Last November, I was doing some plumbing work at my apartment and things went wrong…really wrong.

The long and short…I hit a sewer main and flooded my neighborhood with sewage. It was a total disaster, and because I lived adjacent to the lake, a lot of the stuff got into Lake Michigan, untreated. The city had to send in all kinds of people to clean the mess up. Department of Public Works, crowd control by the police, etc…and a bunch of my neighbors? Yeah, I wrecked a whole lot of their stuff.

The people were pretty angry, and I felt compelled to create an escrow account to help pay their damages, along with offers to the city to help with cleanup – and the city government? They stood strong against me, declaring no tax dollars would be used to pay for any of it, that I would be responsible for footing the bill entirely. I smiled, nodded and apologized, even put up a couple of billboards to demonstrate my commitment to handling the mess. My fault after all, though you’d never get me to admit it in court.

Anywhoo…it was all good, just like I knew it would be, because when I did my taxes on Monday, I wrote off half of the costs I incurred while cleaning up my own little disaster.

So, yeah…I guess the taxpayers had to pay their fair share cleaning up my mistake after all…

What? Oh you heard that one already?

Yeah, I read it too…unbelievable:

At Humid Beings:

The Next British Petroleum Blow Up – A 9.9 Billion Tax Credit

Have a nice day.