‘For less than $50 a year, or 12 cents a day for most taxpayers, we can build and operate this senior center.?
I hate it when people pitching millage proposals make those kinds of simplistic arguments to persuade voters to their cause.
Rhetoric like that is so disingenuous and misleading. Not to mention a steaming load of mule muffins baking in the hot sun.
Less than $50 a year or 12 cents a day to build and operate a tri-township senior center (see story on page 1) doesn’t sound like much when considered out of context, in a vacuum, as if it’s the only tax we’d have to pay.
But when you put it in context, when you consider the BIG PICTURE, it’s another hand reaching into our wallets. It’s less for us, the ones who sweat and toil everyday, more for the Taxman.
Sure, the proposed senior center for Oxford, Addison and Orion townships will cost many taxpayers another $45 per year, if their houses have a taxable value of $100,000. (Of course, it will cost local businesses and new homeowners much more because of their higher taxable values.)
But let’s not forget all the other wonderful taxes we already pay like local millages for townships, villages, counties, police, fire, parks and recreation, libraries, bond debts, school districts, intermediate school districts, community colleges ? does anyone else have a headache?
And remember those state and federal taxes that have first dibs on our paychecks.
The way we get taxed in this country reminds me of the old Chinese method of torture and execution known in the Western world as the ‘Death by a Thousand Cuts.?
For those not familiar with this gruesome practice, it involved literally cutting the victim to pieces, a little at a time, bit by bit, while he was still alive.
Once all the cuts were made, the poor soul was put out of his misery with a knife to the heart.
The average taxpayer is being slowly millaged to death a little at a time, but there is no merciful deathblow waiting for us, only bankruptcy, poverty and slumping home sales. What good is a plush senior center, if we’re all living in the Poorhouse?
Yes, plans for the tri-township senior center sound quite marvelous and grand ? most luxury items do.
BUT ENOUGH IS ENOUGH!
I’m tired of being taxed.
I’m tired of my hard-earned dollars being confiscated by government officials and their deluded do-gooding followers who always seem to have big plans for other people’s money.
Well, guess what?
I already have plans for my money like paying my mortgage and utility bills, buying groceries, paying insurance bills and my student loan, and buying clothes and school supplies for my daughter.
And with the money leftover I want to selfishly eat at restaurants, keep my bar stocked with my favorite booze and buy a stogie or two.
It’s my money. I earned it. I have a right to keep it.