If your wages are so totally inadequate for the service you provide, then stop providing it. If the paychecks are so inadequate, then stop cashing them.

Quit! You're not a hostage. Find another job. Go back to school and improve your skills to make yourself more valuable to employers.

Move to another area where rent isn't so high. Living in Santa Cruz is like living in Hawaii or SF or NYC. It's a luxury just to be here.

Anyway Mr. Socialist aren't you supporting the big evil capitalists by living here? Move to Watsonville where you don't have to pay as much rent into the coffers of those you despise. Stop empowering your enemy, you hypocrite.

To the needy, I don't say "go die". I say "I am sorry, but the charity workers who were serving you are no longer willing to serve you at the meager wage we can afford to pay them. Here is a list of other charitable organizations that may be able to help you in the future."

So the golf course is "an obnoxiously manicured field that should rightly be a redwood forest"?!?! Because you know we have a real shortage of redwood forests around Santa Cruz. Not.

Jobs and healthcare are NOT basic rights when those priviledges cost someone else. When your "rights" come at the expense of someone else's rights, that is called S-L-A-V-E-R-Y.

In 2004 the working-class lived in tax-slavery from January 1st until April 11th. 3.5 months!
www.taxfoundation.org/taxfreedomday.html
It's not the galley-chain or sharecropper slavery of old, but it is your new "kinder, gentler" socialist slavery of the productive members of society to the bleeding-heart liberals who use the poor and disabled to mask their pathological hatred of self-sufficiency and of even moderate financial success.

I'm tired of working 3 months straight to pay for conservative charity to the people of Iraq.

I'm tired of working 3 months straight to pay for liberal charity to the people of America.

I ALREADY do what I can to help people (within my limited financial means, AFTER TAXES). But I choose my charities carefully, and I only support those that are cost-effective. This compels them to BE cost-effective.

I can't do that with welfare. Despite your tirade against machine guns and bombs, your socialist gun is pointed at my head every April 15th and infact every 2 weeks.

I've seen how your Robin Hood welfare system spends its ill-gotten gains, too. Waste, fraud, and abuse are rampant.

Meanwhile, I'm struggling just to pay rent while YOU pick my pocket every 2 weeks to fund YOUR charities on YOUR terms. Might makes right? The end justifies the means? Okay, Stalin.