Is this a great county or what?

I want to comment on the proposal by the Culpeper County Board of Supervisors to increase our taxes by only 12.5 percent.

Not to give my age away, but I’ve been around for a few years.

My first vivid recollection is of the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma in the 1930s. We left Oklahoma and went to Illinois (my great- great-grandfather settled there in 1805), where I had my first real job as a farm hand. My hours were daylight until dark, for which I was paid $2 a day (yes, Coca Cola and a Babe Ruth candy bar were a nickel each).

After a stint as a farm hand, I stretched the truth about my age and was hired by the Southern Railroad as a section hand (you see, I was only 14 and the minimum age was 16. By the way, that came back to haunt me when I applied for my Social Security).

Now the railroad was paying me 40 cents an hour or $3.20 a day — hey, that was more than a 50 percent increase over my farm wages (and I only had to work eight hours instead of the 12-14 on the farm) and, man, I was walking in tall cotton now. These jobs were summertime jobs, and any time I was not in school I had a job.

My mom and dad were anxious for me to get an education, so I attended a two-room schoolhouse where I was fortunate to have a marvelous teacher (for all subjects — reading, writing, arithmetic, history, geography and art) whose name was Beatrice Ward. We started each day with the “Pledge of Allegiance” followed by singing the state song and a song selected by a pupil (my favorite was “A Spanish Cavalier”).

We sat in four rows, each of which comprised a single grade. I had the pleasure of going through the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth grades with Mrs. Ward.

After finishing grade school, I finished high school at what was then called a “consolidated high.”

From there, I went to the University of Illinois and received my professional degree (later I received a degree from the Harvard Business School).

From the time I was 11 until I finished at the U of I, I worked whenever I was not in school (I formed my first successful company when I was 16).

After leaving the University of Illinois, I entered the work force and earned my 40 quar-ters of Social Security time so that I was fully insured under the Social Security system requirements.

I served in the armed forces and held a number of positions throughout my career but paid nothing further in the Social Security system.

With the support of my wife, we worked hard and made some decisions that enabled us to provide for our family and plan for our eventual retirements. This brings me to the point of this column. This proposed tax increase will eat up not only all of the indexed increase (my Social Security has increased 9 percent since 2001 — I did not check my records for earlier years) which I receive from the Social Security system, but will also chew up a portion of our retirement savings, leaving us in a negative position (Notice I have not addressed the energy fiasco we are in — that will be saved for a later column).

I can afford this, but I am sure many will suffer from the increase. Is a tax increase fair — I think not; is it just — I think not. After 232 years I believe I can answer the question raised by (I believe) Francis Marion — “Why should we trade one tyrant (King George) 3,000 miles away for 3,000 tyrants one mile away? An elected legislature can trample a man’s rights as well as a King.”

Now I know that is not an exact analogy; after all, we do not have 3,000 members on the Board of Supervisors, but one must also remember that we have taxing authorities in Richmond and then the mother of all authorities found in Washington.

We made the trade, but in the matter of taxation it appears we may have received the short end of the stick.

Think about where we are headed with the tax structure imposed on us and the lack of fiscal restraint by all levels of government.

Jim Bayne is a resident of Culpeper and former Culpeper Life columnist specializing in the Revolutionary War. E-mail