California Scheming

Well, it’s been several days since my last post. What a hectic little time it was.

In the meantime, California leads the nation in decline as its government continues the most blatant, brutish, and crass fiscal assault on its populace, in recent memory. In a nutshell, the Golden State has decided not to meet it’s contractual obligations to the numerous vendors with whom it does, or did, business. Instead, it has issued a series of worthless IOU’s to which it cavalierly assigned monetary value much the way an 8 year old assigns the power of flight to his refrigerator box fighter plane. The current promise is a full repayment in October, roughly six months on average, after the debt was due. Naturally this leaves many small and medium-sized businesses, already under-capitalized in this economic malaise, struggling to keep the lights on.

But that’s not the worst of it. In fact, that’s old news. The real insult is that CA has the audacity to claim that taxes are owed on the receipt of this IOU “income.” Yes, even though these IOU’s often have little to no value outside of an extremely speculative secondary market, even though Banks frequently won’t take them as deposits, even through CA itself, recognizes the true value of the IOU’s in it’s refusal to accept them as payment for taxes due, the small business person must pay good money after bad just to stay on the right side of the state’s revenue services. Of course, they have the option of returning the IOU’s in payment of taxes if they forgo the “change” and accept that “they will not be able to refund the difference immediately, given the state’s cash-starved status.” In other words, if you just give us back our IOU and let us keep the difference for a while, you won’t have to pay any taxes (right away) on the income you gave back.

Good grief!

Tales of American Decline indeed. California has always been on the cusp of the “new.” Trends that start there, invariably work their way across the country and if one wants to, heck, if one “dares” to lick their thumb and stick it to the wind, they’ll find, no doubt, that as goes CA, so goes the rest of the nation. From repressive, nanny-state liberalism, and quality domestic wine production, to obnoxious valley speak and thin crust pizza, if CA has it, does it, or is it, it’s only a matter of time till it shows up in Chicago, Memphis and Boston.

I can wait.

-N