No new taxes ... here or in DC

Voters in Lawrence County, Ohio, have one or two local tax levies on the ballot in the primary election. I predict they will fail.

My own sense is that people there, here and everywhere don't know what the next president and the next Congress are going to do to us tax-wise.

Not knowing how big a bite Barack Obama will take out of my paycheck on July 1, 2009, how can I agree to increasing local taxes?

And I think people are increasingly fed up with public employees demanding this and holding rallies for that when the private sector people are seeing their own economic security slowly eroding away. In the case of WV teachers, the boss offers you a 5.5 percent raise and you say that's not enough? There won't be any 5.5 percent across-the-board raises at The Herald-Dispatch this year. Yet teachers complain it's not enough.

So until we get a little more security in our own lives, I don't see people in the private sector opening their wallets to benefit those in the public sector.