By Jim Fulton

It's axiomatic that you get less of what you tax, more of what you subsidize. The former argument is often used when the subject is "sin" taxes; the latter point is often made when the subject of ethanol subsidies bubbles to the conversational forefront.

As governments at all levels struggle to fund (allegedly) necessary programs (see ethanol subsidies, above), there is inevitably grandstanding ("We need to increase state income taxes on the wealthy or we’ll have to bus our kindergarteners to La Crosse!") and attempts to levy taxes on people who are especially bad at math (gambling).

Let's explore another means of raising revenue while discouraging an especially noxious behavior. Smoking? No -- further increases will only fuel the flight of consumers to neighboring states or Ho-Chunk et al.

I propose a tax on the phrases "It's about" and "It's not about," with a further surcharge on the phrases "It's all about," "I'm all about" and "We're all about."

The tax would be structured based on the size of the audience: in a one-on-one conversation, the tax would be minimal, perhaps a nickel or two. For a cable news program, the tax would be a few tens of thousands of dollars. For Oprah Winfrey, Dr. Phil and the like, the tax would be tens to hundreds of millions of dollars.

If you spend an hour or two listening to the radio, watching television or perusing the printed media or Internet, you will soon realize that even a modest per-incident tax, as outlined above, would raise, based on conservative econometric projections, roughly $19 hillion jillion -- a sum adequate to fund the Social Security and Medicaid shortfalls, rebuild the entire Gulf Coast, completely underwrite manned missions to both the moon and Mars, with enough left over to fund the reconstruction of Iraq and anticipated reconstructions of Iran and North Korea.

Alternatively, these revenues could almost pay for the utopian pipe dreams of Progressive Dane.

Consider Madison's 105.5, “Triple M FM.” Their slogan -- "It's about the music" -- repeated approximately 97 times per hour, would provide a veritable geyser of tax revenue. And how delicious to be harvesting tax revenue from anything that describes itself as "Madison's progressive radio."

Now, the Neil Heinens and other goo-goo ninnies of the world will no doubt wring their hands, furrow their brows and jostle their jowls about the "profound First Amendment implications" of this proposal. Frankly, I'll give their concerns a bit more than a cursory brush-off when they successfully advocate repeal of the Constitutional abomination that is McCain-Feingold.

Beyond such expected whining, I think the glibness and faux hipness that "It's all about" users seek to convey is a clear and present danger to substantiveness and seriousness of thought and governance.

Can ANYONE imagine George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, John Kennedy or Ronald Reagan using a phrase like that?

John Marshall said that the power to tax is the power to destroy. Let’s use that power to wipe out "It's all about," and in so doing strike a powerful blow against the Oprah-fication of American cultural and political discourse.