The easiest way to reduce your taxes

1. Reduce your income.  With a lower income you will have a reduced tax bill.
2. Reduce or eliminate your purchases of gasoline.  There are excise taxes built into the price you pay at the pump.
3. Stop purchasing tobacco and alcohol products.  In some provinces and states the excise taxes can be as much as 50 percent of what you pay at the cash register.
4. Stop buying provincial/state lottery tickets.  This is a tax masquerading as fun for which most buyers get a colourful piece of cardboard with some numbers on it.
5. Reduce what you purchase to essentials only.  In most regions, there is a sales tax on anything that is purchased.
6. Grow your own food.  Eliminating the purchase of foods will reduce any taxes you pay that are levied on food.
7. Start a barter system.  Where no money is exchanged for a good or service, there is no tax to pay. 
8. Own your home instead of renting.  Property taxes are considerably higher for renters.
9. Start a tool lending library.  You don't need that ladder, lawn mower or chain saw every day.  Buy one of each tool for several households and you will save sales tax by not duplicating items.
10. Stop complaining when there are potholes in the road, streetlights burned out, not enough staff for libraries, community centres, policing, fire fighting equipment, garbage collection, snow removal and hospitals.  These are where your tax dollars are spent, but you have wisely reduced the amount of tax you pay, so there's not as much money for them and you don't really need them anyway.

"Nuff said

 

Civic Improvements as a result of the G8 and G20

Thoughts on Richard Dawkins and fundamentalist atheists

Rory Fitzgerald writes of Richard Dawkins in the Huffington Post: 

"Most atheists I know are great people, sticking to the truth as they see it. Most also remain open to new possibilities and acknowledge that they are not entirely omniscient, and are respectful to those who think differently to themselves."

"Dawkins, however, often seems to have only contempt for the majority of human kind who, unlike him, do believe in the spiritual. His selective  campaigning about political issues makes me wonder: is he really an objective seeker of truth, or is he someone who just hates and wants to undermine Judaeo-Christian principles?"

Providing a few examples including the Cambodian genocide, Fitzgerald says that Dawkins is right to be angry about abuses occuring in the churches, but needs to acknowledge crimes and abuses carried out by atheists.  Fitzgerald cites a fragment of a quotation "opium of the masses" as a critical finger pointed at any religion.

"[T]he opium of the masses" comes from a quotation of Karl Marx in his "Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right."  The full quotation is revealing: "Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, just as it is the spirit of a spiritless situation. It is the opium of the people." It lightly echos Proverbs 29:18a "Where there is no vision, the people perish..."  Marx understood that people who have absolutely nothing of earthly value find something of hope in religious belief.  Opium was at one time a drug of soothing, of healing. 

Richard Dawkins would deny people with absolutely nothing, the soothing balm of simply having their thoughts and feelings affirmed about themselves and hope that the world around them can become a better place.  For some this is all they have. 

Dawkins is unquestionably a rabid fundamentalist atheist.  I have no truck with his ilk in the same way I have none with the bombast of the likes of Jerry Falwells and Jim Hagees of the world.