FOREST LAKE: A. B. Cook, of Philadelphia, foreman of the American Telephone & Telegraph Co. corps, which is at work improving the lines in this section, has the clay pigeon shooter beaten for results. Monday afternoon a flock of 17 ducks rested on the lake and Mr. Cook secured a gun and went gunning. He bagged 14 of the birds. Taking them to the boarding place at Jefferson Green’s, they were appetizingly prepared and the hungry linemen enjoyed a game supper.
ELK LAKE: Messerole Bros, of Springville, have placed new roofs on Miss Arnold’s house, the Grange Hall and the new porches of E. B. Smith’s house.
WEST AUBURN: Allen Jayne has nearly finished picking his large apple crop. We are informed that he is shipping the crop to Philadelphia to be placed in cold storage. ALSO, the new State road is now completed from Laceyville up the Tuscarora creek to the Bradford county line. It is hoped to extend it further up the creek to Susquehanna county. It will be a great advantage to the people of this section. In South Auburn Leon Champluvier, who left some time ago for his native land, France, on the Lusitania, arrived safely and will spend some time with relatives before returning.
BROOKLYN: Mrs. S. B. Eldridge, who spent some time in the city studying fall styles, returned a few days ago and had a very successful opening of her millinery parlors on Monday. Light refreshments were served. ALSO, Isaac Van Auken, aged 83, had a narrow escape from death. Mr.VanAuken, who assists C. A. Rozell, the gardener, was taking a load of produce to Lathrop, driving a single house. The animal became frightened near a bridge below the Saunders farm by a blanket becoming entangled in the horse’s feet. While attempting to disengage the blanket with one hand and guide the horse with the other, the frenzied animal suddenly lurched to one side, throwing Mr. VanAuken to the floor of the bridge, while the horse and loaded wagon careened over the side of the bridge into the water. The wagon was turned upside down, while the horse lay on its back in the creek, but strange to say no particular injury was done to any of the participants in the mix-up. Barring a slight lameness, the aged driver was at work the following day. Mr. and Mrs. VanAuken recently celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary and both are enjoying remarkably good health for their years.
LYNN, SPRINGVILLE TWP.: Ralph Loomis, a 15-year-old schoolboy, son of A. K. Loomis, shot and killed a large gray fox about 9 o’clock in the evening. It was prowling in the neighborhood of the poultry yard.
FOREST CITY: Forest City will vote at the coming election on the proposition of a bond issue to construct and erect a surface water system and make extensions to the sanitary sewer in that borough. The sum to be raised is $8,000.
ALFORD: Work was started this week on the new depot to be built by the Lackawanna railroad, burned some months ago by contact with telegraph wires which had become charged by electric wires. The depot will be constructed of concrete and stone. It is expected the building will be completed before cold weather.
MONTROSE: Manager Frank Caruso, of the Cnic, desires to state that through no fault of his the picture prohibited to be shown in the best nickelets in America, was placed on canvas here Saturday evening. It was taken off as quickly as discovered. Mr. Caruso’s purpose is far from giving offense, and when pictures are condemned the operator will cut them out, when requested to do so.
CHOCONUT: Jerome Donnelly was a lucky man last Saturday. At the drawing held for the benefit of Mrs. Thomas Donnelly he won a yearling heifer and at the medicine show, at Friendsville, he won a pig for guessing the number of beans in a bottle.
FAIRDALE: Wm. McLeod received a violent kick from a horse while feeding his stock and had it not been for his faithful dog, he thinks it possible that he might have been killed. The blow glanced from his shoulder, striking his jaw, rendering him unconscious and his dog stood guard, barking furiously, keeping the horse at bay and attracting assistance. It was found that Mr. McLeod’s jaw was badly fractured.
SUSQUEHANNA: Charles Roney will run for Sheriff as a Prohibition Candidate. He was born in Susquehanna in 1851. His father and mother, Charles and Mary Roney, came to Susquehanna in 1847, from Baltimore, Md. His father was one of the first engineers to run out of Susquehanna and died when the Charles was five years old, leaving a wife and six children. Charles attended school at Susquehanna and at the age of 14 went to work in the Erie shops and started to learn the machinist trade at the age of 17. He has worked all through the West and South, but for the past 21 years has worked for the DL&WRR at Hallstead. Mr. Roney says he has made no pledges to any man and can honestly say, if elected sheriff, that he will be governed by the law and by no party boss.
ARARAT: The Jefferson Railroad (branch of the Erie), which passes through this township, finds its highest point near Ararat Summit. This point is said to be the highest altitude reached by any regular standard railroad in the United States, east of the Rocky Mountains.
BIRCHARDVILLE: Chas. A. Golden and family are visiting at T. H. Golden’s. Charles is one of our boys who went to the Metropolis to carve out his fortune and has made good. He operates one of the fire engines of New York City.
THOMPSON: At the Freewill Baptist church on Sunday, a silver collection was taken by the Baptist society to be sent to Mrs. H. R. Terry, of Missouri. Mrs. Terry is a missionary preacher in destitute circumstances, owing to the failure of crops in that vicinity. She recently lost her husband, who was also a missionary and she has taken up his line of work and is carrying it out quite successfully.
NEWS BRIEF: William A. Lewis, a body guard of Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War, and policeman at the White House with a doorkeeper’s duties for 35 years, died at Washington last week. He was 85 years of age, the oldest policeman on active duty.
