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Sword of Chomsky posted:What is hosed up is that if I could get a mortgage it would cost me less per moth than renting. Right now a small two bedroom house (800 square feet) is running 2500 a month or more. The same house would cost me no more than 1800 a month if it was a mortgage payment. I know property taxes would be added to that, but it is still less. If I had 20k in savings I would buy something, but it will take me 5-10 years of savings and no disasters to get enough of a nest egg to purchase something. You are missing more costs in your numbers here. The costs of buying and owning a home include:
There are additional potential costs, depending on where and what you buy:
Finally, if you will ever sell your home, you need to figure in the cost of selling. Typically the seller pays both the buyer and seller's agents commissions, which is a total of 6% of the sale price of the home. Add more costs depending on how negotiations go; often the seller has to fix things discovered during inspection, for example. This cost means that if your home fails to appreciate in value by at least 6% from when you buy it, you have a net loss, and you should account for the net loss in your calculations. UberJew posted:More accurate. I'm 39, and I bought four years ago in the Bay Area (Concord). I was only able to buy a house because of the mortgage crisis, of course, but I could have bought an apartment or condo. And I am not especially well off: I have a decent tech job as a technical writer, but I get paid way, way less than software engineers, and my wife is an artist so she makes very little. My wife takes BART into the city, which is a 45 minute commute, and I work from home. While prices in Concord have recovered, it is still possible to buy a house in reasonable condition in a non-murdery neighborhood here for $300k. Which is of course what all the regular workers with normal salaries who commute into the city do: they buy in Hayward or Richmond or Pittsburgh/Antioch and then take BART. quote:Why does the OP suggest that California has any liberalness to flaunt? We're just Florida with less humidity (e: and some very pretty mountains and forests) and our lovely conservatives have Ds because our Rs are complete lunatics. California still leads the country in a number of liberal causes, including having the strictest environmental regulations (especially for cars), stricter gun control laws, more money for health care for the poor, better support for immigrants, a lockdown on oil drilling especially along our well-protected coastline, and of course, higher taxes on businesses than most states, although with the glaring exception of Proposition 13 and how that affects the property taxes businesses pay. A lot of people in other states assume, wrongly, that California is uniformly liberal, which is of course wrong - we have some of the most staunchly conservative enclaves in the country, most notably in orange county, but basically all of California's rural counties are republican. Mayor Dave posted:The only people I know who have managed that feat (and I only know two) are both engineers whose parents gave them the down payment as a graduation gift. I'm not an engineer and I did not get a gift to help pay my downpayment. Well, I did, but it was from Obama, in the form of an $8k buyer's credit. Thanks Obama! agarjogger posted:I don't even feel like there's any excuse for suffering from this delusion. San Francisco is a major city in the United States, and a finance capitol no less. What chance does it have of being genuinely progressive. Well, you're right of course that there have always been business-friendly interests in SF. But SF also has a history of being a bastion for certain liberal causes, perhaps most notably the gay movement that the Castro is famous for. Gay Pride started here, the effort to pull AIDS out of the shadow and put it at the forefront of American consciousness started here. We elected one of the first openly-gay mayors in the world. On the other hand, San Francisco was a major military town up through the second world war, with naval bases and shipyards all over the place, so it has an industrial history too. It's a unique city with a unique history. I think it's fair to point out that NIMBYism and anti-growth has been the cause of, and certainly exacerbated, the lack of development that's ironically led directly to the current rates of gentrification; if you don't build new housing but demand for housing rises, then the poor people in the Mission, SOMA, etc. get displaced as their homes get bid up to rents they can't afford. But at the same time, it is a city with some charming neighborhoods, some important history (such as the Mission's hispanic heritage and character), and a tourist industry based in no small part on those charms. There's an economic component to the concern over gentrification; if SF's chinatown, mission district, waterfronts, etc. lose their character, SF may lose its position as one of the most popular tourist destinations in the world, almost as famous for its ethnically-diverse dining as it is for having a pretty red bridge. I'm afraid being mad at Google is massively missing the point, though. SF is a desirable place to live, and that means people want to live there, and if they can afford it they'll pay handsomely for the privilege. The only way to stop that would be to make it less desirable, which is obviously counterproductive; so, you need to either make room for more people to move in, or accept that the in-movers are going to displace the poorest of the current residents, and that is of course specifically the people who make the ethnic neighborhoods what they are. Kobayashi posted:Eh, there's a difference between SF proper and the surrounding Bay Area. And I don't know, my understanding of the area is that SF was kinda-sorta analogous to Manhattan's East Side, in that it really didn't start to heavily gentrify until recently. Unlike the dot com spike, SF's latest wave of change started during the housing crisis and continues to this day. That's how I read it, anyway. SF and the surrounding area has been undergoing a process of gentrification since at least the mid-1950s. It's just that people today don't remember as well that this was once one of the biggest naval shipyards and industrial centers in the country. The Port of Oakland is still among the top three on the west coast (after LA and Seattle). During the