Charlestown property owners - the suspense should be over this week. Your new tax bills should be arriving within days. If you haven't done so already, now is your last chance to use the Progressive
Charlestown Magic Tax Calculator to see how much your bill is likely to be.
After your bill comes in, please let us know how close the actual amount is to what our Magic Tax Calculator predicted.
Also, it's still not too late for you to go through the Progressive Charlestown
seven-part series on "How to Pay Less in Taxes."
Before you open the envelope and read the amount, please read and consider the following:
The remissness of our people in paying taxes is highly blameable, the unwillingness to pay them is still more so.
I see in some resolutions of town-meetings, a remonstrance against giving Congress a power to take as they call it, the "people's money" out of their pockets though only to pay the interest and principal of debts duly contracted.
They seem to mistake the point.
Money justly due from the people is their creditors' money, and no longer the money of the people, who, if they withhold it, should be compelled to pay by some law.
All property indeed...seems to me to be the creature of public convention.
Hence the public has the right of regulating descents and all other conveyances of property, and even of limiting the quantity and the uses of it.
All the property that is necessary to a man for the conservation of the individual and the propagation of the species, is his natural right which none can justly deprive him of:
But all property of the public, who by their laws have created it, and who may therefore by other laws dispose of it, whenever the welfare of the public shall demand such disposition.
He that does not like civil society on these terms, let him retire and live among savages. He can have no right to the benefits of society who will not pay his club towards the support of it.
— Benjamin Franklin, 1783
As Republican Presidential candidate Michele Bachmann would probably note, Ben Franklin was one of the Founding Fathers. He invented the $100 bill and was so smart and honest that he chopped down a cherry tree with a lightning bolt.
