"Jack C. Haldeman II - We, the People" - читать интересную книгу автора (Haldeman Jack C)

"PLEASE DON'T BE HARD ON ME, MARK, I'M ONLY DOING MY JOB. I HAVE TO
ASK YOU THAT. IN RESPONSE TO YOUR QUESTION, ROUGHLY 99.987% OF THE
ELIGIBLE TAXPAYERS USE THE LONG, ITEMIZED FORM."
Mark nodded. A person would have to be crazy to pass up the chance to say how his money would
be spent.
"AID TO DEPENDENT CHILDREN."
Mark was old enough to remember the hungry times, the children who had grown up without hope.
"One hundred dollars," he said.
"OFF-SHORE DRILLING SUBSIDY."
"Zero." They were almost all gone now, much to Mark's relief.
"RE-EMPLOYMENT TRAINING PROGRAM."
"Fifty."
"NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS."
"Fifty." He tried to imagine a life without music, without the sculptures and paintings all over town.
He remembered how much Mary had liked the weekly concerts by the river and he recalled that day in
the park with the kids and the dancers. "Make that seventy-five," he said.
"NEUTRON BOMB RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT."
Mark laughed. They tried to slip that old chestnut by every year. "Zero," he said. A bomb that killed
people and left buildings intact was crazy, pure and simple. If they could refine it so it killed only generals,
he might be interested.
Mark relaxed and let the categories roll by. He always put his taxes off until the last minute. A lot of
people did.

Alice Thompson was an actress. At 43, she felt her career was just peaking. She had worked her
way up through the ranks from community theater to stage productions to Hollywood, from ingenue roles
to character parts. She had a comfortable income, good investment advice, a secure career. She
portioned out her calculated tax with good humor: the Actors' Old Folks Home, a theater scholarship at
her Alma Mater, the Playwrights' Association, two summer camps specializing in drama, the National
Repertory Theater. She had little interest in the mundane affairs of state and saw no reason to spend any
money on them. She had a little left over.

Erik Hesse was a janitor. He was sixty-three and had been a janitor for over forty years, from the
day he got married. It hadn't been a bad life, especially after the union came in. These days it was hard to
get someone to do nontechnical work so he made a pretty decent wage. When the time came, Erik went
to a tax preparer to find out how much money he had to allocate. He put it in off-track betting, weather
control (he hated shoveling snow off the sidewalk), the sports cable network, two research projects that
concerned beer, and woman's gymnastics. Erik had a granddaughter who was into somersaults. Even so,
he had a little left over when he finished and no place to put it.

Raymond Montonero was a Supreme Court Justice. There was less and less for him to do,
however. People were working their problems out together in an aura of optimism that astounded him. It
seemed that the more control people had over the government, the more control they used in their daily
lives. He carefully allocated his tax bite to the Congressional Library, scientific research, and social
programs. He worried over the remaining balance for a long time.

Tom Hanna was a red dirt farmer in the Oklahoma panhandle. His family had worked the same land
for five generations and even though it wasn't a large spread, it was theirs. He was a proud man, and
when he came in from the fields that Saturday he took his taxes seriously. He allocated the bulk of it to
the Farm Bureau and the County Agriculture Commission. The rest he parceled out to the two state
universities for operating expenses. He had a boy down at OU playing football and studying to be a