Another difference between death and taxes is that you don't have to work like fury to pay for the dying you did last year.

Quillen riffs on the familiar maxim that “nothing is certain but death and taxes,” sharpening it into a modern complaint about the ongoing, labor-intensive nature of taxation. Death, however inevitable, is a one-time event; taxes recur annually and require sustained effort—earning, accounting, and paying—long after the year’s life has already been lived. The joke hinges on the absurdity of “paying for” last year’s existence, suggesting that taxation feels like retroactive billing for simply having been alive. Beneath the humor is a populist skepticism toward bureaucratic demands and the sense that civic obligations can become burdensome, repetitive, and emotionally disproportionate to their abstract purpose.