East Bay Conservative

My advice to the prospective Bay Area homeowners: Don’t move to Oakland.

Or, if you can’t tear yourself away from the prospect of horrible schools, murder as a way of life and a mayor who looks and sounds like Ronald McDonald in grayscale, at least make sure you read the fine print.

As October ends, we unlucky Oakland homeowners receive our annual property tax assessments. They read like a comedy routine — as if the government designed them to cause the gap between amount paid and services received to be as wide as possible.

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I know election season is in full swing, with other local bloggers offering endorsements of the various propositions. I may do so before the election next Tuesday, but in the meantime I want to discuss something that has a more direct impact on my everyday life.

From time to time, I need to ride the Bart elevator to get from street level to the platform. In certain stations — generally those without a mezzanine section — this requires first entering into the paid zone and then getting on the elevator. Not so in stations such as those along Market Street in San Francisco.

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Article after article has hit the wire in the past couple months about cities in distress forced to cut budgets. Pundits frame the issue in a variety of ways, but by and large people are of the view that after this period of belt-tightening, things should return to business as usual.

I am pleased to see localities finally forced to live within their means, and I am doubly happy to see them not immediately look for new sources of tax revenue. But I do not agree with the standard assessment of the problems’ roots. I believe government has reached the outer limits of largess and will be forced to trim back time and again to avoid Vallejo’s fate.

Actually, I think many cities will fail. There will be more than a few bankruptcies.

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I’ve returned to the blog world from days spent lamenting the coming taxation apocalypse. Luckily, the turmoil in financial markets is providing much-needed opportunities to purchase stocks that one can hold for the long term, thus escaping Mr. Obama’s taxation tsunami.

In my absence, the East Bay looks none the better, except for the nascent victory glow coming from Liberals who mistakenly believe the coming years will be brighter as a consequence of the coming election.

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