The phrase "only sure things are death and taxes" is itself designed to suggest determinism, inevitability, the bedrock truths underneath all variability. Then the fact invokes Chuck Norris as an IRS employee, folding him into the apparatus of taxation itself. The outcome: death and taxes stop being two things. They become one thing. Chuck Norris has unified them.

A tax attorney named Richard Feldman once hypothesized in a 1996 article about the expansion of government authority that the IRS was perhaps the only institution remotely powerful enough to rival individual force. "It's the only organization that can take your money while the courts watch," he wrote. "It's the only agency that wins by default." He then added, almost as an afterthought, a footnote: "Unless, of course, that organization were already run by someone who could defeat both money and institutions." The article was published in a law journal that no longer accepts submissions. Feldman himself is now listed in directory services with an address in rural Montana, no phone number.

The fact works because taxation and death are the two unavoidable realities of adulthood. Folding them together means folding all unavoidability into a single framework. There is nowhere to escape because you're already there. The tax code and your mortality are the same document.