Taxing ourselves

Being a prognosticator can be a difficult task. The job does require you to foretell the future, after all, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be done. Heck, sometimes it’s really easy.

Take the question of raising taxes: I can get that one right one hundred percent of the time. So when Judge Rutherford proposed a county occupational tax, I threw caution to the wind and immediately predicted it would never pass.

Okay, so it hasn’t come up for a vote yet. That doesn’t matter. It will need a majority of magistrates to vote in favor of the bill, and no sane office holder who will have to go back to the voters at election time is ever gonna tell those same voters beforehand that their tax bills are going to go up. I foresee lots of no votes from this crowd.

Not that they have been alone in what I predict will be solid opposition to this idea. The Chamber of Commerce has already voiced concern about the job-killing effects of this proposed levy. And the group has been joined by Monk Sanders, who objects to more taxes on the working class, who, in his opinion (and I concur) are already being killed by high electric rates and gasoline prices.

One letter-to the-editor writer opposed the new tax by saying that once government has a source of new revenue; it will immediately spend more, not less. This may very well be true, but there is also a side to this argument that hasn’t been explored by the new tax’s detractors, and that is how the very citizens portrayed as victims of big government run amok are sometimes responsible for unnecessary costs themselves.

Monk Sanders suggested cutting waste as an alternative to any new taxation. One example of wasteful spending he cited was for what he called the “dog hotel”. Nice phrasing, by the way. Put that way, it does sound like a ridiculous way to spend tax money.

Except that the only reason the county needs an animal shelter-the more proper name-is that irresponsible animal owners, aka tax payers-allow their animals to run and breed freely, thereby insuring a ready supply of neighborhood pests, no matter what neighborhood you live in. And when they get tired of that animal, just load it up like a piece of trash and set it off in a strange neighborhood, and voila, problem solved, right?

Except that they just dropped their problem off on someone else. Not to worry though, because they’ll probably get a similar surprise package from another animal owner who has had the same idea.

And when I say the animals are dropped off like a piece of trash, I mean exactly what I said, because trash is still being freely distributed along the county’s roadways by unconcerned citizens who are more concerned with keeping their vehicles clean.

That’s the way trash was handled until Gov. Patton got the Solid Waste Ordinance passed; throw the trash into the creek and send it via inland waterways to someone else’s property.

So let me say to those who see themselves as potential victims here, maybe, just maybe, if you take responsibility for some of your actions, that by itself could save enough money to keep those new taxes at bay.