All of our interaction with the government seems very
normal. A bill for property taxes, a
bill for car registration, car insurance, and other items are all the norm. If you
own a car, and want to keep it legal, you need to pay for plates and insurance.
Go to a store and pay for your
merchandise and walk out.
In California it is different. If you are homeless, there are no property
taxes (kind of obvious). No license, no
car insurance, no big deal; you won’t go to jail. When you get a ticket, forget about it. Steal under 900 dollars and you will not go to
jail. If you shoot someone and there is
a witness, they will release you until the trial. It’s not rocket science; if the witness can’t
testify, you don’t go to prison.
What is different for responsible working people? If you have a job, a family and a home, you
cannot behave like that; the government can screw you over. They can foreclose
on you house for nonpayment of taxes. If you don’t pay your traffic ticket, the
government will go after you. They know you have money. The threat of jail could mean you lose your
job. From there, you can join the homeless.
Notice, the only ones that have to comply to the laws, are
people with money, homes, a family, cars, and a job. If you are homeless and, on the
streets, government doesn’t give a damn about you. You pay no taxes and if they have to lock you
up, it costs the city real money. Jail is a service that returns no money back
to the government. It is an expense.
So, what does it all mean?
If you are here illegally, you get out of jail free. If you are broke,
you don’t have to pay things like fines or report to court for physical
offences. But God help you if you are a
bonified taxpayer who has money and is a scofflaw. You will pay, because government
can ruin your life; they know you have money and they can mess with you.
The bureaucracy is not stupid, the state government assumes the taxpayers are extremely stupid. And they are right. They legalized crime, so don’t act surprised by
the results.
How do you fix this? The poor can live and exist outside of
the rules for the middle class without punishment. The poor can ignore the
system and there is no repercussion for doing so. There is no feedback from the state government
stating that the deadbeats are not paying their assessed charges. Taxes go up
and people move out. Is that the solution to the problem? The answer, sadly is
yes. Most problems solve themselves. The California State government is broken and cannot be fixed. Don't tell them, there is nothing worse than political indignation. I might not get my 20 ballots for president in the next election.
1 comment:
In 410 AD, Rome addressed the Romano-Britons: you are proving too expensive to defend. Look to yourselves.
To be fair the Romano-British ruling class had kept the show on the road for rather longer than the Californian ruling class has managed. They even seem to have kept going for some decades after 410 AD. But in the end, klabooey!
Happily the British standard of living was restored after only another 1300 years or so.
About 30 years ago we visited Orange County friends who were a generation older than us. They wanted to know where else they might live. They knew they loved Edinburgh but they also knew that the winter there was too long for them. South of England? NZ? Oz? I suppose they could have done a lot worse than move to the island of Madeira: a benign climate, and the Portuguese are pleasant people to live among. But it's a tiny island so they might have got cabin fever. Anyway we suspected the whole idea was pie-in-the-sky since they'd want to stay reasonably near to their children and grandchildren. We later had acquaintances from Southern California who retired to Seattle which I suppose is not too long a flight away.
Of course there's not much point trying to stay near your younger generations if they might up sticks and move away.
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