by: B.J.
Posted: February 25, 2007
Every time the government brings up yet another SPLOST (otherwise knows as Special Purpose Local Options Sales Tax) proposal, I tend to pull more and more of my already short hair out of my head—in total disbelief of how the American people continue to willingly reward the downright ineptness of government by continuing to vote to INCREASE their already outrageous tax burden on themselves. Interestingly enough, the government NEVER seems to find any justifiable reason to repeal or refund any of these tax increases—even if they bring in more money than they “allege” that they need. Rather, they simply KEEP the money and find “other” ways to spend it. Does this mean that we believe that the government does a better job of managing our money than we do? I sure hope no one believes that to be the case.
Government (i.e. legalized force) already overtaxes us for income, property, sales, tags, licenses, investments, savings, unnecessary fines and traffic tickets—you name it—their hands are already all over our financial lives—and they are ruining it by their constant mismanagement of the funds taken from us through theft and deception. The theft should be obvious, hence the tremendous tax burden we are forced to pay against our will. However, SPLOST proposals are the government’s way to deceive the citizenry by instilling a belief that they need more “resources” to “improve” the school system, for example. They also present the proposal to the local citizens as a mere “penny” sales tax increase, when the TRUTH of the matter is that SPLOST proposals are a 1 percent increase in the sales taxes on the goods and services we buy. The government also banks on the local citizens falling for the deception of the SPLOST proposals that are supposed to benefit “the children”. These are major deceptions that must be exposed.
When the government proposes a 1 percent sales tax increase, it’s ACROSS THE BOARD—and in many cases far EXCEEDS one penny. For example, $100 purchases would cost the consumer another $1—just to pay the increased sales tax on that purchase—that’s 99 cents more than a penny. How about an auto purchase? A $20,000 automobile would now include another $200 increase in the sales taxes on the car—that’s $199.99 cents more than a penny. When we vote to approve SPLOST, we are actually voting for tax increases that are contingent on the amount of goods and services we buy from a merchant—and they are NOT limited to only $1 transactions either. Therefore the increase we are voting for isn’t anywhere near a damn penny.
As the “doing what’s best for the children” deception, there isn’t a greater case of total government hypocrisy than in this case. If the government were so concerned about the best interest of the children, they would move to strengthen the state’s Child Services Departments. If this department was taken more seriously, many of these children would be removed from their parents that are obviously unfit to care for them properly. Furthermore, if the government were so concerned about “the children”, then they would require that EFT (food stamps) benefits could only pay for nutritional foods—not snack cakes, sugary drinks, candy bars, and salt-laden potato chips, for example. Instead of addressing these obvious problems with the children, the government continues to suggest drugging alternatives to “control” their behaviors instead of altering the poor nutrition patterns the children are experiencing. In short, the government doesn’t care about the children any more than unfit parents do. They use the children to deceive the public to voluntarily increase their own tax burden to cover up the government’s obvious incompetence.
When the government presents a SPLOST proposal to us, we should have some idea of how much the government is already spending to “educate” (used very loosely) the children in these grotesque institutions. If the American people had a true grasp of the amount of money that is the government is ALREADY wasting on education, we would all be in Washington with pitchforks. The government NOW spends anywhere between $5000 to $17,000 per student each year to “educate” them (poorly, I might add)—and after 12 years of this crap many still can’t read!!! The saddest part of all of this is that despite the fact that the government spends more of our money on education than ever before, the education system in this country is worse than it has ever been. So does that mean that more money (funding, resources, whatever you want to call it) IS the answer? Not only no, but hell no. How long are the American people going to continue to willingly reward this incompetence? If the government needs more of our money to spend on this garbage called “public” schools, we should require that our elected officials put THEIR name on the proposal and justify the need for the tax increase, and see if they could win their next election by drafting such a proposal. That’s why we hire elected officials to represent our best interests. However, when we vote to increase our own taxes, we have nothing but ourselves to blame when our finances continue to dwindle as we continue to be tremendously underserved by the government.