'Cause They're the Tax Man

A sink hole swallowed a fire engine the other day. And that was on top of a huge water main breaking and flooding streets, businesses and homes just a short distance away, days earlier. These are huge infrastructure messes that cost the city hundreds of millions of dollars and huge headaches for about as many bureaucracies. The California Assemblyman for that district, Mike Feuer, said in a sound bite, "These things happen because Californian's are so anti-tax these days..." or something like that. Of course we're anti tax, the legislators from this state have raised taxes so high that businesses and property owners are leaving the state. To balance the budget Californian's just got a 2% surcharge on our income taxes, a 15% raise on our sales taxes, the removal of a tax deduction for children, an almost doubling of our car fees, an increased amount on the first quarterly tax statement, and an adjustment of the tax brackets so that lower income earners have just moved up a notch, thus having to pay more taxes. The legislators also have in the works: taxes on services that have never been charged before like dry cleaning, veterinary services, attorney services, and it goes on and on. And we still have a deficit because of all the borrowing our state has done, the interest on the debt is killing us! Our tax coffers are low because no matter how much money our state has, the legislators find ways to spend it, and it's not on infrastructure. Obviously.... www.hjta.org
I've been wanting to write a blog that outlined my feelings about our tax structure here in sunny California, but being a bit lazy, haven't wanted to dig into all the necessary research. But paying quarterly taxes coupled with hearing Feuer's statement that we're "anti tax" helped me start the process, anyway.
Taxes kill economies. One of the reasons our tax bills are so high is because government employees belong to unions. Unions have contracts with the state. Unions have created huge benefit packages for their members. (oh yeah, they also support their favorite legislator come election time). Tax payers pay all of these benefits. Since Schwarzenegger has been Governor, he has created more state jobs. More taxes. So why isn't there any money for the cities for their budgets? Because the state takes it away from the cities to pay for all of its spending.
The more businesses pay in taxes, the less employees they can hire. The fewer people who are working, (we have a huge unemployment number) the less is spent on goods and services that help create a tax base. The more government grows, the more it needs to take money from its citizens. The more taxes taken from citizens, the less they have to spend. See where I'm going?
Our country was built on a tax revolt. I think another one is brewing.