post-war period, there have been several waves of massive suburbanization. In SF proper, areas such as china basin have been slowly converting from old industrial land into revitalized neighborhoods for decades. In the 1990s, though, we saw a lot of those areas converted into "artist lofts" which actually went in the majority to up-and-coming dotcommers and new wealth businesspeople, many working in SF's financial sector (which has also been growing since the 1950s). The housing crisis did bring about some significant changes, don't get me wrong; a lot of people were displaced through foreclosures, which made it possible for some big redevelopment projects to get started. But poorer immigrant populations and blue collar workers have gone through a process of displacement into the fringe suburbs of the bay area for at least the last 50 years. Armani posted:The guy I am currently seeing wants to become a K-12 teacher but not in this state. He feels California fucks the good teachers while giving horrid teachers permanent paying tenure, that government pensions to retires is killing the state, high taxes are a loving crime because the job creators will leave, etc. He also is pissed off at Unions in general and that takes some serious deprogramming to get that kind of hate down. Sever. FRINGE posted:The meta-argument "tell all the Apple drones to go live in Apple land instead of ruining our city" does have some ground-level sanity to it. If the coffee-pourers cant afford to live in SF then it makes sense that there will be a backlash against the Apple drones driving rents up "because they can". (Telling low-wage workers to commute in and out of SF is ridiculous. Adjusting the system to make it less attractive to bigger-money vultures makes political sense from a local perspective.) But they are based on an apparent failure to know or understand the statistics. The software industry is only something like 15% of the bay area's employment. If Apple, Google and Facebook all left the bay area and took all of their workers with them, it'd be a small blip on the total economy and make very little difference to the housing situation here. Gentrification in San Francisco is driven by a rising population, falling unemployment, and recovering economy creating high demand for housing, with 40+ years of restricted development throttling supply. The tech buses are highly visible tokens that give protestors a way to get the attention of reporters, which is valuable for grabbing media attention to their cause, and maybe that's useful for engendering some kind of change. But it doesn't seem like the protestors are asking for the kinds of changes that will actually give them what they want - which is stabilizing rents so that ordinary wage earners can afford to stay in the city. Trabisnikof posted:Unfortunately, I think the people who want to dress like clowns are drowning out a legitimate discussion about a complicated issue and instead turning it into "tech versus not-tech", when really its about the fact that many Bay Area communities refuse to adapt to a denser reality. I'm not talking about SF or Oakland, both these cities are building new and denser developments. Its the cities where the job growth is, and the peninsula in particular, that refuses to adjust to their own changing economics. This is a really good point and goes to the heart of the matter. The Bay Area communities do not work together to plan for the millions of people we are going to add to our population over the next 20+ years. Too many communities have policies driven by homeowners who are perfectly happy to watch their property values skyrocket while preserving their views of the Bay, and willfully ignoring the traffic nightmares that are caused by the way this inevitably forces people to move farther and farther out into the periphery of the bay area. The decisions not to have BART in Marin or to San Jose back in the 1970s is part of that, and shows how long this kind of attitude has persisted. San Francisco gets the attention in the media, but huge parts of the blame for the current clusterfuck go to peninsula cities, San Jose, communities along the hills of the East Bay, etc.
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May 6, 2014 19:30
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Dusseldorf posted:The problem you see repeatedly in Berkeley politics is the wealthy homeowners are thrilled to use anti-everything useful idiots that this place is ripe with to oppose any measure that would actually increase density and lower housing costs. I think part of the problem is that truly affordable housing can only happen right now if (a)rents are set artificially low, such as by section 8 housing, or (b) a massive amount of the demand for more expensive housing is met. If the Bay Area needs half a million more units of housing, then building 100 units of "affordable" housing just means 100 tiny units that will be instantly gobbled up at rents of $2500+ a month, because there's just so much demand. So a community group sees plans to build something that will clearly wind up selling apartments at $400k each, and say "hey this isn't affordable housing, it's just further gentrification." And they're right, in the very short term, or if this new development actually involves first demolishing a larger number of units of existing cheaper housing. But in the broader case, all the different communities adding units of any kind to the marketplace is essential to creating the opportunity for affordable housing to exist at all.
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May 6, 2014 19:55
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Shbobdb posted:I agree, there is no way the STEMs will unionize. There is too much of an anti-Communist presence from Koreans, plus Asian work ethic in general is pretty nuts. It leads to people just accepting what is a very bad situation. What? Are you seriously saying that the reason STEM workers in the US will never unionize is because of asian immigrants? I think it has a lot more to do with "white collar" workers viewing themselves as seperate from, and more elite than, "blue collar" workers. Unions are for unskilled tradesmen, while STEM workers are part of the well-educated thinking-person crew who are smart enough to get paid well and not need unions. (I disagree with that view, if it isn't obvious, but I think it's a view that has been very deliberately and intentionally cultivated by the right for decades.)
