Which Witch Will Twitch?
An Excentric World undercover reporter was recently dispatched to infiltrate the committee responsible for privatization of National Parks. To maintain his cover, photos had to be taken at night. Most park facilities include a visitors center, classrooms, theaters, gift shops, picnic tables, developed trails, restrooms and group areas with ramadas and facilities, some used for weddings. When revenue data was plugged in from the parks that included concessions, the computer hard drive fried. Danger, Will Robinson.
by Blodwyn Smythe,
Sedona’s Virtual Reporter
SEDONA, AZ: Not too long ago, the Romanian government passed a witch tax. The tax levies a duty on people who are employed as witches and fortune tellers, who must now pay income taxes and pay into government pension funds.
The Romanian government will start collecting the tax, which is being referred to as the “witch tax,” according to the Christian Science Monitor. (Some Romanians believe the Christians are the ones behind to levies). The Romanian government re-classified certain professions to full professional status, subjecting them to taxes. Parking valets, embalmers and driving instructors are also included.
A pole dancer demonstrates the positive effects on one’s physique. It appears to be a before picture. Never mind the foot.
Not to be outdone, New York City just included private lap dancing and pole dancing as taxable professions. With so many new rules and laws and threats involving 2012’s voting rights, many feared that if they danced in line while waiting to vote, they could be taxed. Surprisingly, there were no billboards erected warning of the poll dance.
Some in the witch trade are cursing the government, figuratively and literally, while others believe it legitimizes the trade and support it. Witches must now pay 16 percent of their income to the government as income tax, as well as contribute to pension and health funds.
There seems to have been a lot of witch related media in the recent past. Many recall senatorial candidate and Tea Party darling Christine O’Donnell of Delaware insisted she wasn’t a witch after admitting to having dabbled in witchcraft as young woman. Her campaign cursed, she was crushed at the polls. About the same time, the first half of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows” was released and the film “Season of the Witch,” starring Nicolas Cage and Ron Perlman, was debuting in theaters.
The proposed tax sparked concern in Sedona, Arizona and Salem, Massachusetts, where clairvoyants, palm readers, psychics and mediums abound in their communities with the respect and appreciation of the general public–well, maybe of the open-minded tourists or at least the desperate and confused occasional visitor.
While Romania is the land of Count Dracula, both the literary character and Vlad Tepes (Vlad the Impaler), the brutal Medieval warlord and inspiration for the character, Sedona and Salem remain mystical places within the United States. Sure, Bermuda has its Triangle and Stonehenge is shrouded in mystery and power, but Sedona and Salem have more crystal shops that all other localities combined. If you laid every crystal from Sedona and Salem end to end, the line would stretch a really, really long distance, never mind adding the attached wands and jewelry.
In Sedona and Salem, futures telling is considered a service and therefore not taxable. The selling of crystals or magic wands or jewelry is taxable income. Neither city seems concerned with the taxing of parking valets, as very little parking is available. With regards to embalmers–that’s just weird no matter where you live. And the only pole dance around involves fitness classes for senior citizens– hardly a draw for the typical g-string money stuffing clientele.
Sedona, etched by its magnificent red rocks, and Salem, by the Atlantic coastline, have always attracted visitors who possess a curiosity for paranormal phenomena, UFOs and possible cabalistic events. Salem’s history may be laden in the occult with its reputation of mass murders during the Salem Witch Trials in the late 1600s, but Sedona is rapidly gaining notoriety for being the land of enigmatic vortexes and UFO sightings and landings.
While people around the globe may lose track of time, in Sedona that term takes on a quite different meaning. Sedonans who “lose time” do so because of being held captive by aliens for what appears to be days while the extraterrestrials probe and prod them, only to return them in what, in actuality, would be just a few earthly minutes.
Now the fascination with witches, werewolves, vampires and warlocks and the like is confined to a series of Twilight movies, geared toward teenagers and young adults who yearn for the good old days of Goth and the writings of Poe, Byron, Shelley, Hawthorne and Faulkner. Sadly, this misunderstood subculture represents the last group of children who actually read.
While there was no mention of witches, embalmers or lap and pole dancers being taxed during the national debates for President of the United States, many people in those professions are busily filing papers with Legal Zoom in hopes of registering their businesses as not-for-profit corporations.
