I don't usually like to answer

letters to the editor, mainly because it's too easy to get caught in a

revolving door that never goes anywhere.

But Timothy Parker managed

to draw me out last week with his treatise on the previous week's column.

A couple of minor points: For

some reason, folks like Mr. Parker seem to feel that anyone who disagrees

with their point of view is spewing venom. And the picture he paints of

Fayette Republicans giving me (or is it Bush? I'm not sure) the Hitler

salute is also a common retort from those who don't have an argument.

Now for more weighty points

in his letter.

One item I must deal with,

just so other people with thought processes similar to his won't get the

wrong idea, is Mr. Parker's mistaken assertion that I had suggested American

taxpayers today are worse off in general than the serfs of Medieval times.

How ridiculous! Actually, the

ridiculous was just what I had in mind. But I'm not going to give you

the whole answer to the puzzle here. Do a little work for yourselves and

look up "hyperbole" in the dictionary.

As to some of his other points,

he accuses Republicans of seeking "to shift the tax burden down."

Hmmm, let's see now, eliminating the income tax burden entirely for the

3.9 million working people with the lowest incomes is shifting the burden

down. Providing an average of almost $1,500 a year in tax relief to 38

million families with children is shifting the burden down.

I'm glad you explained that

to me.

In fact, people who make a

whole boat load of money will indeed be seeing their taxes lowered by

many times the $1,500 those working families will receive. And why is

that? I'll try not to shout here ... those who make the most money are

paying almost all of the taxes.

See, no exclamation point,

no capital letters, no bold face. I'm remaining calm.

Of course, the column for which

I'm being lambasted was a column that actually criticized the style of

tax cuts the Bush Administration has given us, but for some reason my

antagonist thinks I'm going to be upset if he characterizes the privileged

life that Dubya has lived.

Here's that excerpt for your

enjoyment. He refers to Bush as "a white boy, born to wealthy parents,

educated in private schools, enrolled at Yale as a legacy with a 1200

SAT, given a National Guard pilot training slot otherwise unattainable

in a war, who then fails to even complete his commitment, enrolled at

Harvard Business School with less than stellar academic record, does nothing

significant for 20 years, becomes a baseball owner and somehow governor

of Texas and then purchased the presidency (but not the popular vote)

Putting aside the exaggerations

and the grammatical errors, my response is: "And your point?"

I suppose there's something

in there somewhere about how high taxes should be and how large government

should be, but I can't find it.

Finally, there's this business

about whether the Revolution was about who was taxing us or how high the

taxes were ... not that it would affect the main point of the argument

either way. True enough, King George did try to mollify the colonists

probably were more concerned with their hatred of the crown than with

the level of taxation.

But those farmers and shop

owners wouldn't have picked up their muskets and marched against the best

army in the world if that crown hadn't been causing them some pain.

Now, of course, we increasingly

have the same situation. Washington is as far away from the average citizen

in terms of understanding as England was in terms of distance. And Washington

increasingly is usurping the authority of our duly elected local governments

and imposing its will. But that's a whole 'nother column.

Just for the record, the point

of the column was my contention that our nation needs to take a good,

long look into the future and decide whether we are going to be a nation

with a strong central government that is involved in every facet of our

lives, a nation with high taxation and very little individual freedom

or responsibility, or a nation with a limited central government that

restricts its activities to protecting our rights and freedom, and a nation

with low taxation and a high degree of individual freedom and responsibility.

I find myself in a position

of sympathy with our regular letter-writer Gunther Rückl. Gunther

has been trying to turn me into a socialist, and in the process of carrying

on a continuing dialogue, I'm starting to really like the guy.

But he was in a state of mild

despair the other day because he is trying to present a lot of data and

a lot of arguments, and many of the letters we print in response to his

letters simply attack him rather than dealing with his arguments.

Now I know what you mean, Gunther.