Pardon me while I vent.

Living in California has it's advantages, but one of the big disadvantages is all the different ways the state government has of picking your pocket.

Start by noting that after state and federal income taxes, property taxes, sales taxes, gas taxes, car registration fees, solar energy charges, and who knows what else, nearly 50% of what I make goes to the government to waste in one way or another.

So Saturday I find in the mail two letters from two separate branches of government tagging me for more.

Below are the two separate notices.  The top one is new this year, a fee levied on property owners to pay for Cal Fire, the state agency that fights forest fires.  Never mind that until this year, their other sources of income, presumably from property taxes, was enough to pay for whatever it is they do.  Never mind that where I live, the worst that happens is a grass fire, and in all the years since I moved here in '91, no one's house has burnt down, and no grass fire has grown beyond maybe five acres.

Further, there is a volunteer fire department station literally within sight of my house.  If I went out back and shouted "Fire!" at the top of my lungs, they could hear me.  They have always handled the occasional grass fire without problem.

Never mind that just this summer Cal Fire and without warning suddenly demanded 135 dollars, and called it a yearly fee, and now it's another 115 only eight months later.  What, I wonder, will it be next month?  To rub salt in the wound, last week I saw a brand new Cal Fire pickup driving down the freeway.  I have the sneaking suspicion my hard earned money is going to pay for all the shiny toys those Cal Fire boys would like to play with, and not to any real fire prevention.  After all, they did such a fine job not preventing and then barely putting out the gigantic Rim fire this year.

The second bill on the bottom is a registration fee for a cat!  Now when I adopted this cat out of the pound, they seemed really happy to have me do it, and only charged me 60 bucks, which I didn't mind at all since they told me it covered his shots, and they threw in a collar and a bag of cat food too.  About a week later, we discovered he had worms, the shot for which apparently was not covered at the pound.  That was another 150 after a couple of trips to the vet and some pills we had to force feed him.

Now, all of a sudden they want to not only tag me with registration fee, but also a penalty for apparently not paying a bill I have never seen before.  Now, ask yourself what business the state has keeping track of a cat?  They obviously have a bureaucracy in place to keep records, to issue bills like this and to assess fees if their demands aren't met.  How much does that cost, and for what benefit to the taxpayers of the state?  The pound facility I went to to get the cat in the first place was state of the art, with a big lawn, a play area for animals, and all new and separate areas for the different kinds of animals, so they are clearly greedily feeding on my labor without limit.   For me that appears to mean forty bucks now, plus apparently another 15 every year after that, for a cat.  I'll bet all the infrastructure to track, bill and ding non payers costs them more than 15 a year to run and maintain.  In addition, I have to bear the burden of feeding, and doctoring the cat all by myself.  Kitty litter ain't cheap these days.

Screw that. As you can see, the cat is dead.  No money for cats, although they have me by the shorts on the property, and I'll have to pay for Cal Fire's brand new pickup trucks and their gold plated retirement programs.  Very, very reluctantly, but I will pay.  The day will come for these bastards, when all the payers like me just say "no more, " and then the damn "public servants" will have to work past 52 and pay for their own health insurance, like the rest of us fools who think it's honorable to work for a living.