Raising Taxes is an Ill-fated Move | Eastern North Carolina Now

    Why is it when most politicians are faced with financial problems, their first instinct is to covet other people's money? I guess it's because it's easier to solve the problems they have created with other people's money. However, the use of other people's money is what has created the financial mess we find ourselves in, in the first place. In the name of greed (self-indulgence), the politicians created structures and the people invested on such collaterally thin margins that when the bottom fell out, they put all of us at risk. Can you say Ponzi schemes? With the indiscriminate printing of money, the stimulus, rising inflation and interest rates, disposable income will soon be a thing of the past. A lot of politicians must like this because they keep doing the same things.

    Practical experience tells me that increased property taxes will have the following effects on our local economy.

    1. Goods and services will be more expensive as the businessman passes these taxes on to the consumer.

    2. These increases will increase the amount of sales tax paid.

    3. Increased sales tax costs will send people to the internet and out of state for purchases.

    4. Increased property taxes will make this area anathema to potential citizens and businesses.

    5. High unemployment will continue unabated.

    6. People will vote with their feet and leave the area as they have in all the states above the Mason Dixon line and California.

    Instead of engaging in corporate welfare (bribery) and chasing grant money (theft), and fulfilling the wishes of the moochers among us, perhaps we need to discriminate between wants and needs. As you may have noticed in the last election, THE PEOPLE are sick of funding politicians' personal utopias. It has been recently noted that public-sector workers now outnumber workers engaged in manufacturing and sales by a minimum of 2-to-1 at the lower end and as much as 6-to-1 at the high end in all but two states. Therefore, it will take real political courage to go after spending rather than continue with the political looting of the producers in society - THE PEOPLE are tapped out. Cut spending by rolling expenditures back to 2008 levels and by capping any tax increases that are not tied to increases in population growth and the consumer price index.