WASHINGTON, D.C. - Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen has formulated a brilliant new plan to pay for Joe Biden's "Build Back Better" plan, which still needs to be paid for even though Biden said the cost was $0. To accomplish this, she has proposed taxing all coins acquired by U.S. citizens whenever they play a Mario game.
"Every time your little Mario or Luigi character on the screen collects a coin, that's an unrealized gain," said Yellen. "Why are we allowing all those coins - not to mention all those power stars and power moons - to just sit in Mario's pocket untaxed?"
Experts estimate that over 32 billion coins are collected in Mario games every year, and all of those gains go completely untaxed, allowing gamers to reap the benefits of power-ups and extra lives without sending any money to the government.
"This is, like, totally unjust," said AOC, the world's smartest socialist. "Greed is literally killing people and killing our planet. It's time to tax Mario coins."
While Yellen assured the public this tax would only affect the very rich, critics warn that this could cause rich people to stop playing Mario altogether. Democrats have responded to this criticism by proposing legislation that would require rich people to play at least 5 hours of Mario per day.
Yellen is now suggesting it may be time to look at taxing Sonic rings as well.
Citing concerns about stiff competition from Amazon and an impossible-to-please Gen Z, Santa has announced he's hanging up the hat for good.