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May 7, 2014 04:50
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Gavin Newsom is kind of like a distilled, ultra-refined politician - clean-cut, handsome, utterly entrenched in the big-money wheeling and dealing of modern politics. But he was a pretty good mayor, and his politics are pretty well aligned to my own. I kind of view him as my personal politician-robot. Beep Boop Let's marry some gays today.
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May 7, 2014 18:01
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We have a history of robotic governors, don't we? Grey Davis, the Terminator, Pete Wilson.
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May 8, 2014 06:05
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Obdicut posted:He did other horrible things, too, like kicking the residents of a homeless shelter out so he could talk about how there really were beds available. "Care Not Cash" wasn't a bad idea in an ideal setting, but without actually improving the 'care' bit it was a victim-blaming clusterfuck. I never heard about that, and actually had the impression that care not cash had been pretty successful at actually making a difference for homeless people, unlike the efforts of basically every previous mayor. I distinctly remember willie brown's homeless policy being "send waves of cops to sweep through golden gate park and arrest them, and while we're at it, be sure to confiscate and destroy all their belongings". Under "care not cash" we stopped giving cash to the homeless, but I thought there was also some large increase in the number of beds available per night, plus a focus on improving the various social services for homeless people. Was that all just a sham? As for the murder rate, I don't know what he promised, but he did deliver a lower violent crime and murder rate by 2009. Generally I liked that he was willing to fire people who weren't performing well, undertake major initiatives, wrangle with the famously contentious board of supervisors, and cut the budget when necessary. I don't know (or care) much about his personal life and generally have a positive impression of the guy. The slick, carefully-managed media appearance is a turn-off but also very understandable to me given how much the media tends to treat politicians like celebrities (focusing on how they dress, how their wives dress, that kind of poo poo).
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May 8, 2014 18:22
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The wikipedia article on Care Not Cash is pretty positive, suggesting at the end that the homeless population of SF went down by quite a lot by 2007. I'm afraid "real improvements" probably could never have involved opening up a large number of new beds for the homeless, which is of course the fundamental issue in san francisco, for all the reasons we've been discussing on the last several pages: NIMBYism and the difficulty of getting new affordable housing constructed. The other half of the coin is the way Reagan destroyed the mental health care system in this country in the 1980s. I give Newsom credit for making some kind of difference in a situation where the resources to really solve the problem just aren't available to a city mayor. But it is disappointing that the program wasn't an unqualified success. Board of Supervisors. In SF, notoriously batshit and dysfunctional, with occasional bright stars like Tom Ammiano.
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May 8, 2014 18:32
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quote:A study released February 9, 2005, indicated that the number of County Adult Assistance Programs (CAAP) residents who declared themselves to be homeless residents of San Francisco had decreased from 2,497 to 679 since implementation of Care Not Cash in May 2004.[3] As of January 2007, the caseload had decreased further to 333, although Mayor Newsom admitted in a radio interview that two or three new homeless persons come to San Francisco for each homeless person that gets off the streets.[4] A decrease from 2497 to 333. Newsom's admission doesn't seem to correspond with the data presented. Obdicut posted:Credit for what? What actually happened that you're giving him credit for? The homelessness problem in San Francisco experienced an 8-year period of not being swept under the rug and roundly ignored by everyone in city government. Mental health and substance abuse programs received funding they would not have received otherwise. A bunch of homeless people stopped getting free booze subsidies. The government's use of the city police as a tool for harassing the homeless was reduced significantly. I don't know what to tell you, man, I'm not getting how the program was "victim blaming." I was living in the city at the time, and alcoholism on the streets was a very real and prevalant problem, right in front of everyone's eyes, so I can't agree that pointing this out is just blaming victims. Newsom's programs specifically put money towards care and treatment in a way no previous mayor had bothered to do. He made a real effort to get more beds available, although obviously that wasn't as successful as anyone wanted, and the main source of beds that weren't NIMBYd into impossibility were the residential hotels in the tenderloin... which are of course owned and run by scummy tenderloin landlords. What do you think he should have done differently? I mean specifically, given the lack of additional funds being available at the time, given the lack of any will on the part of voters to have homeless people housed in their neighborhoods, given the lack of state or federal funding for free mental health care, and given that whatever programs SF implemented would be basically guaranteed to attract homeless people from other bay area cities. I actually think what Newsom "admitted" in that quote up top is a sign of success for the program. Homeless people in SF were being treated well enough that homeless people in Oakland, San Jose, etc. were pulled in, seeking better treatment and services.