Back when I was fresh out of law school and serving as a law clerk, I had a telling argument with a colleague about taxes. The question was simple: Who owns the money used to pay taxes? I argued that taxes were like any other obligation - it simply had legal precedence over other financial obligations such as loans, rent, mortgages, or whatever because the government created that precedence through its own self-interest. My colleague was adamant that tax dollars belonged to the government - not the individual - and that when you did not pay your taxes you were stealing the government’s money. The question may seem a rather silly one - but the response that people give to the question is likely telling on their personal political philosophies.
We all have tax obligations - local, county, state and federal - and we pay them every day, week, month, or year. The taxes include income tax, local and state payroll taxes, property taxes, school taxes, sales taxes and any other tax that the government might think up. From my perspective, we owe that money to the government - but the money that we pay the government is still our money until we turn it over to the government. I have a legal obligation to pay my taxes - and there are consequences if I do not make those payments.
But then again, there are countless other financial obligations out there for which I have legal obligations to make payments. For instance, if I do not pay my mortgage, then the bank will foreclose based upon the contractual agreement I made with the bank to pay them back. The mortgage payment that I send every month to the bank is my money until I send it to the bank to satisfy my legal obligations. The difference between one financial obligation and another is not the duty to make payment but the consequences that arise from the failure to make the payment. Thus, the money that I pay in taxes is my money - not the government’s money - until such time as I pay the government those funds. If I fail to meet my legal obligation, I will face the consequences, i.e., get arrested, lose property, or have a tax lien levied against me.
My colleague did not buy this argument and seemed actually angered that I would even suggest that the government did not own those tax dollars even before they were paid out. My colleague told me that the money belonged to the government, period, end of story. In his mind, you could not even begin to compare taxes to other more mundane financial obligations. When I suggested that the only reason that they were different was that the government had made them different, he was not persuaded.
I was thinking about this conversation when a reader sent me an analysis of a recent Supreme Court decision that upheld an Arizona tax credit scheme that provided taxpayers with a $500 tax credit against their school taxes if they made a contribution to non-profit school tuition organizations, which then could be used by the taxpayer to send their child to a private school. It was something of a school voucher program that helped parents to have a choice on where to educate their child. A challenge was mounted against the law under the Establishment Clause because some of the monies were used to for private, religious schools. The majority of the Supreme Court refused to overturn the state program and simply noted that Arizona was not directly engaged in supporting private, religious education. In other words, the state was not deciding where the monies were going - so the state could not be said to be picking or endorsing a religious perspective. The only thing the state did was create a tax credit that parents then utilized to make educational choices.
This did not sit well with Justice Kagan. In her dissent, she wrote: “A dollar is a dollar - both for the person who receives it and the government that pays it, whether the dollar comes with a tax credit label or a direct expenditure label.” In her view, the dollar we are talking about was the government dollar - not the individual’s dollar - and the use of that dollar in any way to support a religious school was unconstitutional under the Establishment Clause. The mere fact that the government allowed the individual to make the choice did not change the fact that the individual chose a religious alternative. Because the government allowed the individual to use the government’s dollar for a religious purpose, even where the government was not involved in the decision-making process, the government thereby impermissibly supported and endorsed a religion through its funding decisions.
There is so much wrong with this perspective that it is hard to even know where to start - but it is something that my colleague all those years ago would have embraced and accepted. The problem with the reasoning boils down again to how you view ownership of tax dollars. For Kagan, tax dollars are government property even when they are not paid to the government because of a tax credit program. In other words, the government is allowing you to keep its money - not you to keep your money.
For a conservative, it is easy to see that a tax credit program allows you to keep your money - and what you do with it is your business. For a liberal like Kagan, the dollar never really stops being the governments and, when you make the wrong choice in how you spend it, the government should step in and correct it.
Please submit any questions, concerns, or comments to Susquehanna County District Attorney’s Office, P.O. Box 218, Montrose, Pennsylvania 18801 or at our website www.SusquehannaCounty-DA.org or discuss this and all articles at http://dadesk.blogspot.com/.
Pennies from heaven? No. Spare change? No. A sizeable chunk of change that Gold Card holders have donated to the Susquehanna Library just by shopping at their local ShurSave market. Yes!
The Library Friends regularly hold Gold Card sign-up days at the participating markets in Susquehanna County. Prior to our August sign-up day at Rob’s Market in Great Bend, we calculated what the Library has received from this program since January 2006. The total was $24,669.63. This represents 822,321 items purchased.
More than 275 new participants were added after the August sign-up at Rob’s Market in Great Bend. We are grateful for their willingness to join and we are excited that the Great Bend market has now re-opened after it was flooded in September. The Library Friends anticipate holding another Gold Card sign-up at Ray’s ShurSave Market in Montrose on November 19.
As we remind shoppers each time we solicit their participation, registering your Gold Card to help the Library does not cost you anything. The Community Rewards Program established by the ShurSave Markets Group generously donates three cents from every purchase of Shurfine and Western Family products by customers who have designated the Library as beneficiary.
Remember it is not necessary to re-register every year. However, if you have not registered, you can stop in at any of our library locations (Montrose, Hallstead/Great Bend, Susquehanna, or Forest City) and pick up the form. It takes just a moment of your time, but it is a gift that keeps on giving. Every penny counts!
