Tax Evaders, The Video Game

Just in time for Tax Day — a video game where you get to defend your local schools, hospitals, and fire departments from the dreaded TAX EVADERS. A totally addictive game for any pro-tax patriot!

Oh no! The school’s windows are boarded and the lights have gone out at the fire station!

Look what happens when we make sure everyone pays their share!

WHEW! Taxes save the day once again!

Cleaner Burning Stoves for the Developing World

The Oak Ridge National Laboratory helped develop a new light-weight energy efficient stove, which will reduce fuel use, smoke, and cooking time for families in the developing world.

Stoves like this reduce use of forest resources and emission of greenhouse gases.

Photo credit: Envirofit.

Tax Dollars Create Money. Literally.

Those dollars in your wallet? Printed by the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing. Check out their awesome anti-counterfeiting work — and the high-tech new $100 bill, coming soon.

Taxes Prevent Discrimination

• A woman gets fired without warning because she is pregnant.
• A man missing an arm is fired, though his disability had not hindered his work.
• A women with severe rheumatoid arthritis is ridiculed for her limp, and her supervisor refuses to reschedule her for work after she recovers from surgery.
• A man faces persistent racial harassment at his job site, and is threatened by his employer when he complains.

Americans have recourse against discrimination in the workplace thanks to the EEOC. These are just a few of the cases the EEOC has fought and won this year.

Protecting Americans’ jobs and their civil rights: your tax dollars at work.

Like Google Earth? Thank NASA and the USGS.

Here’s a photo of the newest Earth-observing satellite, whose images will be made available *for free* thanks to the U.S. government and your tax dollars. Data from previous Landsat satellites have made whole new kinds of research possible (and are also what power Google Earth).

Launched by NASA, this little guy will be Landsat 8. And how have the previous Landsat’s worked out? Glad you asked:

Landsat 5 successfully set the new Guinness World Records title for ‘Longest-operating Earth observation satellite’ as stated in an e-mail from Guinness World Records sent to NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. Outliving its three-year design life, Landsat 5 delivered high-quality, global data of Earth’s land surface for 28 years and 10 months.

Photo: NASA/Kim Shiflett

Taxes are Preserving America’s Literary Culture

Americans have written some of the world’s great literature, but increasingly few of us are reading it. As the NEA says, literary reading in America is “declining rapidly among all groups, but that the rate of decline has accelerated, especially among the young.”

So for the past seven years, the NEA has sponsored “The Big Read,” a program to encourage reading across America, especially among young people. The NEA provides grants to local communities, who discuss and celebrate a single great book through a month of local events.

At the Brooklyn Open, a open-mic night and book group explored Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. Photo by Brenda Williams-Butts.

Less Asthma in Mount Vernon, IN. (Thanks, EPA.)

From the EPA:

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced that Countrymark Refining and Logistics, LLC has agreed to pay a $167,000 civil penalty, perform environmental projects totaling more than $180,000, and spend $18 million on new pollution controls to resolve Clean Air Act (CAA) violations at its refinery, located in Mount Vernon, Ind.

Once fully implemented, the pollution controls required by the settlement will reduce emissions of harmful air pollution that can cause respiratory problems, such as asthma, and are significant contributors to acid rain, smog, and haze, by an estimated 1,000 tons or more per year.

[…]

The State of Indiana actively participated in the settlement with CountryMark and has received over $110,000 to fund a supplemental environmental project to remove asbestos-containing material from an old grain elevator in downtown Mount Vernon. The settlement also requires CountryMark to provide at least $70,000 in funding for a supplemental environmental project that will install diesel retrofit and/or idle reduction technologies on school buses and/or non-school bus, publicly-owned vehicles located within 50 miles of the refinery.