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May 8, 2014 18:58
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I don't, of course not. But it's one of the few metrics I've seen. Unless you erect an Israeli-style "security fence" around the city and start using checkpoints to control who gets in and out, you cannot really measure how effective homeless care programs are on the basis of how many homeless people you count on the street at night. So all you can do is count how many individuals, identified by name, are going through the system and what their outcomes are. One particular program seeing its caseload go down is a suggestion of success. But you and Obdicut are right to say that doesn't necessarily mean "the homeless population went down," so I retract that. I think Newsom's initiative helped a lot of homeless people that werne't being helped. I think it was a net positive for homeless people in San Francisco, compared to the alternative of "do fuckall, arrest them when they wander too far into our tourist destinations" policy of his predecessors, Agnos, Jordan and Brown. Especially Frank Jordon and Willie Brown, gently caress those guys.
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May 8, 2014 19:08
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computer parts posted:Did the number of people using CAAP decrease as well? Perhaps they just kicked people off of the program. I don't know. FYI, SF is its own county.
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May 8, 2014 19:32
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Obdicut posted:Do you have citations for any of this? Do you? I mean you've made a number of uncited assertions, while I've at least bothered to link to wikipedia. quote:The homeless problem has never been 'ignored', anyway. it's always been front and center. Among community activists, sure. Previous mayors mostly engaged the homeless problem using the police. There was very little, if any, action out of the mayor's office to actually improve services or actually try to provide more beds. That was mostly seen as something for the charities to do. At best, mayors occasionally signed into law efforts made by the BoS. At worst, they went out of their way to punish homeless people in a blatant effort to get them to just move somewhere else. quote:And when you protest against 'victim-blaming' and call cash payments to the homeless 'booze subsidies' it's kind of hard to take you seriously. I didn't protest against victim-blaming, you did. I pointed out that alcohol and drugs on the street were (and still are) a very big and pervasive problem, one which was, in my opinion, absolutely exacerbated by giving cash payouts to people with mental illnesses. Of course homeless people are going to self-medicate, given the horrendous circumstances they're in. As well-intentioned as the cash was, I am convinced it was hurting more than it was helping. It was (and still is) demonstrable that a big amount of the money went straight into substance abuse. Substance abuse and addiction is one of the major causes of homelessness! So yes, cash payments to the homeless are, at least in part, booze subsidies. Prove me wrong. quote:Worked his butt off to get funding increased, not done sweetheart deals with developers and instead insisted on more low-income and section 8 housing being built. I think he did work hard to get funding increased, and I don't think it was (or still is) possible to get major low-income housing projects done in a reasonable amount of time in San Francisco given how ferociously the various neighborhoods push back against them. The biggest exception in recent history was Newsom's efforts to get a project done in Baysview-Hunter's Point (one of the shittiest neighborhoods in the city, which is why the NIMBYs didn't prevent it). From this SFGate article in 2007, quote:Since Newsom became mayor, the city has put nearly $500 million into construction of affordable housing, and it is working to rebuild the public housing projects that are home to nearly 20 percent of San Francisco's families. There's a plan to put 6,000 new homes and apartments on Treasure Island and thousands more high-rise apartments and condominiums on Rincon Hill and around a rebuilt Transbay Terminal. $500 million for affordable housing. That's nothing to sneeze at. I mean I do get it. Newsom is very pro-business. He likes to operate hand-in-hand with business interests. Care Not Cash was not an unqualified success. But there's this thing we liberals like to do, where we eat our own? Nothing is ever good enough, there's no true scotsman. And especially in San Francisco, you get this thing where leaders are bending over backwards to try and enact liberal policy, and they get screaming protestors as a result because adding density to a city invariably means tearing something down in order to build something else, and "affordable housing" in SF means anything under like $2000 a month, and literally any effort you make on behalf of homeless people pisses off at least one group who thinks your way is the wrong way. Gavin Newsom is not perfect but I don't think it's unreasonable to say that he genuinely tried to help the homeless in San Francisco by recognizing that the same tactics that had been used for decades weren't working and weren't helping and that a different approach was necessary. And I think it had a positive effect. And I'm a bit annoyed at being attacked for saying so, especially by someone who demands I cite sources without having cited a single source himself. Like, can you back this statement up? Obdicut posted:He did other horrible things, too, like kicking the residents of a homeless shelter out so he could talk about how there really were beds available.
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May 8, 2014 20:51
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Texas is terrible because it is full of Texans. This is the California thread, we can slag off Texas with impunity here right?
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May 16, 2014 05:47
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I'll take San Francisco's brand of smug and insufferable yuppies over Texas's brand of poo poo-kicking, wannabe-cowboy, hyper-Nationalist, bible-thumping racist conservatism every day of the week. I won't deny San Francisco has a lot of terrible people, but at least our terrible people aren't joyfully electing governors that execute more prisoners annually than the rest of the country combined - including the mentally disabled - and are proud of that fact. And yes I know it's different in Austin. I'm tired of hearing how Austin is the exception that makes Texas OK. I don't like LA much but I'd rather spend a lifetime in LA than a year in Texas.
