by Paul Mavrides

I'm going to tell you a scary story. It's called "My Tax Case." My Tax Case isn't very sexy, it's dry as dust, complex and slow moving, so I hope you'll bear with me. It doesn't involve brutal thought police kicking in my door like a bad TV show. There weren't any ambitious prosecutors out to make a name for themselves by publicly attacking my work as pornography. There are no prudish hanging judges with bitter faces to rail against. If I'd lost, I wouldn't have gone to jail, I wouldn't have gained a criminal record, the entire subject wouldn't even make a good protest song. Actually, my situation was akin to being rubbed with a piece of sandpaper in one spot for several years. Or perhaps taking half a decade to go through the windshield of a car in a slow motion accident.

What was going on?

Well, in order to raise sales tax revenues, the California State Board of Equalization, which is the branch of the Government that collects sales taxes every time you purchase anything that's applicable to sales tax, made a clear illegal reinterpretation of the existing sales tax regulations for publishers, authors, and illustrators. The BOE, decided that the authors of comic books, editorial cartoons, illustrated children's books, are no longer authors.

At present the earnings I receive--royalties, residuals, advances--generated by author's manuscripts are exempt from sales tax law, as if I wrote in prose. The ruling of the BOE redefined original manuscripts, of cartoonists and children's book creators as "templates for printing manufacturing."

The BOE put cartoonists and children's books authors in the oppressive position of having to gain state granted permission to use their constitutionally guaranteed right to free speech. See this slip of paper? It's my sellers permit, a license from the state which allows me to collect sales tax for them. It also happened, for a while, to be an author's permit. The term free speech became an oxymoron, a self mocking concept.

Free speech isn't free if only the wealthy have access to it. The power to tax is also the power to destroy. If the state rescinded your sales tax license, for any reason at all, you'd be unable to earn an income from your work, unable to arrange to have your work published, your literal right to speech would have been suspended by the government. Gov't tax accountants usurped the US constitution and seized the power for themselves, and themselves alone, to determine who is an author and who is not, who gets to be published and who does not. I told you this was a scary story.

This incremental curtailing of speech rights was hardly noticed by most of you, operating as it does at a level invisible to most of the public. That's the insidious nature of this case. It's only a matter of time before the Board, backed into a semiotic dead end, begins taxing children's literature authors and their publishers within our state.

In their pursuit of this issue, the Board relied in great part on the maze of gov't bureaucracy to provide cover for their mischief. The Board reneged on a settlement in my favour, imposed, without prior notice, a tax lien on my property and played hardball without pause. I estimate that I've personally lost over a $100,000 in income because of vanished work time. It took me almost five years to move through five appeals levels at the BOE. Expenses are currently estimated to surpass $70,000, on just the appeals alone.

And how large was the bill I've been fighting over? The amount of tax at issue was only around a thousand dollars.

As Robin Williams so astutely pointed out, the Bill of Rights was not written on an Etch-a-Sketch. And it's up to all of us to prove that.