Sweet dreams

With a $97.5 billion budget surplus, one might reasonably hope our elected officials would be looking for ways to ease the pain of high prices and inflation by avoiding tax and fee increases right now. But no way. Not even the smallest relief will be forthcoming. Disappointed that California is no longer in first place as the state with the highest gasoline tax, trailing Pennsylvania by a few pennies per gallon, it seems our politicians will allow California’s tax on gasoline to increase July 1 by 2.8 cents per gallon.

Instead of counting sheep every night before falling asleep, I think of all the taxes and fees we pay. Try it sometime. After a few months, the nightmares get less severe and you’ll just wake up two or three times with cold sweats. Don’t worry, you’ll fall right back to sleep after you stop crying. You’ll get used to it, like the frog who cooks to death because he won’t jump out of water that is warmed just one tenth of a degree every day until it’s too late.

My nightmare last night was our politicians were unsatisfied with the $97.5 billion surplus and came up with a plan to close the gap to $100 billion because, well, because they could. They reminded each other that everybody needs air. We should tax it, they said. We have about 40 million people in California. The average human respiration rate is 15 breaths per minute. Using simple arithmetic, collectively, Californians will take 315 trillion breaths per year; $2.5 billion divided by 315 trillion breaths is 0.00079 pennies per breath. Why that’s practically nothing they said. Nobody will even notice.

And then someone asked, what about sunshine?

Sweet dreams.

Steven Smith