Tax Relief At Last!

With the price of oil topping $100/barrel, there's good news: gas taxes have gone down dramatically (when computed as a percentage of the cost of gas). Gas taxes are not a whole bunch higher per gallon than they were ten years ago, when oil prices were around $10 a barrel. A one-dollar tax on a ten-dollar barrel is 10%. But that same one-dollar tax on a $100 barrel is only one percent! That's like "cutting taxes by 90%!"

I wonder why President Bush hasn't been explaining to the American people how his policies have been bringing us "significant tax relief."

But with all good news, there has to be bad news, which in this case is the undeniable fact that the overwhelming majority of Americans are ignorant, unpatriotic slaves.

Surely that would be the verdict of America's Founding Fathers -- especially the "Sons Of Liberty," a Boston group which included Paul Revere, Patrick Henry, John Hancock, James Otis, John Adams, and his cousin, Samuel Adams. In the famous "Boston Tea Party," they tossed the tea into the Boston Harbor rather than pay a tax of 3 pence per pound.

The British underestimated the patriotism of the colonists.

"They have no idea," wrote a great tea lover of the time, Dr. Benjamin Franklin, "that any people can act from any other principle but that of interest; and they believe that threepence on a pound of tea, of which one does not perhaps drink ten pound in a year, is sufficient to overcome the patriotism of an American."

They only drank ten pounds of tea a year, and the tax was only three pence per pound, and they tossed it in the Harbor and began a revolution, risking "our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor" rather than accept these taxes.

Today's Americans use at least ten gallons of gas with every fill-up, and pay ten times more in taxes per gallon than America's Founders would tolerate. They called it tyranny. We call it "progressive."

Every 4th of July we continue to celebrate "Independence Day." Why bother? Is there anything America's Founders believed that Americans believe today?