Here's a radical concept: ask the corporations to pay taxes!

I must take exception to a remark I heard more than once on American news over the past few days; it went something like this: if small businesses were honest when claiming their income and paid their fair share in taxes, America could practically balance its budget.

Yeah! Those deadbeat, unpatriotic leeches! Why don’t the income tax police go after them so we could balance our budget!

A short twenty-five years ago, I was one of those small business owners. My goal was to afford private Catholic school and college for both kids.

I packed four lunches for the next day while listening to spelling, checking homework, and preparing dinner. We were an average suburban family in the 60s. Very Ozzie and Harriet...I didn’t wear an apron, though.

Between chauffeuring, after-school activities, music lessons, homework, and projects (the pinatas were most challenging), the four of us lived chock-full days. Weekends were for catching up, housecleaning, yard work, and the week’s laundry: 20 socks, 10 white blouses, 2 uniforms, ready for Monday. Nightly homework was done after playtime but before dinner. When the girls were in primary school, I would bake one dozen cupcakes for the two classes of each grade when it was one of my kid’s turns. I am not complaining; at least the good nuns taught the kids how to read, along with excellent study habits and building on the moral compass they were learning at home.

And don’t let me forget to mention our snow-white toy poodle, who was no less hyperactive than we were…and we all thought she was perfectly normal. Despite her diminutive size, our dog came with a load of her own unique responsibilities, from feeding and walking to veterinary visits that never seemed to coincide with opportune points in our hectic family schedule.

I began my professional workday at 8am sharp. I operated a small graphic arts service. The word service means exactly what it implies: have the assignment ready when it is needed. Period.

There was a cartoon taped on a wall in my office showing five or six men doubled over laughing hysterically. The caption read: “You need it when?”

One year was particularly busy. The little service that could ran shifts of freelance typesetters, paste-up artists, and proofreaders from 8am until 11pm. At the end of the business year, the accountant prepared the tax return. I paid what was owed. All year, I also paid for health insurance for the one full-time employee. That year, my little service business got audited: an additional $13,000 was due in taxes. It was as though the Government peeked at the business’s bank balance and demanded every last dollar: “You have how much? Thanks -- we’ll have all of it.” So you see, folks, this was only one little business that paid its fair share. However, I vowed never to work that hard again, and I didn’t.

The moral of this sad little tale is this: leave the waitresses, cabbies, teachers, cops, starving grad students eking life out on stipends that Reagan saw fit to tax, and all the other struggling, hard-working, low-paid American workers alone! Leave the small businesses that are paying their fair share out of it, too! Why not ask the big corporations...the same corporations now enjoying record profits…why not ask them, in our bestest, nicest, pretty-please begging, whining, extra Sunday special with-a-cherry-on-top plea...if they might entertain the notion of paying just a teensy weensy, iddy widdy bit of taxes? Oh, nothing too great...we don’t want to anger them, now do we? Why, then they would threaten to move even more of their business to the Cayman Islands...and we certainly wouldn’t want that! No! We taxpayers wouldn’t expect those big, rich corporations to pay their fair share...bite your tongue! But, maybe, just maybe, if we all ask real nice now, do you think the rich corporations which simply have too much money…money they’ve been shoveling in as fast as they can...just so much lovely green luscious crinkly-crisp money...they might agree to pay a teensy weensy, iddy widdy li’l bit of taxes? They can decide how much they want to pay. They just might go for it...maybe?

Ya think?