The Never-ending Problem

If there’s one thing I’ve learned about human nature through the years, it’s that people like to complain. Granted, some like to complain more than others; and some show some genuine artistry in their ability to complain, while others are just your run-of-the-mill complainers.

Being an election year, the complainers are out in full force. One party complains about the other’s policies, making them out to be a bunch of villains, and the other complains back. Some of these complaints are rather remarkable. I mean, the people who make them up must be way out there to come up with them. Why, they’ll take something that a candidate says and twist, turn, fold, spindle and mutilate it into something totally different, on a totally different topic.

I haven’t decided if these spin doctors are on drugs, from the planet Xircon or just escapees from insane asylums. Once the campaign is over, they shouldn’t bother going to work for the government; I’m sure that they could make more money writing fiction. They’ve already got the experience.

Leaving these professional complainers behind; let’s get back to the run-of-the mill complainer. It seems that many of them are only happy when they are complaining. I mean, have you looked at Facebook lately? At least ten percent of the comments on there are somebody complaining about something or someone that the rest of us couldn’t care less about.

Maybe complaining is a safety valve for these people, to keep them from exploding. If that’s the case, then it would seem to me that we would be doing them a favor to help ensure that they always had something to complain about. It could be sort of a fall-back position, for moments when they run out of other things to complain about. That way, they’d always be miserable, which should make them always be happy.

All we need is something that’s big enough and long lasting enough that it becomes a permanent problem in their lives. At the same time, it’s can’t be so big that it overshadows all other complaints. If it were to reach those cosmic proportions, they might get bored of complaining about it, and just become miserable. No, there needs to be a very careful balance there, between being big enough to complain about and small enough to allow other complaints to overshadow it.

If we want to do this right, we would need to gift this problem equally to everyone at a very young age. That way, we couldn’t be accused of discrimination against complainers. Since they would be young, we’d need to educate them about the problem, so that they would have a true appreciation of it.

This sounds like a job for the public schools. We could institute an elementary school class, which infuses the mind of our children with a life-long problem, like taxes or the national debt, so that they could learn how to worry and complain about it at a very young age. Actually, it wouldn’t be hard to do. All it would take is to lower the age for paying income taxes to five years old. Then, the IRS could be after the kiddies, to make them pay income tax on their allowance. If anything would be a problem for a child, that would be it.

This might even put an end to the problem of people who don’t pay their income taxes. By starting them out young, when they are still quite impressionable, they would be indoctrinated by the time they became adults. Then, even the bum on the streets would be accustomed to paying taxes on their panhandling. Hmm, this could be boon for the American government; more tax revenue, without raising taxes.

Let’s not lose track of the focus though. Increased tax revenue is only a side-benefit. The true goal here is to help out the complainers, giving them ready access to something that they could complain about. While indoctrinating them early would be a major part of that plan, regular reminders are necessary as well.

Perhaps going back to Roman times, and installing tax collecting booths would help keep people reminded of their tax burden. Except, instead of putting them at the entrances of cities, we could put them at the exits of the workplaces. Then, people would be able to pay their own income taxes, instead of having their employer take it out of their check. If they don’t pay, they don’t get to leave work.

Aha, once again we have a way to boost tax revenue, while doing the people a favor. Get all those bureaucrats out of the IRS offices and into the workplaces, where they can really make people miserable. That’s the IRS’s goal anyway; why not help them do it even better?