By William Weissinger

Bravo to the County for proposing a mandatory parking tax for everyone. I have one quibble: to be consistent, the County needs to combine its proposed boat tax, its proposed parking tax, and its proposed bicycle tax with a head tax – that is, a tax to be imposed on the literal head of each citizen and tourist, with the payment to be evidenced by a mandatory “head tax medallion” worn everywhere in public on one’s forehead. Such “forehead jewelry” would be easy to see, and fashionable as well Now you may say, why not merely make a deal with Elon Musk’s Neuralink and embed a credit card in our brains?. Well now, allowing credit card companies free rein into our brains? No good could come of that. But a debit card? Sure, that would work. And with Neualink Dream Recall TM (coming soon no doubt to a brain near you) your dreams would be better than the real vacations you, after paying all these new taxes, could no longer afford – and without Covid or missed connections.

However, even a head tax will not fully accomplish our needs – some people walk a lot, and some run for miles and miles – think of how much wear that creates to municipal roads and sidewalks, and how much consternation they cause our drivers, who after all will be paying a parking tax themselves!

So it is only fair to require that each person carry a County-issued pedometer (available for a reasonable one-time fee) that would track the number of steps each of us walk, and impose on all our monthly steps a “steppage” tax. Or the tax could be more simply applied by geolocation using our brain-implanted Neuralinks: after all, it wouldn’t be fair for us to tax someone jogging in Whatcom County. That would be for Whatcom County to do!

Skeptics may claim that this is an unreasonable intrusion into our rights and a violation of the Constitution’s Interstate Commerce Clause, but you can see yourselves this is absurd: no inter-state walking would be taxed – we don’t even border another State, and to get to Canada you’d have to swim. Which reminds me: shouldn’t we consider a swimming tax? Of course, then we could no longer call the most common swimming stroke the “free”style But you must admit that is a small price to pay for creating a firm funding base for San Juan County.