Search Results for: Property tax

Property Owners Burden Rising

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Peter Whoriskey:

“What is all the money going for?” the 60-year-old translator wondered last week. “I’m not seeing it in better services. Homeowners are becoming cash cows.”

The spectacular boom in Washington area real estate prices over the last five years has been accompanied by staggering increases in home tax bills as many local governments have spurned significant tax cuts in favor of reaping billions more from homeowners.

Judging by the number of “Madison Property Taxes” inbound searches recently, this is a topic on many local homeowner’s minds.

Federal Income Taxes: The Vanishing State & Local Tax Deducation

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David Leonhardt:

The culprit is a once-obscure federal tax provision known as the alternative minimum tax, which was created in 1969 to ensure that a relatively small number of wealthy people did not use loopholes to avoid paying taxes.

But it is increasingly being applied to families with incomes of $75,000 to $250,000 a year who claim relatively high deductions – like the ones for property taxes, state and local income taxes – and the exemption for children. When it does apply, it cancels some of those deductions..

The impact is about to mushroom. Barring a change in the law, almost 19 million taxpayers will be subject next year to the alternative minimum tax, or A.M.T., up from roughly 3.4 million this year and 1.3 million in 2000, according to the Tax Policy Center, a Washington research group whose calculations on this issue are widely accepted.

The non-indexing of the Alternative Minimum Tax will cause more problems over the next few years for Wisconsin residents.

Mayor’s Comments on Tax Increase

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Mayor Dave sent a letter in response to my recent post on his proposed budget that would raise property taxes 5.4%:

Dear Mr. Zellmer:
Thank you for your recent letter regarding the City budget. I, too, am concerned about the rising pressure on property taxes.
In my 2005 budget, I am proposing City spending increases of 3.6 percent, which is comparable to inflation plus City growth. In fact, the increase would be only 1.8 percent if we excluded four major items over which we have little or no control: rising fuel costs, health insurance for our employees, pension fund payments, and debt services.
Yet despite our responsible approach to spending, taxes go up at a much greaterrate than spending increases. The reason is declining and stagnant state aid programs. If state aids had just kept pace with inflation over the past two years, taxes on the average home would be $66.00 lower. Ultimately, the solution to high property taxes is not to gut City services, but to convince the Legislature to
fully fund state aid programs.

State and federal funds ultimately originate in the same pocketbook as property taxes…….

Best Laws our tax Dollars can Buy

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Nice to see US Attorney General John Ashcroft is busy addressing our most pressing legal needs: protecting Hollywood.

Ashcroft declares “most aggressive assault” on piracy in US history

At a press conference in Los Angeles today, Atttorney General John Ashcroft announced an expansion of Department of Justice powers to combat intellectual property theft. Some say the approach appears to be modeled after the war on drugs.
The U.S. Justice Department recommended a sweeping transformation of the nation’s intellectual property laws, saying peer-to-peer piracy is a “widespread” problem that can be addressed only through more spending, more FBI agents and more power for prosecutors.

In an extensive report released Tuesday, senior department officials endorsed a pair of controversial copyright bills strongly favored by the entertainment industry that would criminalize “passive sharing” on file-swapping networks and permit lawsuits against companies that sell products that “induce” copyright infringement.
Link to Declan’s News.com story, Link to DoJ press release, Link to the lengthy report issued today by the DoJ’s Task Force on Intellectual Property (PDF). More coverage at the LA Times: Link 1, Link 2

Via Boing Boing

Interesting Spin on City Tax Hike….

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Judith Davidoff:

City taxes on an average house in Madison would increase $82 under Mayor Dave Cieslewicz’s proposed 2005 executive budget.
That means the owner of an average $205,359 home would contribute about $1,597 to city operations, exclusive of county, MATC or school taxes.
Overall spending under Cieslewicz’s budget would increase 3.6 percent, though the property tax levy is going up 5.4 percent.
Brasser said that was due to the reductions in state aids and other revenue sources, as well as having less in reserves to plug the budget hole.
Last year the city had $4.7 million in reserves from the mayor’s hiring freeze.
“When all other revenue sources don’t keep pace with the inflation in our expenditures, the property tax is what has to make up the difference,” Brasser said.

Ideally, this article would include some history – spending and tax increases over the past decade vis a vis population growth, inflation and city employment, among others. If find this obfuscation disingenuous….
If you have views on this, send them to mayor@cityofmadison.com (keep in mind that our total property tax increase will include school and county increases as well).
UPDATE: Dean Mosiman summarizes the Mayor’s tax increase plans.

(more…)

Wisconsin: Squeezing the taxpayer….

