The tax happiness of the Curry years isn’t over. Other so-called Republicans don’t have enough control over your wallet.

The latest scam is to take more money from your family and give it to bums.

City Council Member Michael Boylan, who once headed the liberal public TV station, is a registered Republican. He is asking the Duval Legislative Delegation to give the council the ability to raise the local taxes on food and beverages at hotels and bars.

Why? To help the homeless.

The majority of people who are homeless are homeless because they prefer to be, unless someone gives them a free home.

Liberals see them as victims, of course. They have no qualms about taking money from other people and giving it to people who don’t work.

Jacksonville taxpayers already shell out some $26 million a year for such “help.”

Boylan’s idea is to spend about $13 million more of Other People’s Money.

That could only go up. As experience in other cities has shown, the more goodies you provide, the more homeless people you get. San Francisco, for example, is becoming a ghost town in the central city.

Does it help? Los Angeles County spends more than $1 billion a year on homelessness and the number of homeless has increased 55 percent in recent years, according to the City Journal.

There already are tramp camps in downtown Jacksonville. How many more does the city need?

How does that aid in the cause of “downtown redevelopment,” which every politician espouses (as if there never had been any)?

Politicians and bureaucrats blame a lack of “affordable” housing. Housing is unaffordable to some people because government has run up the cost of housing and produced record high mortgage rates.

Not only is the idea of fixing a problem caused by high taxation and regulation with even higher taxation and more regulation ridiculous, it also is a staple of liberal philosophy. There never is enough government interference in the economy.

In a recent study, an alternative approach was mentioned as one way to approach the problem: less regulation, and incentives for developers.

The report by a council special committee said remedies should “include property tax discounts, donation of city owned property, and access to finance capital. This was also included in the COJ 2030 Comprehensive Plan: The City shall continue to offer incentives to encourage the private sector to provide more housing in price ranges accessible to very low-, low-, and moderate-income families.”

Boylan, who headed the committee that produced the report, prefers the other method: Throwing money at the problem and making it worse with such approaches as rent control and “tenant’s rights,” which makes it difficult to evict people who won’t pay their rent.

Laughably, the study listed as one of the “weaknesses” causing homelessness “a conservative political climate.”

Conservatives believe in helping people get up the ladder, not keeping them in perpetual poverty as a lifetime of government “aid” does.

Liberals support ideas such as emptying mental institutions, which was done in the past four or five decades, and the current woke policies of not enforcing the law. Those ideas are among the leading causes of increased crime, violence and homelessness.