old-fashioned gonorrhea without the government sticking everybody else for it?

Well, Guv'ner Patrick wants to tax everything else;  he may as well try to tax gonorrhea.  I'm sure the Guv'ner is a good man, but his headlong spiral into tax madness appears to be that of a man who is hell-bent on not getting re-elected.  Guv'ner Patrick really needs to learn how to practice safe tax.