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Steven Walters summarizes a variety of viewpoints on the Wisconsin Policy Research Institute’s recent study on state government spending (7.7% above the national average). The real crunch (and why the spending battles continue at the local and state level): Wisconsin’s income is 2.8% below the national average. [75K PDF]
This problem will not improve until our economy is increasingly based on high growth, valued added businesses. Wisconsin’s above average government spending was supported for decades by the state’s now declining manufacturing base. This change, which will take many years, requires an open mind, a willingness to avoid coddling and subsidizing declining industries, rethinking government spending (consolidating services and making sure the services we provide make sense in the 21st century) and doing everything we can to encourage business formation. It also requires economic and political leadership, which is, in my view, is generally lacking. (see this national example where the NAB has successfully kept public spectrum for TV stations). Note that TV viewer numbers are declining…..
Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett’s latest budget caps the property tax increase @ 2%

Taxpayer Bill of Rights?

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Wisconsin Senate Bill 477 otherwise known as the Taxpayer Bill of Rights, would cut the inflationary spending increase school districts are allowed under state-set revenue limits from $241 per pupil to $120 in the 2004-’05 school year and to $100 in subsequent years.
This article’s premise that spending more money increases quality does not always hold. My brief interactions with candidates, the board and interested observers indicates that state & federal mandates (not always fully funded), services beyond the core educational programs, along with rising administrative costs are driving spending increases.
Wisconsin, like other states, needs to consider additional sources of education dollars. Residents are largely tired of ever growing property taxes. [Editor: how about auto license fees or sales tax changes]
Wisconsin Property Tax Information: Teoma All the Web Yahoo Search Google

6.16

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Roberts said “a lot of stuff” involving Hunter Biden was missing from her iCloud when she got a new phone the next day.

Many editors of the loftier titles won’t admit it, but they all have an eye on the success of the British tabloid Daily Mail Online which, after establishing a large newsroom in New York, has grown to be the world’s largest English-language news website reaching over 225 million unique monthly visitors globally — 75 million of those coming from the United States. Dougherty, now at The Daily Beast, was formerly an editor at the New York Post and Daily Mail.

Krugman’s op-ed about why he, as Nobel-winning macroeconomist, isn’t worried about the debt includes these arguments:

“The older I get, the more my writing is driven by curiosity and the desire to learn, rather than by conviction and the desire to persuade.”

Some time ago, I built a Bürgeramt appointment finder. It helps people get an appointment to register their address at the Bürgeramt. The tool is exceptional in two ways: it’s available to everyone for free, and it follows the rules. I worked with the city for many months to get it sanctioned.

Chris Arnade is not a political extremist. If he reports that the US asylum system is broken, then there’s a real problem.

Printable Popup Horizontal Sundials – How to Make a Sundial.

There is nothing in Wisconsin state law which authorizes municipalities to charge a road use fee. Instead, roads are meant to be financed primarily through property taxes which have strict levy limits and uniformity requirements.  

The Town of Buchanan was one of the Wisconsin municipalities using a TUF to illegally get around their property tax limitations.  

In its letter, Elliott wrote, “While Southwest has a proud history, that history is not an argument for supporting poor leadership and sticking with a strategy that no longer succeeds in the modern airline industry.” Elliott included with its letter a 51-slide presentation laying out its case for overhauling Southwest. One slide features a 2014 quote from founder and former CEO Herb Kelleher: “If things change faster outside your company than they change inside your company, you’ve got something to worry about.”

Car insurance companies secretly collecting driver data with the help of phone apps.

It turns out the 6th floor houses Kitamura Camera’s “Vintage Salon,” dedicated to truly rare and valuable collector’s items. I was blown away when I saw an early Leica built for the German Army bearing a price tag of 40,000,000 Yen, or more than $250,000 USD at the then-current all-time high exchange rate. It turned out that wasn’t even the most valuable model on offer. I asked Mizutani-san if he’d be willing to be interviewed about his experience and the world of ultra-high-end camera collectors, and he agreed.

That is from New History of South Africa, by Hermann Giliomee, Bernard Mbenga, and Bill Nasson, a very excellent book.  I found it to be one of the best single-volume histories of any country I have read.  The other South Africa book I found especially helpful was Understanding South Africa, by Carien du Plessis and Martin Plaut.  One of the best things about travel is you understand a country — through books — much better than before you went there.  Everything is more vivid, and you retain much more of it.

In recent months, NASA officials like Koerner have been grappling with the reality that not all of this hardware is likely to be ready for the planned September 2026 launch date for the Artemis III mission. In particular, the agency is concerned about Starship’s readiness as a “Human Landing System.” While SpaceX is pressing forward rapidly with a test campaign, there is still a lot of work to be done to get the vehicle down to the lunar surface and safely back into lunar orbit.

Will the people connected to this policy be held accountable for any terrorist attacks it makes possible?

The fact that the US allows its own citizens to be put on an enemies list of a Country we are funding is really pathetic and should never be allowed.

But of course that still leaves the basic question of what batteries will be used for. I’m going to go through a bunch of use cases, from the obvious (cars and energy storage) to the not-so-obvious. But first, I should talk a bit about why batteries are such a general-purpose technology.

