Hishtory

Taxes. One of the founding principles of our country, or actually the reluctance to pay them that was the founding principle. Needless to say, we’ve had a bad relationship with taxation ever since. Nobody likes to pay taxes, but we can all agree there are some things we can do better as a community than we can do by ourselves. Building roads, public utilities, law enforcement, fire department, the list goes on and on. But, defense, is a big check mark on the list. As a nation, one third of our federal budget is devoted to the military. But, how do you finance a war effort if you can’t levy taxes? During the Revolutionary War the young United States had that very problem. They literally begged, borrowed, and stole whatever money they could from various sources by any means possible, including piracy (they called it “privateering”). They also obtained high interest loans from the other countries, including France and Spain, they cut deals with investors from the Netherlands, and borrowed hard curren