TAXES - SERIOUSLY???

It is hard for me to believe sometimes that they keep doing this, but obviously there is some segment of the population that remains chronically undecided. You would think that with a track record that the state of Oregon has with whining to the voters that the sky will fall every year if they don't raise taxes that people would have figured it out by now, that basically that is ALWAYS what the government will say naturally, if by saying it they will get pad more by the well meaning or frightened taxpayers that actually make the mistake of believing them.

It is basically like a trained lab rat. They in Salem know that all they have to do is say to would-be taxpayers (or the ones that THINK OTHER people are going to have to pay more - yeah, right) if you don't give us more money, Jo and Jane taxpayer, the jails will be emptied into the streets, we won't have any money to teach your kids anything except climate change and whatever they each can learn on the multiple personal computers in all the classroom (or maybe the computers will be forced - ghasp - to not run on an updated OS and the library will only be open thirty minutes a day.

OOOOhhh I am scared now! If things get really REALLY bad it might be like it was when I was a kid and the teacher is forced to do what he or she might be able to do with just a piece of chalk and their own brain. Yeah, I suppose that would be kind of bad. But seriously, I wish that they actually MADE some of these hard decisions and had to actually decide that maybe there shouldn't even BE a public library (with the 100 bucks we would all have extra we could probably do better with a yearly Amazon.com giftcard, and that wouldn't even go toward the administrative waste that is generated by big brother trying to provide our media needs) and maybe there shouldn't BE a public pool and maybe yes, they should be forced to just actually teach reading and writing and math in school instead of having all kinds of fancy stuff that really just passes for distracting kids and makes parents THINK that their kids must be learning. ACTUAL learning is very boring and very cheap. Abe Lincoln managed a first class education for free, yet the schools struggle every year without raising the budget.

I mean seriously have you ever, even in a good year, heard the government say Oh, wow, this is GREAT we have SO MUCH extra money we are just spending it left and right, in fact here is some of it back because we don't need all of it! OF COURSE NOT. Though obviously it does happen. You think of all the things government pays for like long criminal prosecutions for one lone weirdo here and there or all kinds of subsidized garbage and it becomes very obvious that there are oodles of it gushing everywhere like a leaky bucket except the leaks go straight into the sewer instead of the banks of the people who made it and would actually be good stewards of it if they got to keep it.

As much as they are actually able to scare voters out of their wits and their dollars, most actual learning of any quality is accomplishable by actually READING the stuff that is already written and not having fieldtrips and computer programs to teach something different. But it remains that state, local and federal governments have been trained to constantly whine and complain and scare the money away from the taxpayers year after year after year.

It is true that most of the people who agree to be taxed are the ones that THINK someone ELSE is being taxed. Lke those BIG BAD corporations? Nobody seriously thinks there are companies like INTEL who are not being taxed more than ten dollars a year, do they? (Actually it wouldn't be that bad in my opinion if they weren't because likely the money wouldn't go to some greedy fat cat dressed like the Monopoly guy and wearing a monicle, it would probably go toward not having to lay off the guy next door or the guy in the ward who had to go on unemployment for a year).

The people they are talking about who only pay the corporate minimumn are the people who don't even MAKE any money at ALL. It is the basic minimum that people need to pay to keep themselves incorporated for the year. It is the people like our friend with the scrapbooking business that is basically scraping by, if making any money at all. So basically the government with the ads that scare people into sending more money to be wasted in Salem are basically just the same group that knows that if they don't cry, moan complain and threaten the taxpayers year after year after year with the same idle threats they might actually have to get by with less. They won't be able to provide subsidies for unemployed people to have free phone service every year (did you know that a lot of states pay for that?)

And all of us, not just the people that work really hard to pay their own way even if it might mean going WITHOUT phone service from time to time, might actually have to pay our own bills and not simply apply to Salem to be on an even longer list of people with even more extensive needs to whine even LOUDER next year. I think that it has come to the point that they are really crying wolf... LOUD. And people like me who are so jaded by the fact that I KNOW they don't really need the money and are asking for it anyway will never EVER listen. Not that I should ever make the mistake of trying.