March 2, 2006
Pleasant Experience with Government
I was reminded again why I prefer Cobb County, GA, to Orange County, CA. Here in Georgia they have what’s called a “homestead exemption” to property taxes. Basically it enables you to reduce your property tax from 1% of value to about 0.6% of value per year. As with a lot of property tax rules, it’s designed to discriminate against renters, but I’ll take what I can get.
So I waited, being the procrastinator that I am, until the day before the paperwork was due before going in to file it. I expected it to take most of the morning, with lines out the door. Nope. I was in and out in ten minutes, a single minute of which was spent in line. And what’s even better? While I didn’t know much about the paperwork I had to file, the lady behind the counter was pleasant, helpful, and seemed to be generally cheerful to see me! For the first time in my life, I felt like someone in government was actually trying to serve me, instead of the other way around!
Recently I was talking to a friend of my wife’s, who closed her small business in Long Beach, CA, to move to Chattanooga. She was talking about all the hell she went through trying to keep that business lawful in California. She had thousands of dollars to pay to get her proper licenses, she had an auditor come in to the office once a year and assess her a 10% tax on everything the business owned, and found herself on spending sprees at the end of each year to hide income from taxation. In Tennessee? $10 for the city, $10 for the county, and since TN has no income tax, that’s about all she needs to worry about. Not only that, they were sending her notices about the paperwork she needed to file, instead of penalizing her after the fact for not filing things she had no idea even existed.
And people wonder why folks are fleeing California like the plague?
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