Merry Christmas: County wants higher sales tax — and part of your paycheck!

The official push for a ballot measure adding an additional half-cent per $1 to sales taxes in San Diego County was launched this week with a deceptive attempt to hide its real intent.

“Money raised from the tax surcharge would help fund some of the most pressing issues facing county government, namely a strained social safety net, the Tijuana River Valley sewage crisis and wildfire safety, according to paperwork filed with the Registrar of Voters,” the U-T reported Wednesday.

That’s what the government employee unions that are the muscle behind the push want you to believe. The truth is that the unions and their political allies are working around the clock to prop up a county budget that is ever more strained by employee pay and pension costs. This profligacy was on striking display in the grossly irresponsible actions of county Supervisors Terra Lawson-Remer, Monica Montgomery Steppe and Paloma Aguirre on Dec. 9. They used an accounting trick — one that allowed county reserves to be spent with a simple majority vote rather than the normal four votes — to provide millions of dollars in bonuses to county workers.

Rather than embrace technology to make operations cheaper and more efficient — as the private sector has long done — the unions see government first and foremost not as a provider of services but as a provider of well-compensated, secure jobs.

The tells are in plain sight on the sales tax proposal. “Up to 60%” of new revenue must be spent on social services, the U-T reported, which means it could go to the salaries of the 6,000-plus employees of the county’s Health and Human Services Agency. “Up to 23%” of new revenue must go to addressing the South Bay’s sewage crisis. Attention, locals who remain naive about blatant political manipulation: 0.1% falls within “up to 23%.”

The tactics are as dishonest and misleading as the city of San Diego telling residents in 2022 that new monthly trash-collection fees would be just $23 to $29 if a ballot measure allowing such fees passed.

The same U-T article also had two other nuggets of news that would have been worthy of the front page in their own right.

The biggest was that the county is looking for lobbyists to help it win state approval of allowing counties to levy payroll taxes, such as the unemployment insurance taxes the state collects from California employers and the personal income taxes the state collects from California employees. When are these taxes collected? Every time you get a paycheck.

The second was that the county wants lobbyists to get the state to let it raise taxes on real estate sales from 55 cents for every $500 in value to $30.55 for every $500 — an increase of more than 5,400%. If the county succeeds, the purchase price of a $700,000 home would rise to $742,000, a 6% increase.

And don’t forget the backdrop to this tax-hike mania: Lawson-Remer, Montgomery Steppe and Aguirre are among the many California politicians who pretend to care about keeping life affordable for their many struggling constituents. Pushing to allow the county to take a chunk of every paycheck, to add to the cost of buying most consumer goods and to make housing even more expensive shows their real agenda: extracting as much money as possible from 3.3 million county residents to keep government unions happy.

If this and San Diego City Hall’s similar machinations don’t show the need for a voter revolt, nothing will. Wake up, San Diegans. Wake up. Wake up.