in the California State Legislature. Beginning tomorrow, all you lucky slobs who are not unemployed in California will see a nice little surprise in your next paycheck. A nasty surprise. California is increasing state tax withholding by 10%, even though your tax rate hasn’t actually gone up (yet) and of course it’s an annualized change so uhm … take that, you silly taxpayers who keep whining about tax increases.

The thing that bothers me about this is that the state seems to be illegally borrowing money from us that we don’t actually owe, so they can get an interest-free loan to prop up their dopey outta whack budget that they won’t balance. Do they really think this is going to help? Of course not, I think they’re just preparing us for the inevitable onslaught of tax increases yet to come.

I really, really wish the voters of California would get a f***ing clue one of these days and vote each and every one of these thieves out of office, from the lowest rung all the way up to the governor, because I’m getting really tired of being forced to pay for things that I don’t actually benefit from, while the state workers and the union workers and the beneficiaries of all these dopey social programs (like that “we’ll pay you to take care of your own relatives at taxpayer expense” program, which is, of course, unionized) seem to get by unscathed. They don’t get pay cuts. They don’t get laid off. They don’t lose thousands of dollars from pension fund investments that went sour. Of course not, because they get bailed out time and time again by the taxpayers. And the worst part is the state keeps adding more stuff to the pile.

Oh, and for those of you who are thinking hey, I’ll just change my withholding so I don’t get a tax withholding increase, be careful, I’ve heard of people getting whacked with penalties that far outweigh the “savings” when the state catches on and you end up owing more taxes than were withheld. (And since they’ll probably jack our taxes up again anyway, there’s really no point in fighting it, they’ll take it all and then some because they refuse to cut anything that needs to be cut from the state budget.)

Happy Halloween!