On April 6, 2020, the Huntington Beach City Council voted to give pay raises to city employees, including police officers.  The estimated cost of these raises is $5 million over the next three years.  Huntington Beach reported general revenues of $188 million in the fiscal year ended June 2019 and also reported total revenues exceeding expenses by $25 million for that same year.  Chicken feed, right?

FYE June 30, 2019, the city collected $89.1 million in property taxes, $47.4 million in sales taxes, $18.8 million in utility taxes, and $14.0 million in transient occupancy taxes.  What will these revenues look like over the next few years?  No one voted on these raises — just one bureaucrat giving another bureaucrat a raise with other people's money entrusted to their care.

The city of Riverside is proposing floating a bond issue to cover the exorbitant costs of public servants' pensions.  Bonds are a double tax — you must pay interest on the bond and then pay the bond back.  A recent study by Stanford University found CalPERS underfunded by $1.4 trillion.

April 16, 2020, 22 million Americans filed for unemployment due to the catastrophic slowdown caused by the Wuhan virus.  This same week, California governor Gavin Newsom proposed giving all illegal aliens $500 for assistance in taking our jobs.

Two weeks ago, the government added 16,000 to the tax-funded payroll and increased the number of H-1B visas.  Just whom are our "public servants" working for?  California highway patrolmen routinely retire on $100K-plus pensions, California sheriffs and deputies retire on over $200K, firemen well over $100K.  Mark Yudoff, chancellor of the U.C. system, just retired with a tax-funded pension of $337,000 after seven grueling years.  How long do you have to work to get your $300K-plus pension?  Keep those tuition payments coming!  U.C. chancellor Janet Napolitano plans to retire this year, again after seven years (this must be the magic number for exploiting the taxpayer), and her pension should exceed $400K, as she is paid over $500K now.  In 2016, Napolitano outsourced 100 tech jobs to India and laid off 100 UCSF I.T. workers.  The president of UCSD is paid $441K plus benefits.

In 2018, Curtis Ishil, head of the California Public Employees Retirement System (CalPERS), stepped down.  Today, he draws $418,608 per year, the largest of more than 700,000 pension checks issued last year.  Some 35,598 worth $100,000 or more were issued last year according to data from TransparantCalifornia.com.

The average American makes $60,000 per year and most of the time with no benefits.  Are you getting the idea here?  Don't live in California?  Not your problem?  Think again: the State of California spent over $320 billion last year, and $106 billion of that comes from the federal government.

How did we allow our "public servants" to become so much more equal than the rest of us?  The hogs are truly in the farmhouse.  The people we hire and elect to ensure our equality and protect our rights are the same people who are depriving us of equal treatment and our rights.  They have become elitists and have placed themselves above the fluctuations of the economy we have entrusted them with.  Until they are forced to live by the same laws, rules, and regulations they impose on "we the people," we will never return to a representative form of government.

Our "public servants" have turned into greedy, self-serving tax parasites.  Are we still a constitutional republic as our Founders intended, or have we become a progressive socialist state?  Hello, Venezuela.