The difference between death and taxes is that death does not get worse every year.

My property tax bill for my place here in town arrived the other day. And, my property tax bill for the Beta Site arrived today. Let’s see what we have here…

In town? A hair under $5000
Beta Site? A hair under $60 (and of that, $55 is ‘forester’. Actual taxes from mill levy stuff is $2.78)

Yeah, thats not a typo. In town I pay almost 100x what I pay at the Beta Site for 1/200th the acreage. Yes, 1/200th. And, of course, every non-property-owner in this town has a vote that counts as much as I mine. So when they want something new and shiny for the city to build, they can just vote for it because, hey, it’ll be those rich property owners paying for it and not us ‘working Montanans’. And yet, in the same breath, these people will whine about rents being absurdly high while never connecting those high rents to the property tax increases being passed along to them in their rent.

Both of these properties are 100% paid off, and yet I still have to pay for the privilege of just keeping them. Madness.

I need to go buy a bulldozer and a buncha concrete.