The Peoples' Money: How Voters Will Balance the Budget and Eliminate the Federal Debt by Scott Rasmussen is a good book to initiate us as concerned citizens to the nuts and bolts of the process of getting the government budget balanced and the federal debt eliminated.

Dear Editor,

Dear Editor,

Kudos

Jerome C. Arnett, Jr., M.D., AAPS and Editorial Board member of the Medical Sentinel, has been appointed member of the newly-formed Ethics Committee of the American College of Chest Physicians. He has already attended the first meeting in New Orleans last year and subsequent meetings this year. He will be participating in setting the tone and direction of the committee as well as its mission. We wish him our best.

Physician incentive to behave in a traditional fashion as a firm, patient advocate, is waning for many reasons — some functional, and some intentional. For example, managed care has devised a novel payment system for contracted physicians called capitation that actually reverses the normal incentive for providing treatment. Under capitation, a “provider” is paid a flat fee (perhaps 50 cents) per “covered life.” The capitated doctor is paid in advance by such a company — even if he does not treat a single patient over the course of a year.

Charles W. Adams, a U.S. tax attorney, states the purpose of his book is to "set taxation apart and bring it into focus as one of the most powerful forces at work structuring society, today as well as in the past." He points out this is a formidable task, that there is no formalized discipline on this subject and this book is "to help fill that void." He starts out with a quote from Oliver Wendell Holmes, a well known Supreme Court Justice of the early 20th Century. The quote is over the entrance of the IRS building in Washington, D.C.

[What are taxes?] The greedy hand of government thrusting itself into every corner
and crevice of industry[which] watches prosperity as its prey and permits
none to escape without tribute.
Thomas Paine
The Rights of Man (1791)

Let us flee to the land of the barbarian
where we may live as free men.
Roman citizen, A.D. 4th cent.

Do not dig a hole for somebody else,
lest you fall in it yourself.
Russian proverb

Much of the recent discussion among both Democrat and Republican members of Congress regarding the need to lift the travel ban and end the U.S. embargo of Cuba has revolved around the possibility of selling millions of dollars in agricultural products to Cuba. These politicians conveniently forget that the Castro brothers are dictators of the old, unreformed Stalinist variety, who have, in fact, devastated and desolated a once beautiful and prosperous island.

Although I have not practiced neurosurgery for many years, I have kept abreast of health care policy and advances in medicine. Since my retirement I founded and edited a medical journal, served on the editorial board of another international surgical neurology peer-reviewed journal, and at the request of President George W. Bush I served in the Injury Research Grant Review Committee of the CDC in Atlanta. I trained at the premier Georgia trauma center, Grady Memorial Hospital, under the auspices of Emory University, and I have published on this subject.

Kudos to State Rep. Allen Peake for his valiant efforts and much-needed proposal to eliminate the increasingly burdensome property taxes in the state of Georgia. No one should be surprised that Mr. Frank Gadbois is against it! His aversion to individual freedom and free market capitalism is well known. Instead, Mr. Gadbois is for "progressive taxation," confiscatory, class warfare socialism first enunciated by Karl Marx in the second plank of his Communist Manifesto (1848), in which he called for "a heavy, progressive or graduated income tax."

Kudos for The Telegraph report [07/02/07] describing the current tax situation in Bibb County that may saddle county taxpayers with thousands of dollars in penalties and tax arrears.

Now we read that Bibb County Chief Appraiser, Jim Davis, is looking for a private consulting firm with an incredible price tag of $2.5 million to do another property tax assessment in Bibb County.