voice of san diego – The Surly Subgroup

By Sam Brunson

I grew up in the north suburbs of San Diego and, while I haven’t lived in Southern California in a couple decades now, I try to keep a vestigial self-identification as a Southern Californian.[fn1] Part of that self-identification is listening to the Voice of San Diego podcast; it keeps me vaguely up-to-date on current politics in San Diego.

Today, as I was walking to the pet store, I turned on the most recent episode. On that episode, the regular hosts were joined by Liam Dillon, now a reporter for the LA Times. And they mentioned a story he’d recently written, about the inheritance of property tax rates in California. Continue reading “Inheriting Property Tax Assessments in California” →

Nice_Avocados Last night, I flew back from the (wonderful!) AMT conference. After a three-hour storm delay, I landed at Chicago O’Hare and, walking to get my bag, I checked Twitter. A tweet from Voice of San Diego (VoSD) (which seems largely to be a geographically-focused ProPublica) highlighted a convergence between two of my favorite things: taxes and avocados.

I grew up in and around San Diego, and I grew up eating avocados (both in guacamole and BLAT form),[fn1] but I’ll confess that I’d never much thought about why there were so many avocados grown in San Diego; I probably always assumed that they were native to Mexico, and that San Diego had a similar climate to Mexico, so they were a natural fit. Continue reading “Avocados and Other (Delicious) Tax Shelters” →