by Richard A. Cheatham, Press Media Group, LLC
I wasn’t smiling, but I sure was paying. You may smile at my recent letter to the tax man below.
Enclosed you’ll find my check for __, an amount you tell me I somehow owe on my “2005 Real Estate Tax Bill.” I know you’re “just an employee doing his or her job” following orders from your superiors. (Same popular explanation used at the trials in Nuremberg following World War II, by the way.)
I’m also forwarding a copy of this letter to the person who claims to represent me on City Council and to the Mayor, not that that will matter in the least. It just makes me feel better for all of you to know how I feel.
My city real estate taxes have increased dramatically over the last five years. If you say that’s due to my house becoming worth more, I answer that I’ve not sold and still live in my house and have no profits from any theoretical increase in value. Just perhaps, the tax rates could have been reduced by a corresponding degree! What a novel idea! I guess you’d just rather keep the windfall at my expense.
This outrageous tax bill is about __% of my personal yearly income. It’s as if you own my house and rent it to me for __ per month. I also have to pay your personal property tax and a city business license fee in addition to State and Federal taxes. The city government has become a vampire. Keep it up and you’ll kill your prey or it will try to gather enough strength to run away from you.
Consider one of the many expenses funded through these taxes. I have no children, yet a good bit of this money goes to support poorly performing city government charity schools that some still call the “public school” system.
Government monopolies don’t perform as well as competing providers who routinely have to deliver good value to their customers or risk losing their patronage to competitors. Imagine that! Your lousy, top-heavy school system is guaranteed fat budgets because you have me and other real estate taxpayers over a barrel.
I never liked the failed Soviet system of marketplace compulsion. I favor voluntary choice, freedom and the voluntary marketplace. Seems many in this failing city don’t agree. What happened to “Americans;” proud, self-sustaining, skeptical of government “help” and independent?
I’m the world’s greatest authority on my own personal values, dreams, wants and needs. I’m also bold enough to say that I can spend my income advancing my values and needs better than you or any of my many other well-paid government “servants” can.
Know that I consider your demand “highway robbery” and pay it as I might any “protection money,” for you have the power and I don’t and I’m not ready to run away from you quite yet.
©2005 by Richard A. Cheatham. All rights reserved. Mr.Cheatham is a professional speaker/writer whose weekly column, “Drawing Back The Veil” appears weekly in The Lynchburg Ledger. Mr. Cheatham is syndicated through Press Media Group, LLC, 434-332-2845. Contact him through, Living History Assoc., Ltd., at www.LHALtd.com or DrawBackVeil@aol.com.