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May 16, 2014 07:50
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Yeah don't take me too seriously, the only part of Texas I've visited was Dallas/Ft. Worth. It's fun to rag on Texas though because they make it so easy. Papercut posted:It's funny how the same ridiculous attitude that the Bay Area has about LA is now being adopted by East and South Bayers about SF. So much hate on one side while the other side is just like, "yeah, that area is cool". The problem is that to all of these spurned-lover emigrants, all SF is is street festivals and letting your freak flag fly, but to lots of people SF is also about incredible natural geography, historic architecture, fantastic museums, and world-class parks. Sorry that those of us who remain aren't keeping it weird enough for you and Vice. Trabisnikof posted:To be fair, I hear SF people use "Bridge and Tunnel" a lot these days and there's generally an attitude that only the poors live in the East Bay and there's a general ignorance of the fact the East Bay has incredible natural geography, historic architecture and some silly museums too. I agree strongly with this. The "gentrification" thing is important and a big deal, because it's turning ethnic communities (especially the Mission) into "revitalized" modern wealthy person places that may be cleaner, but are much less interesting to hang around in. But overall San Francisco's charms remain healthy and intact, at least from the perspective of a native. Golden Gate Park, the Asian Art Museum, Ocean Beach, West Portal, 9th and Irving/Judah, the Academy of Sciences, the zoo, Chinatown, Japantown, inner Richmond/Geary, the Fillmore, the Castro... most of the places I used to hang around as a kid or when I was in my 20s in college are still there and doing OK. The Bay Area has a lot of amazing attractions that make it a really great place to live, even after accounting for the traffic, high cost of living, and the socioeconomic forces that are changing things over time. And yes, the East Bay is very nice too. It's not all Fruitvale. I enjoy living in Concord. It's not the same as San Francisco but there are distinct advantages.
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May 16, 2014 17:43
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Yup if you exclusively hang out in SOMA, the Marina, Potrero Hill, and North Beach, you're gonna get a really different idea of what the City is like, compared to someone who spends most of their time in Ingleside, Bayview/Hunter's Point, Excelsior, Crocker-Amazon, and Visitacion Valley. e. From The Racial Dot Map: 
Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 18:11 on May 16, 2014 |
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May 16, 2014 18:05
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Dusseldorf posted:And even the Legion of Honor has a horrible art collection. It only has a nice view going for it. It generally gets really good reviews on the various review sites.
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May 16, 2014 23:13
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Yeah the burrowing owls thing is a red herring, it's not what the article is about really. That article's been making its rounds and showing up in a lot of threads for the last few weeks. I'm not sure I agree on every point, but it's so comprehensive and thorough that it's more or less required reading for anyone who wants to speak intelligently about the Bay Area housing.
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May 21, 2014 06:46
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It is an amusing-sounding detail that fits into the much bigger picture the journalist was trying to paint: thousands of development-stymieing decisions, each of which may seem reasonable on their own, which accumulate into a clusterfuck that has brought us this frustrating state of affairs where liberals are literally angry about people taking busses. The owls are a loving metaphor.
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May 21, 2014 17:58
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Most of the people buying homes are married.
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May 21, 2014 18:19
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Sure, yes. I was responding to this: Moon Potato posted:Go to Mountain View, look at how land is used there, then tell me why anything in this paragraph belongs in the discussion at all.
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May 21, 2014 19:00
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Moon Potato posted:It's a bad metaphor and a lovely attempt at click bait. An author who enjoys digging up historic details as much as him should have been able to figure out why there are municipal and regional ordinances about protecting burrowing owls and how, even if you developed over every last piece of their habitat, it wouldn't drop rents in San Francisco at all. Jesus christ you are just really determined to not understand the premise of using a small example as a stand-in for a systemic problem. It's not an anti-environmentalist hit piece! The author is showing how hundreds of different decisions, each of which seemed rational and supportable in isolation, have combined to create a bad situation. The owls thing is just a more memorable and attention-getting minor detail that makes for a headline. "Click bait" is one way to describe every headline-writer's job for every magazine, newspaper, and online news story going back a hundred years, but it's kind of a stupid one. Yeah. It has a title that is designed to grab your attention so maybe you'll be more likely to read the article (and view the ads that paid for it). Why complain about that? Do you actually disagree with the article's broad conclusions, or are you just determined to complain about petty poo poo? Just as a reminder: Moon Potato posted:There must not be any good articles on the Bay Area housing problem then, because it's really dumb to blame a single breeding colony of burrowing owls for lack of density in an area covered by single family homes and sprawling business parks. That's not what the article says. Trabisnikof posted:Edit: My gripe with that article is that is is kinda light on potential solutions for all its exposition. The job of a journalist is to inform the public about the problems. It is the job of policymakers, taxpayers, and voters to decide on and enact solutions.
