Seattle Taxes

I got a letter in the mail from my mortgage holder, Bank of America. It turns out the autopay I had set up for my mortgage, which was just fine for a long time, was insufficient on my last payment since the payments went up to cover escrow, which went up to cover taxes.The upshot of this is that the payment I made was applied only to principal instead of the payment since it's an oddball amount. I'm not blaming BofA in this case, this is standard, unfortunately. I just have to talk to someone to sort this crap out. It happens often enough I'm sure that this is a rather solvable problem.That's not the thing though. I'll be paying $150 more a month in taxes now based on this. That's close to $2000 a year of additional taxes I'm paying. Of course, the services I'm getting from the city are simply not getting any better at all. If anything the services are getting far, far worse. And no, these taxes don't cover things like trash pickup, that's a different bill that I have to pay. This is simply for the normal day-to-day operation of the city.Why is that?My theory is that since Seattle has, effectively, a single party system (all leftist progressives) that this leads to corruption. Once you're in office, you just need to keep the gravy train running and keep padding the pockets of your supporters. And, of course, that's exactly what's going on here. You have the city wasting money left and right on stupid things.

• Like buying the defunct Pronto bikeshare system and proceeding to mothball it.
• Running your mouth and then having to cover legal bills.
• Installing bike lanes in areas that no one uses them.
• Passing unconstitutional laws then spending more money on lawyers.
• Commissioning studies, then ignoring their results.
• Funneling money to organizations that only further the homelessness problems.
• Buying a $5,000,000 mobile injection van.
• Constant cleanups of homeless encampments.

I'm sure I can keep going on and on with this list.This city is more about showing how much you care in terms of policies, and absolutely nothing about actually delivering the results that need to be delivered.Then you just raise taxes again.Lather. Rinse. Repeat.