Tax Cuts for Dummies

These engineering and science tech-centric jokes, song parodies, anecdotes and assorted humor have been collected from friends and websites across the Internet. I check back occasionally for new fodder, but it seems all the old content is reappearing all over (like this is). The humor is light-hearted and clean and sometimes slightly assaultive to the easily-offended, so you are forewarned. It is all workplace-safe.

Humor #1, #2, #3

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner and all eat the exact same meal. The bill for all ten comes to $100. They decided to pay their bill the way we pay our taxes, so they divided the bill like this:

The first four men — those with the lowest income — would pay nothing. The fifth would pay $1, the sixth $3, the seventh $7, the eighth $12, the ninth $18, and the tenth man — the one with the highest income — would pay $59.

“Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I'm going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.” So now dinner for the ten only cost $80.00.

So the first four men were unaffected. They would still eat for free. But what about the other six — the paying customers? How could they divvy up the $20 windfall so that everyone would get his “fair share”?

The six men realized that $20 divided by six is $3.33. But if they subtracted that from everybody's share, then the fifth man and the sixth man would end up being PAID to eat their meal. So the restaurant owner suggested that it would be fair to reduce each man's bill by roughly the same amount.

And so the fifth man paid nothing, the sixth pitched in $2, the seventh paid $5, the eighth paid $9, the ninth paid $12, leaving the tenth man with a bill of $52 instead of his earlier $59. Each of the six was better off than before. And the first four continued to eat for free.

But once outside the restaurant, the men began to compare their savings. “I only got $1 out of the $20,” declared the sixth man, then, pointing to the tenth. “But he got $7!”. “Yeah, that's right,” exclaimed the fifth man, “I only saved $1, too. It's unfair that he got seven times more than me!”

”That's true!” shouted the seventh man, “Why should he get $7 back when I got only $2? The wealthy get all the breaks!”

“Wait a minute,” yelled the first four men in unison, “We didn't get anything at all. The system exploits the poor!”

The nine men surrounded the tenth and beat him up. The next night he didn't show up for dinner, so the nine sat down and ate without him.

But when it came time to pay the bill, they discovered, a little late what was very important. They were $52 short of paying the bill!