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May 23, 2014 08:30
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Yeah I don't give a gently caress about that guy but I think his article is worthwile reading and it annoyed me that someone dismissed it on the basis of its title or the owls or whatever, and once I got into it, it annoyed me that dudes are arguing with me about the use of an example to try and make a point. Journalists cover solutions when the solutions are part of the news, e.g., a politician or group or someone is proposing to do X. I guess it's fine if someone writing a blog post or an article wants to propose solutions, but I don't think it's valid to criticize someone who doesn't do that. A primer on what's wrong is valuable even if it doesn't include solutions. And in this case in particular I don't think there are any obvious, straightforward solutions.
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May 23, 2014 20:33
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etalian posted:It's basically a great money tree for the DNC given how all the big name tech companies from Google to Oracle give to the DNC in big amounts such as 90 percent contributions vs the GOP. Larry Ellison actually splits his donations between democrats and republicans. Oracle execs are fairly conservative. Oracle puts money into Oracle PAC; a search on the FEC tells you who that PAC gives money to. Here's the first page, showing the most recent contributions:  Anna Eshoo is a D Xavier Becerra is a D Bill Johnson of Ohio is an R Blumenthal is a D Bob Goodlatte is an R Boehner... well, you better know who Boehner is, and seriously gently caress that guy etc. My point being, Oracle isn't even really a blue-dog demo kind of place, it's a fulltime fence-straddler that donates specifically for corporate advantage and nothing else. Google execs are more solidly D, with a few exceptions, but not to a 90/10 split. Google's PAC "Google netPAC" has a disclosure (PDF) listing federal contributions and another (PDF) for state candidates. Click the link for NetPAC to see their quarterly lobbying statements which are basically useless since they don't tell you dollar amounts. But looking at just the federal contributions, it's a sea of Rs and Ds. I think it's fair to say tech firms contributed a lot to Obama's election (and reelection) campaign funds, but beyond that, I'm not sure how actually liberal or even blue-dog liberal most of these firms really are. They give money to whoever will promise to cut regulations, make their businesses cheaper to run, enforce net neutrality (or destroy it, depending on who they are), get more pork-barrel spending for California, and so on. Pretty much like all businesses everywhere in the country do.
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May 24, 2014 00:46
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Regarding prop 42: it's actually weird for municipalities not to pay for disclosure. Municipalities generally have a lot of different regulations for how they operate, all of which cost money. There's rules about how often they have to have elections and how those elections have to be run, for example. They have to pay for some kind of city/town hall, they have to pay for security at meetings, etc. It's actually kind of weird to say "oh but the state will pay for your website" or whatever. Having to have your meetings open-door and accessible to the public is a basic requirement of democracy, not some kind of draconian requirement with extraordinary costs of compliance. Re a new tube: I wonder if it wouldn't make sense to run a BART spur under the north bay between the Richmond line and Marin. Granted that'd be a longer ride from Marin to SF, but it'd avoid having to run a tube under the mouth of the Bay, and also the almost certainty of having to cut tunnels into the Marin Headlands in order to route track. (I doubt there'd be support for adding a deck to the golden gate bridge, if that's even a feasible alternative.)
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May 26, 2014 03:23
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I always figured the line down to San Jose should be wrapped around the bay and joined up with the Fremont line. That would take some capacity load off the transbay tunnel, and also allow trains to be run on a loop which might be more efficient at certain times of day. Being able to BART OAK-SJO could have benefits too.
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May 26, 2014 04:31
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It doesn't have to be an either/or situation. If there was the political will in this state to do something, anything, about prop 13 (and there isn't), it could be phased out instead of just picking a day where suddenly tons of people's property tax burdens go up by huge multipliers. The fact is, the longer you've owned a property, the greater a benefit you get from Prop 13. This acts as a huge disincentive for homeowners to sell, and that acts as a huge restriction to the housing market. Prices are high because demand is high and supply is low. The longer Prop 13 persists, the more it affects those numbers. Even people who would otherwise sell, are incentivized by Prop 13 to rent out a home they no longer want to live in, instead of selling it, so prop 13 actually encourages the "speculator and wealthy class" to persist. Prop 13 was originally passed based on the "grandma is gonna lose her home" propaganda, and it's obviously still an incredibly effective narrative. But it's bullcrap. The rest of the country manages to charge property taxes based on actual value of homes, and yet, somehow, the rest of the country isn't swimming in homeless grandmothers. Because having taxes proportionate to home value actually helps to produce a healthy housing market, where people live in homes they can afford to live in, and sell homes they can't afford to live in, so there is a reasonable turnover of the total home inventory which keeps housing prices from inflating too much. So if we wanted to end prop 13 (and I'll reiterate that currently Californians absolutely do not want to do that), we'd phase it out. Allow tax rates to gradually move towards a percentage of current-market-value based on assessments of that value. You could write into a law that rates can't go up by more than (say) 2% more than they currently do, annually, and that would eventually do the job. If grandma can't afford her tax rate, it's because her house has massively appreciated in value. She can sell the house, or she can use her equity to take out home equity lines of