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LETTERS IN THE EDITOR'S MAILBAG.

Article Excerpt
Byline: The Register-Guard

It's taxes or socialism, folks

These columns have been ornamented by increasingly bizarre assertions by people outraged by three Lane County commissioners' decision to impose an income tax. But the apex of unintended irony was reached by two recent letters accusing those commissioners of being "socialists."

From 1937 until 1996, Lane County and the other O&C counties were classic socialist regimes: The portion of their budgets derived from taxes ranged from zero (Douglas and Josephine) through minuscule (Jackson, Coos and Lane) to moderate (all of the others). Instead of taxes, they relied for revenue on the proceeds from the sale of natural resources owned by the government: timber sale receipts.

It is the end of that socialist bonanza, not some plot to impose that system, which has caused the need for replacement revenue.

Personally, I don't agree with the board majority's choice to impose the tax without an election. But with the spigot of socialist revenues now closed in Washington, D.C., there simply isn't an alternative to replace those revenues other than the old-fashioned method called taxes - the system that every other Oregon county, and virtually every county in every other state, always used.

I don't recall anybody being offended by the socialist revenue while it lasted, or demanding to be taxed instead. The gravy train has followed the tracks of the O&C Railroad into historical oblivion. We can either give up luxuries such as county jails and criminal prosecutions,...

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