Author: Don Ringe

When is the internet not the internet? When the City of Los Angeles sends you a tax bill big enough to choke your fiber optics.

The City, under Mayor Richard Riordan, lured hundreds of internet startups to LA ten years ago with a promised tax break. Some of those firms turned out pretty well, like Shopzilla.com, a shopping comparison site which now employs 220 people and, according to the LA Times, spends over half a million a year just on locally catered lunches for staff.

The City, in its panicked grasp for ready cash, decided to re-define the term “internet” and silently dropped tax bill bombs on several of these companies. Shopzilla’s past-due definition overhaul cost them $2.5 million in additional taxes. They’ll see the City in court.

When I voted for Barack Obama for President. I certainly never expected him to wind up as the de facto Governor of California.

Now it looks like the only way out of this money mess is to just give up and toss it all onto the good faith and credit of the federal government. If effect, President Obama will soon be wearing at least one more hat as the CEO of the now rather tarnished Golden State. Not fun, but a better bet than his General Motors hat any day.

Fine with me. This may be just what California needs, a political Supreme Being who can order up salvation with the stroke of a pen, a Hercules who can clean out the stables in Sacramento by simply letting the American River overflow the capitol, a smart guy who can add and subtract and, by the way, inspire.

But, can anyone really save us from ourselves?