credit (and thereby maintain an equity level equivalent to her original purchase... e.g., she's not building wealth through property appreciation, but she's also not being forced to sell). And if grandma's house has appreciated in value, that means she's gained wealth. If she has to sell her house becuase her fixed income can't support the tax rate and she doesn't want to borrow against the equity, well, at least she's consequently extracting all that wealth she's built from her house! She can move to a lower-cost area, and live at a higher standard of living due to her increased wealth. It's literally insane to spin "grandma's house has gone up too much in value" as a bad thing that has to be compensated for by allowing her real tax rate, after adjusting for inflation, to decline annually. The biggest boondoggle in the whole thing, of course, is that commercial property is included in prop 13. Owners of commercial property lease out their space rather than sell; you can give a lessee a 99-year transferrable lease, which is functionally the same to the lessee as selling the property to them, except that this structure doesn't count as a sale so the property tax rate remains pegged to the original value of the property. It is already bad and heavily exploitable and every year that goes by it gets worse as the tax rate fails to keep up with either inflation or the rising value of the property. The current situation is absolutely a regressive one. Restricting the housing market via prop 13 ensures that the working class can't afford to buy houses any more. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 19:08 on May 27, 2014 |
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May 27, 2014 19:05
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natetimm posted:I have to admit its rare to see the mentality trotted out that grandma should be forced into debt Be honest with your terminology. I'm suggesting secured debt, e.g., a loan against equity, which is very very different from unsecured debt, e.g. credit card debt. With a secured loan, if worse comes to worst, Grandma can sell her house to pay off the HELOC. And I'm only suggesting this as a strategy for a person who is old enough that they're willing to effectively withdraw equity in their home in order to pay the cost of living; lots of old people do this in various ways, including just selling their home and moving into retirement or assisted care living situations. quote:or forced to sell to reinforce an ideology No, gently caress you, this isn't about ideology. I'm describing a deliberate policy decision that would help to lower housing costs for everyone in the state... which by extension would help the middle class. The lack of turnover in the existing home market in California is a big part of the reason why houses are so expensive, and too-expensive housing is a massive, massive drag on the middle class. quote:but at least youre up front about it. Pretty much reinforces my belief that me and the majority of Californians have it right when we tell your ilk to get hosed and good luck on your repeal efforts. gently caress you, I don't have an ilk. I'm presenting a reasoned counterargument to your argument in the thread: address my points or gently caress off.
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May 27, 2014 20:29
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natetimm posted:The argument is that somehow prop 13 is putting CA in the poorhouse and it just isn't true. I don't recall anyone claiming that. Prop 13 definitely reduces the ability of the state to be flexible during a fiscal crisis with revenue sources, but that in and of itself is not "putting CA in the poorhouse," and I don't think anyone's tried to argue that, if Prop 13 had been repealed ten years ago or something, we'd somehow have completely avoided the fiscal crisis the state suffered during the last ten+ years. Trabisnikof posted:Either you can't read or are being purposefully dense. The argument is that prop 13 disproportionally impacts local governments along with forcing California to rely on less stable income sources (sales tax). And (especially) capital gains tax. The housing crisis was accompanied by a credit crisis and a stock market slump. These things combined to drastically reduce capital gains tax revenue for the state. By keeping average real property taxes artificially low, Prop 13 pushed the state to seek a greater proportion of its revenues from income, capital gains, and sales taxes, all of which are more volatile and tend to drop precipitously during a recession... which is precisely the time when the state needs to be spending more (as economic stimulus). redscare posted:Not having prop 13 wouldn't have saved us from the bubble. I don't think anyone has argued that proposition 13 caused the housing bubble. That would be a very stupid thing to argue, since Prop 13 is a California thing and the housing bubble was nationwide. Not having prop 13 obviously didn't save Florida from the bubble. I do think there's a strong argument that prop 13 exacerbates the bubble by artificially restricting supply, which amplifies the affect speculators have on prices. More speculators (cash investors, mostly) competing for fewer available properties (because people with below-market tax rates are disincentivized from selling even at a large profit) crowd out owner-occupy home buyers (who mostly need to get mortgages, which are less competitive than cash offers) and create bidding wars that push up prices. But since prop 13 has persisted for decades now, and there's no sign of it going away, I'm not sure it's proper to even think of this as part of a "bubble". The restriction on supply is sustained indefinitely. Even the crash in 08/09 couldn't suppress California prices for very long, and they've been rising again since 2011, marking (especially in the Bay Area) an earlier recovery than most other parts of the country. The free market is not the best greatest thing. Regulation is critical to protect people from the ravenous blind monster that is unfettered capitalism. But prop 13 is an example of shortsighted regulation that produced more problems than it solved, and was also co-opted from the beginning by business interests. So it actually serves to feed the beast, while not actually helping poor and lower middle class people (as a group, even if it does help a minority of individual members of that group disproportionately). Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 09:26 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 09:24
