I think the fact that so many people are forced to live in apartments is bad for the country. The solution is more building, but the politicians have made it impossible to build. People don’t have as much interest in keeping an eye on government and politicians when they rent, instead of owning their own home.
American politician
Actually, the politicians had to bend the law to keep us off the ballot that time. I don’t know if they did it on purpose or through sheer incompetence. We filed more than 650,000 signatures before the deadline, but then more than 200,000 of them were arbitrarily discarded by temporary help: boobs who were hired off the streets by county registrars’ offices throughout the state.
In Los Angeles County alone, 400,000 people did not pay their property tax this year because they didn’t have the money. They run the risk of being forced out of their homes, which I personally believe is un-American, indecent, and criminal. There is nothing more sacred than the place where a man lives.
Don’t misunderstand me: the politicians don’t petitions, as long as they have no legal effect. As long as they mean as much as writing a letter to Santa Claus. They don’t read the mail anyway. They don’t want the people to have the legal authority to take control of their government. Government controls people by putting up barriers that reduce the people’s right to participate in government, so legislators generally don’t like the right to petition. It frightens them, as it should, and they fight it every step of the way. As long as the people don’t have the right to petition, the politicians can sit up on their thrones and say, ‘We don’t give a damn what the people say.’ They can do that because they know the people have no way of fighting back.
The people in the United States—or at least some of the states—have two basic rights, the right to vote and the right to legally petition. I think the right to petition is more important than the right to vote because the right to petition means that the people can group together to stand up to the politicians and the bureaucrats.
In California thousands of acres are off the tax rolls because they are owned on the face by something like 64,000 tax-exempt corporations and 18,000 charitable trusts. It’s an unfair system. A pays taxes, but B doesn’t pay on the same type of property. Much of this property belongs to organizations that are listed as religions, but they’re not really religious. They’re just a fake to get a tax break. It’s nothing less and nothing more than revenue racketeering.
Many people don’t understand that property taxes have absolutely no relation to a property owner’s ability to pay—unlike the two other major forms of taxation, income tax and sales tax. From that very first meeting back in 1962, those of us in the tax movement decided that our efforts must be directed toward bringing all taxes— but especially property taxes—down to a level where most people could pay them without undue hardship.
For me, the words ‘I’m mad as hell’ are more than a national saying, more than the title of this book; they express exactly how I feel and exactly how I felt about the woman who died at the County building, as well as countless other victims of exorbitant taxes. I can tell you, there have been thousands of people who’ve had heart attacks—some fatal—or suffer severe emotional distress as they saw their lives drastically worsened by intolerable, unproductive, and unfair taxes made all the worse by inflation and an energy crisis that the politicians and bureaucrats have not been willing to face up to.
I didn't comprehend this during the 15 years we worked on 13. I didn't comprehend the size it was going to be. I was running around the track like a horse with blinders on. If I had known it was going to take 15 years, if I had known it was going to take 100,000 bucks out of my pocket, then I might have been too chicken to have gone on.