Hound Dog
Oct 25, 2009, 11:44 AM
Post #19 of 39
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Re: [arbon] Mexican govt taking your money?
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But you can't expect to get much of anything, if you don't pay much "Property Tax" Eh.
Let´s talk about that, Arbon.
We get a 50% discount on our annual proprety tax bill in Chiapas because we are senior citizens over 60. So, if we were younger, we would pay the equivalent of about $50USD a year in San Cristóbal in property taxes.
At our last residence in Sonoma County, California considering its most recent sales price in about 2005, we would be paying about $10,000USD or, perhaps more, in annual property taxes. We don´t have any children and most of that money goes to county schools so I guess what we got for that was a paved county road up our mountain and a somnalent deputy sheriff in whom we had so much faith we kept a 12 gauge shotgun and a .38 police revolver at our bedside. We also were pleased to be purchasing an overstuffed and shiftless county bureacracy with whom every encounter we had was a nightmare.
We left California forever when we retired or we would be paying about a 10% state income tax rate on our IRA drawdowns in addition to federal income taxes. Despite that enormous tax burden the state is broke and people are leaving in droves. We needed air conditioning in much of the summer and gas heat in much of the winter and during our last year as residents of California we were being squeezed by the ENRON crooks for over $800 a month for electricity alone. We had to have two cars because we lived in the country and both had to travel in our work. When we quit our jobs to retire we were informed that we had access to COBRA health care benefits for an HMO plan where we could be treated as cattle to the slaughter for only $1,000USD a month more or less and that was nine years ago. The house we paid $265,000 for in about 1980 we sold for a good profit and the creep we sold it to turned around and sold it for $1,500,000 a couple of years later under a junk mortgage to people who were unqualified to buy it.
In Chiapas, what is it we do not get that we paid in blood for in California? We do not have or need guns or air conditioning and only a modest amount of gas heat and the street and state and federal roads are as finely paved as that county road in California and, unlike California, the neighbors take care of neighbors and enforce civility on our street because the cops have been crooks since the Spanish moved in over 400 years ago and I no longer have to drive down the mountain for food but just walk a couple of blocks to the indigenous market where we can buy enough delicious mountain grown vegetables and fruit and chicken and pork and fish to live on for a week for a pittance. I can drive from San Cristóbal de Las Casas to Lake Chapala, some 1,500 kilometers, over fine autopistas paid for in tolls by those using these great highways and both towns in which we live boast good restaurants and civilized residents and gorgeous scenery.
Tell me what I´m missing, Arbon? What does that extra $10,000 in property taxes we would be paying in California buy except another grinding year of long hours at the office and despotic bosses and long, arduous commutes in stop-and-go traffic and dangerous road rage and people who don´t break into your home simply to steal your television set but to kill you because of self-defeating "third Strike" laws that could incarcerate them for the rest of their lives and authorities who could confiscate your property because they found a marijuana plant out on your acreage you didn´t even know about and creeps running around in the woods or, if you live in the heart of the city as we did at one time in Oakland and San Francisco on the streets, who will shoot you dead for a sawbuck.
Sorry, I got carried away there. What was the question, Arbon?
(This post was edited by Hound Dog on Oct 25, 2009, 11:45 AM)
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