Desperate Taxation

When I checked out of my hotel yesterday, I discovered that the local taxation unit had some weird taxes.  It always seems as if the odd taxation always seems to happen in California.

The first odd tax I ran across was in San Francisco County.  It was the end of August or beginning of September that the county instituted a tax on fines.  Yeah, they were taxing fines and it was not a small tax.  Normally the fine on jay walking was $17.00 but with the tax, it shot up to $51.00, an increase of $34.00.  That is a ton of money.  It also meant that one of the highest speeding fines went up to over $1000.  I don't know if that was repealed but it was shocking at that time.

Then there was the tax I payed on a hotel room in the Los Angeles area.  The tax was instituted at the end of July, beginning of August.  It had to so with energy and raising money to pay for producing electricity so they added the tax to hotels.  This was around the time of rolling brownouts which gave governmental entities the chance to add tax.

Yesterday when I checked out of my room, I discovered another way you can be taxed.  I stayed at a "resort" rather than a hotel, so the local entities taxed both my room and the daily resort fee!  When I checked out, I had two entries for the local hotel tax and for a regional body, so I asked what was going on.  It took the gentleman a few minutes of checking and calling the accounting department before he had an answer.  In addition, the "resort" fee was labeled as a Hotel group usage fee and my friend translated that for me.

Ohhh well.  I'm glad I didn't call room service or they might have taxed that.......LOL.  I'm off to town to take care of a few things.  Hope everyone has a good day.