About one in four people stopped at border had some data copied from their devices by Australian Border Force

Battery-swap stations work well for VPP programs because they offer so much more flexibility than charging at home, where an electric-bike owner usually has just one or two batteries and thus must charge immediately after one runs out. With dozens of batteries in a single station as a demand buffer, Gogoro can choose when it charges them—for instance, doing so at night when there’s less power demand and it’s cheaper. In the meantime, the batteries can give power back to the grid when it is stressed—hence the comparison to power plants.

Is Apple paying OpenAI, or vice versa?

At secret meeting, right-wing radio host Dan Proft dangled $20 million to Darren Bailey’s governor run

Real estate developer Ori Feibush announced the immediate closure of his three OCF Coffee House locations on Monday, a week after OCF workers informed him of their intent to unionize.

She has a lot of company. The past year has been tough for the Bay Area, as thousands of layoffs skittered across the region. Even workers at Silicon Valley’s tech titans — including Meta, Apple and Google — have faced job cuts. Since 2022, tech companies in the region have slashed roughly 40,000 jobs. And with each layoff, workers are entering a market that is less friendly to job seekers than it used to be.

The regime gave $10B to Iran, but tried to take $56B from Elon. Why? It’s simple: they’re fine with Iran getting $10B to kill US troops, but they didn’t want Elon getting $56B to give you free speech. These came just one week apart

The vast majority of Tesla shareholders approved Elon’s comp package in 2018 and have re-approved it now. An activist judge voided it for nothing. The trial lawyers who are asking for billions in fees should get nothing.

United Airlines has launched a new ad serving platform that will exploit the personal travel information of its customers gathered from bookings, and the use of its app to allow a wide array of companies to peddle their wares to flyers.

In the backdrop of heightened data privacy concerns, governments and firms have introduced various privacy regulations. Assembling novel datasets on online advertiser spending, performance, and revenue, we quantify the economic effects of Apple’s App Tracking Transparency (ATT) privacy policy on e-commerce firms. Our paper extends prior literature by uncovering the effect of ATT on not only advertising effectiveness but also changes in firm-side strategy to mitigate the effects of ATT and the resulting net impact on overall firm revenue. We show that the performance of conversion-optimized Meta advertisements, which critically depend on third-party data for targeting and measurement, significantly worsened after ATT with a 37% reduction in click-through rates compared to click-optimized campaigns. Although advertisers substitute away from Meta for the Google ecosystem, those with a higher baseline dependence on Meta nevertheless experience a 37% reduction in firm-wide revenue. We find that this is driven primarily by steeper declines at smaller firms in the acquisition of new customers vis-a-vis retaining existing customers.

For example, while the FBI’s number of reported violent crimes fell by 2% in 2021 and 2.1% in 2022, the NCVS’s measure showed increases of 13.6% and 29.3%, respectively. 

Update on the Suez Canal crisis:

  • transits thru the Canal are down -50%
  • shipping lines punctuality is at 54.6%
  • shipping rates prices +44%
  • ships transit times +90%

Latest news is Houthis arming Somalis to extend reach

Creating a dozen different SKUs for all those things is complicated. Getting regulatory approval for every variation is expensive. So most manufacturers sell only a few variations of their models.

It’s good that the justices are speaking out. But conservatives need to understand that there is nothing to all the media stories concocting ethics complaints about the justices —they are simply being targeted by coordinated “oppo research” campaigns.

Criminal referral requests against Anthony Fauci and other public health officials have been submitted to District Attorneys in Louisiana.

But Quayle has some 737s and a pilot base in Guam, where business is weaker than before the pandemic, and he has traffic rights in Tokyo. And he is a problem-solver. So rather than returning some Guam-based airplanes to the mainland to fly them between El Paso and Houston (see what I am doing there?), Quayle wants to see if he can make money from unique assets that were controlled by United and Continental before the two airlines merged.

The general approach that Apple is taking is highlighted in this great 6-minute video from the WWDC keynote. In summary, Apple foundation models focus on personalization (alignment strategies), performance (core models), and size (on-device strategies). Only the last one is orthogonal from other developers out there, but it surely added substantial constraints that inspired the other two.

At the Tribeca Festival premiere of her intimate new docuseries, “In the Arena: Serena Williams,” the former tennis champ talks about becoming the subject of so much media attentiont at an early age, as WNBA rookie Caitlin Clark is now experiencing. 

The problem appears to mainly affect those riding mountain bikes in all weathers, particularly in Wales and the UK’s other wettest areas, because they are not sealed properly against water ingress. This week, one of the UK’s leading independent ebike motor specialists, the eBike Motor Centre based in Fordingbridge, Hampshire, told Guardian Money it was being sent about 250 motors a month – of all types – from owners desperate to find a cost-effective fix to problems including failed bearings, failed torque sensors and water damage to circuit boards.

“To 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue and to every member of both chambers of Congress: We are 1,800 miles away from the southern border here in Harford County and the American citizens are not safe because of failed immigration policy,” the sheriff said.

I think most everybody thinks their travels are more interesting than they really are and that they are more well-traveled than they really are. I fall into both of these categories, and here are some musings on why.