Our Closing Thought As We Return Home ..

It looks as though our long, strange trip to New York will coming to an end. I stayed an extra day because my brother didn't want to leave just yet, and honestly, I got home a bit late from the show Saturday night. But, I must say, we rocked Katie's off it's hinges last night to over 150 of my old friends - and we had only one sort of fight. Most people get over 30 year old grudges, but people in Brentwood are funny that way. Overall, it was like a Health Care Town Hall meeting - lots of rowdy, animated and riled up people, and one or two lunatics.....

As we focus on politics here mostly, I'd like to comment on the insanity that goes on here in New York, in the hopes that South Carolina does not go down the same path - lest I'll have to find another place to live. The picture above is of the gas station on the Belt Parkway in Brooklyn. It's a bit small, but the price for regular gas is $2.99 a gallon - 68 cents higher than what I paid in SC. Why? State taxes. Cigarettes are about $7 a pack here.. Why? State taxes... By the way, most people I know up here still smoke, despite the price tripling in the last decade - they're addicted, they're not going to quit. I'm fine with the argument that some money from cigarettes should go to fund health care, but let's give up on thinking that you'll price cigarettes out of the market. Inelastic demand, folks ...

Lastly, I have friends that are paying $10-12,000 a year in property taxes, which is more than I pay for my mortgage. Yeah, the schools are good, there's a park every 50 feet, the roads are good, and the teachers and cops are extremely well-paid, but think of the effect on the economy if every homeowner had an extra $1000 a month available. It's a blueprint of California, and we see where that is going. New York would be finished if it didn't have some natural advantages, but even that isn't always enough to overcome fiscal stupidity.

Sometimes, I worry that South Carolina is heading down that same path, and it's accelerating. We don't have some of the advantages that New York has to tax it's citizens to death. The sooner we recognize this, and not expect the State , Federal and local governments to do everything - but not nothing - then we can improve our state without killing it's citizens..

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