My current accountant has informed me unconcernedly that, oh, so big deal, this unpaid tax bill will probably ruin my credit rating. If the bill were from the federal government, of course, the IRS could reach in like the hand of God and simply remove the money from my bank account. Less omnipotent, California's computer instead keeps blithely, mindlessly spitting out its demands for escalating amounts of money, to the wrong address, even to the wrong country. Were I in a more charitable humour, I'd pity California for lavishing its scarce resources on postage and printing bound to earn the near-bankrupt state no further income.

What has this story to do with you? We've heard relentlessly about the UK's unsustainable deficit and national debt. About how taxes are destined to rise. Translate: your government is about to become dangerous. Your government is about to become California. Seemingly benign rhetoric about closing up tax "loopholes" may appear to pertain only to those evil rich people. But since "rich" in Britain means anyone earning over about £40,000, an even stricter, even more inflexible tax regime would easily pertain to plenty of middle-income families. 

It was an arbitrary, capricious and rigid tax code this last February that drove Andrew Joseph Stack, a software engineer whose consulting business that law had rendered unviable, to plough a private plane into the headquarters of the IRS in Austin, Texas, killing one federal employee and himself. Indeed, I've considered hiring a similar craft to implode the capitol in Sacramento, and by this point my ex's wife in Mystic might cheerfully join me in the cockpit.

Frighteningly even for compliant taxpayers, the more desperate our public finances, the more government morphs to merciless predator, with no motivation to be responsive or to correct its own mistakes. It is in California's interest to hire underlings to comb through old federal tax returns for California addresses. It is not in California's interest to hire yet more underlings to respond to protesting correspondence or to remedy errors, so it doesn't. In the face of bureaucratic stonewalling, punters are helpless. For to whom does one turn to rectify erroneous tax bills? The state.

If this story bores you, I'm betting you'll hear a lot more of them in the next few years.