Mandatory Taxation Bill Passes

Baikonur, Kazakhstan, Earth -- 15 Apr. 2057:  After only minimal debate this day, the governing Technocrat-Socialist coalition fulfilled one of its major platform planks as the Senate approved the controversial new tax code in a 255-213 vote.  The signing ceremony, set to occur in 3 days, will mark the official end to the extremely unpopular tax policy experiment which spelled the end of the Libertarian-Traditionalist-Corporatist government which held the Trapezoid for 8 years.

"The byzantine bureaucratic and ontological nightmare which was the Fee-For-Service Model of taxation is no more," wrote veteran political blogger Dax Blagenflam at Branches and Mandates.  "Gone are the 57-page forms, the endless cascade of receipts, the 'indirect life-impact statements' on everything from public education services to childhood vaccinations to pure research funding.  The great irony of the age is that a steep progressive income tax with a parade of fiddly Technocratic incentives and penalties will in the end be less complicated and less intrusive than the promised 'voluntary tax' which bought the Libertarians nearly a decade of nominal laissez-faire policy."

Gage Maximillian Pequod, of the respected right-front blog Live Free or Die, wrote that "the Corporatist's Benedictine backstabbing, which killed the possibility of a Flat Tax, set the stage for the monstrosity of Fee-For-Service.  They have sowed what we all now reap.  In the attempt to remove even the slightest of tax burdens from the rentier class and force the productive classes to bear the burden alone, they have admirably succeeded in ensuring that they will pay handsomely for the back-left's massive welfare schemes and monumental projects."

Yazem Sirius, the interim leader of the extreme upper-leftwing Technoprogressive Party, wrote on the official blog that "the time is fast coming when such all-consuming wrangles over economic leverage will seem like a sideshow to the real decisions we face.  None of the major political actors are willing to face the exploding reality of Economy 2.0 -- the obsolescence of money as we know it, the near-total unemployment which is accompanying the shift toward a post-labour economy, and the radical self-sufficiencies which will make most forms of trade both redundant and self-destructive.  In a mere 5 to 10 years, the laws of economics will have been completely rewritten."