[BlackGriffen]

That's the best name I could come up for it, anyway. Really, this tax would be less about fame, and more about citizens being able to collectively punish those who piss them off. The way it would work is very simple - each year every citizen is permitted to tag one individual for financial retribution. The size of that retribution would be tiny (say 0.01 or 0.001). The citizen must pay a processing fee of, say, double the tax levied.

Now, I call it the "fame tax" because that is what it would amount to - only people famous enough to piss a lot of people off would have to pay a significant amount of money.

Another thing to call it may be the "incivility tax." It could also be called the "non-conformity tax."

I don't know if I really like the idea, but I thought it would be interesting to bat around.

BlackGriffen

[wang_himself]

How about these taxes too:

Asshole Tax
Annoying Thread Tax
Zim Tax
Wang Tax Excemption
Dumbass Tax
Road Rage Tax
Drive Thru Rage Tax
SPAM Tax (Should be SPAM Death Penalty)
SPAM the food Tax
Politician Tax
The "My Kid is a Honor Student" Bumper Stick Tax ($100 Million per year)
RIAA was wrong Tax (Only applies to RIAA and its members)
Bad Movie Tax (Director and Film Stars must pay their salaries to those who saw the bad film)
and finaly the Period Tax, The period tax collects 1 cent for every period a person uses, just don't ever use periods, ever, seriously ever, ummm, the sentence never ends, hmmm

[Millennium]

Although it's interesting, there are problems.

We need to make sure that this tax is at least theoretically payable by anyone against whom it might be levied. To do that, we need to figure out how high the tax could possibly be.

At this moment, there are some 260 million people in the US. Let us assume, for the moment, that the ability to levy this tax were made a part of a person's 1040. Taking into account both people who do not pay income tax (children, poor people, and dependents of other taxpayers; to prevent abuse we'd have to limit the levying ability to one per 1040 filed in a given household) that's probably about 100 million 1040s each year.

In the worst-case scenario, every 1040 slams the same person with the fame tax. If we set the fame tax at one cent, that's $1 million for the person against whom it is levied. Even at if we set the fame tax at one mil (1/10 of a cent; technically this is a valid unit of money in the US, though it has not appeared on any currency in decades, and is usually only referenced on gas-station signs), a person could theoretically be forced to pay $100,000. That's an awfully large fine for annoying somebody; even most famous people couldn't just spend that much at the drop of a hat.

Perhaps something like this would be in order. For each of the first ten people who "slap" you, you pay $1 (so if ten people hate you, you pay $10). For each of the next ten, you pay $0.99, for the next ten it's $0.98, and so on. For everyone after the 990th, you pay one cent. With this base formula, if 1000 people slap you, you pay $505; not an insignificant amount of money but not insurmountable by any means. This should also ensure that most non-famous people are not unduly burdened, because it's rather hard to get 1000 people who can only slap one person each to choose to slap you. You have to screw up pretty badly to do that.

That's the base formula. Atarting at 5001 people, however, the formula changes. The old dollar amount (which would, incidentally, be $545.01) is wiped away, and instead you pay a flat 11 cents per person who has slapped you. The cost for 5001 people, therefore, is $550.11; a significant increase but not all that huge. At 10,000 you pay $1100 (under the base formula you'd only have paid $635). To get ten thousand people to slap you as opposed to anyone else, you must be doing something really wrong.

At 10,001, the scale changes to a flat 12 cents. At 20,001, it's a flat 13 cents. This tops out at 890,000, at which point you are paying $1 per slap. I doubt that even John Ashcroft could manage that many people choosing to slap him.

Either way, the idea is completely infeasible, and won't ever work, because no politician in his right mind would vote for a bill which will have a heavy impact on his own taxes, most likely. However, it does make for a fun thought experiment.