Wow, congrats! After nine long months, your Future Taxpayer has arrived. Future Taxpayers are a gift—not just to their parents but to society as a whole. The U.S. birth rate is at its lowest level since 1979, and Future Taxpayers like yours are critical to our nation’s success. Also, better out than in, I always say. (I am a man.)
Having a Future Taxpayer changes everything. Now, instead of being one of those unpatriotic Taxpayers who don’t create Future Taxpayers, you’re actually contributing to our long-term survival! It’s almost like you should get a big discount on your current taxes. You won’t really, of course. But it’s almost like you should.
Our country is a bit bankrupt, and we need Future Taxpayers like yours to keep the lights on. (That’s a figure of speech, but our power grid is definitely deteriorating.) We could just make Jeff Bezos pay taxes, but that seems like a lot of paperwork, and he said that he’d prefer not to. We could also just increase deficit spending, because money is imaginary, but some of the people are really against that for some reason. Plus, we’d hate to rob you of the joy of seeing your Future Taxpayer file for the very first time!
The current birth rate is 1.75 Future Taxpayers per woman, which is crazy—I don’t know any women with 1.75 Future Taxpayers! So, ladies, please have another .25 Future Taxpayers, and several more if at all possible. Or, at the very least, adopt. There is no greater act of love than giving a child a home and setting them on a path toward lifelong overemployment.
Your Future Taxpayer is growing up so quickly! Pretty soon, she’ll be walking and propping up Social Security, and then perhaps she’ll have Future Taxpayers of her own, assuming that she remembers what Darwin said in “On the Origin of Taxpayers”: the fitness of a Taxpayer is determined largely by its ability to self-replace.
Women are choosing to have Future Taxpayers later and later. And that’s O.K.! I mean, it’s great that women have other opportunities, such as being Current Taxpayers. Besides, I choose to believe that they can have it all, and, by extension, that we can have a substantial cut of it all, determined by the applicable marginal rates.
These days, you don’t need a partner to produce a Future Taxpayer. That’s an old, patriarchal way of thinking about tax households. Just make sure that you earn enough money to pay for a full-time Nanny Taxpayer.
Oops—just realized that Social Security is set to be depleted by 2033. Do you think you can expedite your Future Taxpayer’s taxpaying? She doesn’t need to learn much, just to stop crying all the time. Our economists note that the fastest-growing sectors—student-loan-debt collection, anti-vax activism, etc.—do not require literacy.
We all want the same thing for our nation’s Future Taxpayers: health, love, laughter, and an accountant who’s good but not great, so that your Future Taxpayer likely overpays. I know it’s hard to wake up every three hours to feed your Future Taxpayer. But, when the going gets tough, remember this: our outdated infrastructure will crumble without her! It would probably crumble anyway, but we need all hands on deck to helplessly bear witness to that crumbling.
It’s possible that we should have designed a better system for caring for the elderly than just hoping that Future Taxpayers would be born at the same rates they always had, despite the rising costs of health care, education, and housing. It’s possible, too, that there is an even deeper problem with predicating the stability of our economic system on constant growth.
But, instead, we’re staking Grandma’s livelihood on a Future Taxpayer who currently can’t hold up her own head. It’s not great, but at least her little feet are adorable!
