Tax Regressor

The opening segment is a parody of the “What Do I Make?” Facebook posting. All the man simply said in the posting was that as a boy he wanted to be a firefighter, and was just curious as to what the current income was for a firefighter. The response of that “firefighter” in CoBaD’s opinion was extremely abrasive and not at all warranted. CoBaD has had the privilege of meeting several firefighters, and none of them has ever behaved as poorly as that.

The body of the skit is based on a very public scuffle in the Rock Island, Illinois papers in the summer of 1875. It all started with an 11 August 1875 letter to the editor. Judge S.S. Guyer, under the pen name “Tax Payer,” accused Township Assessor James “Scotch” Taylor (1814-1901) of abusing his office by underreporting animals on farms and pocketing the difference (e.g., Guyer said that John Edgington actually had 21 horses on his farm, whereas James Taylor’s records said only 10 were present). Taylor countered by arguing that in that particular instance, those 11 horses not counted because they were deemed to be too old or too young to be work horses, and therefore were not considered to be taxable. Most of the press, the public, and inevitably the law, sided with Taylor. The town of Taylor Ridge, Illinois, is named in his honor.

This skit is a highly fictional set up leading to that spat. It claims Guyer submitted an anonymous letter to the editor as an act of vengeance after being caught by Taylor for attempting to cheat on his taxes. Why he simply didn’t avoid the whole ordeal by filing his taxes with Haute Cuisine will never be known.

Cheers tae scotstranslate.com fur th' helping wi' making James’s lines sound mair authentic!