Michael Jackson is dead and, as a result, Los Angeles’s taxpayers are likely to see their tax bill go up. According to the Los Angeles Times:

City Atty. Carmen Trutanich said this week that he was investigating how the city ended up with a $1.4-million bill. Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa’s office conceded that a city effort to solicit online donations to cover the memorial costs yielded only $17,000 before being upended by “frequent and prolonged server crashes.”

I love that the mayor is talking about how profitable this spending is going to be for the city in the long run. I think that the last time we heard that excuse to spend money was when we were told that taxpayers would make lots of money if they paid for the banks’ toxic assets or that the country would benefit for the $789 billion stimulus spending.

This is my favorite part:

But the new city controller, Wendy Greuel, seemed more concerned with the $48,826 that the Emergency Management Department spent on 3,500 boxed lunches from Jensen’s Finest Foods in Wrightwood, in San Bernardino County. The lunches were intended for emergency personnel at the Jackson memorial, but Greuel thought it seemed excessive, especially after her staff called a nearby Subway and was given an estimate of $17,491 for the same number of lunches.

Read on here.