Perhaps there's a good alternative

for people who love SPLOST. That would be moving to Canada where the sales

tax is 15 percent. They would skip all the intermediate steps, and for

people with school children who love snow, it could be wonderful.

A few words of caution, though,

about Canada. Schools don't close out there when it snows: they just plow

the roads and kids have to go to school. That takes a bit of the fun out

of it, but education is a worthy cause there too.

The Canadians also like to

brag about their free health care. Here's what so interesting about the

free health care Canadians get from their 15 percent sales tax (plus much

higher income and property taxes than we have).

(1) A lot of their doctors

feel overregulated and underpaid and try to move to the U.S.

(2) The hospital nurses feel

overworked and underpaid too, so they frequently go on strike. Elective

surgery takes on a whole new meaning when it's at the nurses' election,

not yours.

(3) It may be six months between

the time you get sick and the time you can get a doctor's appointment,

so there's a good chance your problem will go away in the meantime, one

way or another. Some Canadians smartly come to the U.S. to get treated

(but not free).

The Georgia House of Representatives

has 180 members, of whom 74 are Republicans. With only 25 votes against

allowing an 8 percent sales tax, you can see what kind of Republicans

we have there.

Our best defense against extravagant

taxes is electing people who oppose extravagant spending. People like

that would not put needless temptations in the form of SPLOST special

elections in front of people too weak to resist the lure of goodies like

sewers, stadiums, trees, parks, roads, sidewalks, bike trails, pools,

etc. In varying degrees we may need all these things, but we're already

paying taxes for all these things too, and some things are more intelligently

financed through bonds (for reasons I have explained many times before,

having to do with making the users also the payers).

It's time for us citizens to

draw the line. So far as I am concerned, the existing 5 percent rate is

where I draw the line, and I am not even happy about that because our

current 1 percent LOST tax in Fayette County is squandered through an

inequitable, even dumb, formula, for the benefit of large businesses and

our wealthier city residents.

In August of this year, our

local elected officials will be looking at a new formula to divide this

LOST pie within the county, and the right thing to do would actually be

to drop the LOST altogether. It'll be interesting to see who's got the

guts to propose that.

Claude Y. Paquin

Fayetteville

[email protected]