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Weekly Newspaper and Travel Guide
for Pecos Country of West Texas

Opinion

Friday, January 18, 2008

Smokey Briggs

Sage Views

By Smokey Briggs

Old retired slackers
in the Land of the Free

Just when I begin to think I have written one too many articles decrying our nation’s gleeful prancing toward absolute government tyranny, and that I am beginning to sound like a crackpot, some bunch of government-employed bloodsuckers comes to my rescue.

Today’s featured jackbooted, bloodsuckers are the city government of Greenburgh, New York.

The Associated Press headline read: “Plan would let seniors work to pay taxes.”

After reading the headline, it took me a moment to clamp my mouth shut.

Surely, this is a bad joke, I thought. Nope.

Here is the deal: The town of Greenburgh is eating the financial guts out of its citizens. According to the story, a bunch of senior citizens cannot keep up with their property taxes.

For example, a 76-year-old woman named Audrey Davison lives alone in the home she bought and paid for, and raised her family in. She gets a $620 check from Social Security each month ($7,440 a year) and owes $12,000 a year in property taxes.

So, now she has taken out a reverse mortgage on her home to pay the taxes, and is looking at moving from the home she has lived in for 43 years.

The bloodsuckers’ response: “Wow, we have become really insane bloodsucking leaches, and it would be evil to confiscate a little old lady’s house like this, even in the name of the public good. Maybe we should cut back on our spending and lower these taxes. This is nuts.”

Hahahahaha. That was a joke.

What they really said was, “Hey, lets let the old biddie work off her debt.”

So the town has concocted a program where she can work for minimum wage, for the town, to work off her yearly taxes. Forty-three years. She bought the house. She paid for it. And now, the bloodsuckers offer her two choices: move, or become a serf for the city.

This is sick. Of course, the whole concept of property taxes is sick.

Property taxes are simply a nice way of the government telling you that you never own anything. The government owns it, and you pay them rent, long after you pay off the guy that paid the government rent on the place before you.

Private property is a joke. It does not exist. This is not even the evil of Communism. This is Serfdom. Welcome to the new Dark Age.

Now, why is Audrey in this predicament? Is it because she is a free spending harlot and drinks $50-dollar-a-bottle scotch by the case while trying to seduce the lawn boy?

No. Audrey does have a fatal character flaw though – she wanted to retire. That, judging from the actions of our governments at all levels, is an evil that must be punished.

More correctly, these old slackers must be put back to work – for the public good of course.

Forty-three years ago, Audrey and her husband were employed. They bought a house and reared a family.

During that time the federal government extorted money at pain of imprisonment from them for “Social Security.”

Social Security. Those words make me laugh every time I see them sandwiched together.

Social Robbery is more like it.

The promise, of course, is that when you retire, there will be a bit of retirement coming back.

In the meantime, Audrey and her husband paid off their house, all the while paying rent to their local government rulers each year.

As well, every year, and I mean every year, their loving federal government manipulated their money – the money that is our only option since these same feds make it illegal to use anything else – so that every year, every dollar is worth less than it was last year.

We call this inflation. Somehow the lapdogs that make up most of the media cannot seem to supply a definition for it, even though it is not too hard to find.

The Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary’s second definition for inflation is, “a continuing rise in the general price level usually attributed to an increase in the volume of money and credit relative to available goods and services.”

Inflation is simple. The government is printing more money through its partner, the Federal Reserve.

It is an incredible set up. The bloodsucking politicians get free money to buy more votes and comfy mansions, the Federal Reserve bankers get a healthy kickback from the government in the form of interest on the debt, and the American taxpayer gets screwed. The screwing really becomes evident at retirement when many of us start living on a fixed income.

Before retirement, most of us manage to tread water against the tide of inflation as our earning power rises along with our experience and age. So, we may not get ahead, but we do not fall too far behind.

Then we start drawing retirement – and every year that $620 Social Security check buys less and less and less.

In the meantime, your property taxes go up –because of inflation. Property values go up and up, not because the property is actually more valuable, but because dollars are worth less and it takes more of them to buy the same stuff.

So, your retirement is fixed, but your expenses are going to get higher every year.

But the government ups your Social Security every year to adjust for inflation right?

Hahaha (That’s me laughing like an insane hyena again).

Yes, the government does bestow on the retired a “cost of living increase,” but only by a little bitty fraction of what inflation truly is. The whole game is rigged. Just for starters, the government does not even factor in the prices of fuel and food into its calculation of inflation. Now that is funny, in a sick, sad, twisted kind of way.

The two biggest everyday expenses of any American, and we don’t bother to count them into the calculation of inflation.

Still think the game is not rigged?

If you do, go ask any retired person how their bank account is holding up compared to five years ago, or ten.

Then go read up on all the rules the government uses to calculate inflation. By the rules, the actual price of something can go up, but it will still count as bringing inflation down. I’m not kidding. When calculating inflation the government really can declare up is down and forward is back.

So Audrey, my dear lady, your mistake was thinking that you could retire.

And for this mistake, you must pay.

And think about it, your desire to sit around on your butt for your golden years is really selfish and not in the public interest at all.

Not when you still have some blood flowing through your veins, and can be of some use to society.

So back to work Audrey, you selfish slacker. Cannot get a job? Don’t worry about it, your town fathers will let you work for them, for minimum wage, until the day you die.

Gives you a warm fuzzy feeling doesn’t it?

Somebody strike up the band, I feel like singing a good patriotic song about rockets glaring and the land of the free.

Don’t you?

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