First of all, please remember that we don’t pay taxes because government takes what they’re owed even before you get paid.

Can you imagine standing in line to receive your pay in cash instead of a paycheck and there are government goons standing there for their payments? Just think, seeing your hard-earned pay and then having to hand it over while watching your amount of take-home cash dwindle. I have to believe that would be the quickest way for the next revolution to start. There’s a good reason that the government takes your money before you see it.

I have to laugh because someone young wrote an essay on why the American Revolution was a mistake and that we should still be serving the British Crown. Yeah, right. Guess he never read anything about the cost of socialism and the high cost of maintaining it. Then there’s the former British colonies like ourselves, India, Burma and too many others that had to fight for their freedom. Perhaps he never heard of something called the Value Added Tax or VAT. I do know that when I was stationed in Germany there was a 33% VAT on things considered luxury items and some of those items I wouldn’t consider luxuries. England was supposed to eliminate the income tax when the Value Added Taxes were implemented. OK, that didn’t happen. They also have a National Insurance Tax.

I was first stationed in Germany in 1970 and was shocked to learn how things like coffee, alcohol, cigarettes, gasoline and others had a very high tax placed on them. We were given a ration card, which limited the amount of coffee, liquor and cigarettes we could purchase. I remember paying $1 for a carton of cigarettes in the commissary on base while Germans were paying around $7 for a pack of cigarettes. I don’t remember what we paid for a 3-pound can of coffee but the taxes placed on coffee in German stores made it around $15 a pound if I remember correctly. Luckily we could purchase gasoline coupons at the Post Exchange that reduced what Germans were paying and I remember that even with those coupons gasoline was a whole lot cheaper in the United States.

I hate to think that Americans have become so ignorant as to not learn from the high cost of socialism in Europe. The country of Greece just defaulted on huge loans to its government and no one really knows what will happen to that country, but it sounds like there is a financial disaster unfolding. Even Puerto Rico is close to bankruptcy and probably financially worse than Greece. Why? Because both governments spent so much money they had to borrow money in order to survive. It would be like you and me paying one credit card bill with another credit card, which means we never pay off anything.

Then there’s our country’s debt of nearly $18 trillion and we haven’t paid a dime toward the principal.

If you don’t think your town could be in trouble by borrowing money, think again. I just read a couple of news articles where borrowing is leading several large cities like Chicago into a situation much like Detroit ended up in.

Windham just passed borrowing money for a new fire station in South Windham. It is something I supported only because of the location and condition of the present station on Route 202 in South Windham. I believe we could have taken that amount of money out of our huge town surplus account and not interfered with our bond rating.

I learned that some in the Windham Town Hall are still spying on us with Google Earth and that it started long before even I realized. I recently received a call from a highly upset Windham citizen because of a huge increase in property taxes.

Lane Hiltunen of Windham says it’s sad to say government won’t be happy until it has all our money.

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