short comments on some current events

[cellio]

County property taxes are currently the subject of a fracas. The county executive wants to cap increases in assessments at 4%, because school districts aren't allowed to gain more than 5% a year and if they do, they have to lower the tax rate to compensate. This cap sounds like a win for the taxpayer at first glance, but actually, what it means is that under-assessed properties will remain under-assessed while everyone else picks up the difference. Accurate assessments and the resulting changes in millage rates are more fair, and the current scheme might violate the state constitution. (Fairer still, of course, is to not tax property, or savings. If you have to tax something, taxing consumption (sales tax) seems fairer, with exemptions for food, heat, etc. But don't penalize people for trying to save for the retirement no one else will provide.) But the part I like is that when approving this plan, the council mandated that tax bills would show whether you gained or lost from this scheme. So at least they have to tell us. :-) (Well, that said, how many homeowners see their tax bills? They go to the mortgage company.)

According to CNN, a CA prosecutor and judge conspired to keep Jews off capital juries because "no Jew would vote to send a defendant to the gas chamber". I find this curious. Yes, I know a lot of liberal Jews who are anti-capital-punishment, but that's because they're liberal, not because they get it from their religion. Lots of non-Jews are anti-capital-punishment, too. I actually wonder what the proportions supporting capital punishment are in the four groups represented by these two divisions: Jews and Christians, and religious versus non-religious. (Non-religious, in this case, means identifying with the religion but not doing much of anything about it, like the bagels-and-lox Jews and Christmas-and-Easter Christians.) I suspect that religious Jews are the most likely to suppor the death penalty.

Finally, Terry Schiavo. The situation is tragic, but I don't see how it's any business of the federal government to intervene in a specific case. If you have an issue with the way the state courts are structured, address that (if you can, constitutionally -- which I doubt). But you don't get to pick and choose interventions like that. So purely on legal-purity grounds, I hope this current effort fails. On non-legal-purity grounds, I feel awful for everyone involved but it's a sucky way to live and if she did express an opinion on that, her family needs to honor it. And this should serve as a wake-up call for everyone to put these things in writing; she was only 26 when she was struck down. I had a living will by then; do you now?

Comments

[goljerp]

I'm not after a proportion of someone's net worth. If he never spends it it hasn't really done him much good, now has it?

OK, first of all, my mistake: I suddenly started talking about net worth with rich people, which confused the issue. Forget about net worth; on average, rich people spend a smaller amount of their net income, thus my argument that a move to a consumption-based tax would hit them less than the present taxing system.

Also, mansions and yachts and BMWs are optional, but the things poor people buy aren't. So, what's to prevent the smart rich people from putting off their BMW purchases for a few years until they can buy, er, influence, the powers that be to change the tax system again?

You also appear to be unconcerned (as, apparently, are the powers that be) with the accumulation of wealth in the richest fraction of the population. This actually worries me, because there are all sorts of ways in which the mere existance of wealth leads to power. (Bill Gates' children will probably get into Harvard, no matter what their SAT scores are.) And if you believe that wealth is a zero-sum game, allowing some people to accumulate massive amounts of it hurts others. (Even if wealth is not zero-sum, it's possible for the richest to accumulate wealth so quickly as to deprive others of it.)

In my mind, the estate tax is the best tax there is. OK, maybe it could use a little bit of tinkering, but I think it's good to tax the transfer of wealth from one generation to another.