Editor, On Dec. 16, 1773, demonstrators destroyed an entire shipment of tea in the Boston Harbor in protest of taxation without representation. Today, we have ultra-taxation with representation. At the rate that we are going, we will just sign over our employment checks and accept the spending money that our government gives us.
When a government takes one person’s money and gives it to another, either as handouts or subsidies, it is communism in its purest form. It took a while for Russia and China to realize that communism doesn’t work and that capitalism is the only type of economy that benefits the people as a whole. Without capitalism, there are no jobs.
The federal government’s prime responsibility is the defense of the states, yet it spends only 19 percent of the federal budget on defense, while it spends 12 percent on welfare and 18 percent on other government programs. President Barack Obama is proposing a $4 trillion budget, which means that $1.2 trillion is used by the government for non-defense spending. That works out to $1,248 for every man woman and child every year.
Do you realize the amount of taxes that we pay to the federal, state and local governments? On average, we pay 17 percent federal income tax, 10 percent state and local, 9.7 percent sales tax, 2.5 percent corporate, 2.5 percent property, .5 percent gas and 6 percent miscellaneous. Many of these are hidden taxes. Just look at your phone bill. More than 30 percent of my phone bill is for taxes and government services, such as the Obama phone. Although our present local sales tax is 7 percent, every time something is sold, a sales tax is added, which gives us the 9.7 percent.
Social Security and Medicare are considered a tax in the federal budget, but originally that money belonged to the workers, who paid into the system, which was to be separate from the government. Yet, our greedy politicians “borrowed” that money and now have to pay it back.
Winston Churchill once said, “There is no such thing as a good tax.”
Do we need another tea party?

— Len Calderone
Midway