***MEMO to SELF..Pay Real Esteate Taxes.

Memo to Self: Pay the Damn Real Estate Taxes. Last Day without a Damn Penalty.
Yup. Just looked at date on computer screen and it is April 30, 2004. South Dakota and its subsidiary government units have their finest day today. It is Tax Mulcting Day.

Last chance to pay without getting an absurd interest penalty assessed. What is strange, I pay taxes in Clay County South Dakota. If the envelope is posted a day late, Wham...they send you a bill for interest. BUT, even if they get my check on time, that county often leaves the check sitting on a desk, in a drawer, or file for two weeks before they get around to cashing the check. Hmmm? Taxpayers are never supposed to think.

Which reminds me. The school I was graduated from Wakonda Public now has about one half or one third the students it had when my brother and I were there as students. Most graduating classes then had 25 to 35 students. Clue on the year I graduated...It was one of those few years in which the year reads the same right side up as upside down. Anyway there seemed to be room for all of us even if there were around 300 students.

For some reason that school district has had to add on classrooms and auditoriums for 177 students now occupying that space. Kids must have gotten awfully much fatter in those years since I attempted to remember dates of great historical events such as well..I can't remember those dates and never had any of any other kind in those "wonderful" high school days to remember.

Back to Real Estate Taxes. As a consequence of my now deceased relatives, I have a few acres of land back near the old stomping grounds. With half or one third as many students and building projects, and who knows what else, the school has had to opt out of the property tax freeze and add on another buck or so per acre to the taxes already mulcted out of our hides.

Those taxes must be falling down into a big hole someplace. When is South Dakota going to fix the tax system here? Republicans have controlled the state house and the governorship for most of the state's existence and they still can't get a sensible fair system working. Of course, choosing to tax those least able to resist paying has been the consistent approach. Fairness be damned. South Dakota has a tax system designed to help the very rich build factories and provide jobs and rock candy mountains for the rest of us peons. If that idea worked as advertised, South Dakota would be border to border industry and invention. Research centers and corporate headquarters would be everywhere. We would be building cars and have a lock on computer production. Farm equipment and tractors for the world would be rolling out of South Dakota factories. Wind generators would be designed and built by the thousands....but, you know that is not happening. The state population is dropping and businesses burn through tax exemptions and then leave SD.

Enough of this gotta write those checks to Clay County Treasurer and get my sorry ass to the post office before they close the window early. Service is not the middle name of our local post office either.

Stay tuned to a weblog near you ..even if the blogger is pissed off because he is giving away a "new computer and accessories " he can't buy...sob, weep..mope...to thankless bureacrats. It really is a gray depressing day. )))) Doug Wiken