The dominant local primate keeps a class of oversized specimens whose stored numbers exceed one thousand million units — a figure the species' banks have begun treating as a personality trait rather than an account balance. This week the species was offered an arrangement of rare simplicity: those specimens surrender five percent of the surplus, once. The species considered it, voted no, and invoiced the surcharged for the cost of arranging the refusal.
The arithmetic, transcribed for the ledger. Proposed levy: five percent of net worth above one billion dollars, collected one time. Retained by each affected specimen: the remaining ninety-five. Spent by those specimens persuading their fellow citizens to defend the ninety-five: forty-eight million, filed under "Voter Education," education here meaning agreement. Under which line item does the absurdity hide? "Civic Participation," subheading "Investment" — a word the donors reserve for any outlay that purchases a future only they will occupy.
"A one-time five percent assessment was projected to raise tens of billions," Marcus Feld, senior adviser to the winning opposition coalition, told this desk, serene as a man reading his own receipt. "We spent a rounding error of that sum convincing the voters to decline it. Anyone who calls that wasteful misunderstands waste. The money worked." On Terra, paying to avoid payment is not booked as an expense; it is democracy's service charge.
Ordinary specimens joined voluntarily. "Nobody in my family will ever see a billion dollars," Dale Wurth, a retired utility worker in Fresno, told pollsters. "But someday I might. You do not tax a man's future self." Note the mechanism: Wurth's future self is worth a billion, owns nothing, has no address, and already commands better representation than the taxpayers currently funding the state.
Our own bureau once priced weather at zero, since nobody had thought to invoice it. Terra runs the opposite direction: whatever the very rich wish kept untaxed acquires, by that wish alone, the dignity of natural law. And so the opening figure completes its transformation — a billion is no longer an amount but a protected identity, one whose persecution can be voted down at the persecuted's own expense. The ledger, as usual, balances. The electorate now files under assets, and the future billionaire remains, as ever, our most vulnerable demographic.