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Trabisnikof posted:It is incredibly dishonest to use medium income for the whole population to argue about the income of homeowners. Homeowners generally make more than renters. You also can't just use median home price as a stand-in for what Grandma's house is worth. A house built in 1995 cannot have been owned for 30 years. So if you want statistics on the average valuation of the grandma-eviction houses natetimm is worried about, you need to first find the median price of homes that were built and purchased over 30 years ago, and continuously occupied by their owner for that time. Average square footage of new homes has risen steadily, so homes over 30 years old tend to be smaller on average. They are also on average closer to city centers, which may push values up, or down, depending on desirability of that city center. Then you need to find what the actual new tax rate would be. Repealing prop 13 doesn't necessarily happen in a vacuum: if you do a revenue-neutral repeal, you'd simultaneously pull 13 and lower the state's fixed tax rate. Then you'd have to pro-rate the impact of the new tax rate based on those figures, against the rest of the putative granny's tax burden, before you can compare it to the tax burden an equivalent grandma had in other high-property-value state, say Flordia, New Hampshire, or Washington DC. This is obviously not easy to do. So instead, we can just make assertions about how disastrous it would be, without any actually useful data to inform those assertions. natetimm posted:Landlords and speculative investors are more likely to be able to eat the tax increase. In any case, the law could be written or amended to account for those situations. I've said before I'm not against making it no longer apply to commercial or industrial properties, and that includes homes owned by investment firms or landlords. Landlords and "speculative investors" which includes both landlords and owner-occupiers can't necessarily eat a tax increase. Landlords can be presumed to pass on increased costs to their tenants in the form of increased rents, and a higher tax burden may simply be counterbalanced by a proportionally lower valuation of the property, if we assume that investors do a rational total-cost-of-ownership calculation before deciding what they're willing to pay for a home. And "commercial and industrial" very specifically does not include homes of any kind. Homes are divided among owner-occupied dwellings and non-owner occupied (rentals); and among these, subdivided further by single-family vs. multi-family. You will be hard-pressed to find statistics that lump non-owner-occupied housing in with commercial and industrial real estate, only excluding owner-occupied. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 21:47 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 21:43
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predicto posted:In case it wasn't clear, this post was not intended to be taken seriously. I'm also a homeowner, although only since 2009. So far, prop 13 hasn't helped me - my taxes were actually lowered drastically in 2010, as Contra Costa County did a thing where they assessed values and if they were lower, they temporarily lowered your taxes to compensate - but I expect to begin benefiting next year, as my house is now worth more than I paid for it and the county should figure that out with the next assessment. I think it should be possible to convince homeowners to vote to repeal or reform 13, but it would depend on convincing them - especially newer home-buyers - that they're actually being hurt financially in the long run by it. Voters are generally unsophisticated and respond more to appeals to emotion (like the grandma story) than to tables of statistics and facts.
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May 28, 2014 22:11
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The biggest reason our budget is hosed (especially during recessions) is because the voters have enacted dozens of constitutional amendments which require spending on X Y and Z, while the legislature was hamstrung for decades by a supermajority requirement to raise taxes. I think we finally got rid of the supermajority thing recently - and also established a supermajority of democrats after redistricting got rid of some of the worst gerrymandering - so things have eased up a bit. But most of the relief has come from economic recovery, and we'll still probably be hosed again when we hit the next recession. California's hype as a superliberal paradise is massively overstated. We were a red state for decades, and only switched to solidly blue in the 1990s. We elected republican governors even more recently than that (the last one was Schwarzenegger). While we have some of the most liberal counties in the country, we also have some of the most conservative. Orange County is a longstanding fiercely republican stronghold, and a highly influential one. California has led the nation in environmental protection laws, particularly with CARB - but much of that was possible because of how bad the LA area smog had gotten. So bad that bipartisan support for air quality regulation was possible. Our decision to completely ban oil drilling off the coast is also as much due to NIMBYism as it is due to environmentalism. Bitter Republican pundits hate California mostly because they hate Hollywood, and secondarily because they hate gun control. They also hate women, so it's intolerable for Nancy Pelosi to be the democratic house leader - a San Francisco Liberal. We also have two women senators, including Dianne "assault rifle ban" Feinstein. Nevermind that Feinstein is actually pretty conservative, she was once a mayor of San Francisco so she must be evil. They also really really hate gays, and San Francisco is obviously where all the gay people live. Ultra-liberal, successful, wealthy, beautiful, temperate-climate San Francisco. What could be more symbolic of the failure of Liberal ideology than the AIDS-ridden sodomy capital of the West? Surely any moment now we will suffer our much-deserved comeuppance as our tree-hugging immoral liberal policies bring down our state around our heads. So California's budget crisis is obviously the first sign of that self-caused apocalypse. It can't possibly be caused by a variety of complex factors, and it must definitely be apocalyptically bad, because otherwise that might imply that the world's sixth-largest economy is actually a beautiful, successful, growing, attractive state whose citizens benefit from its social tolerance, welfare safety-net, business regulations, environmental protections, and all that other liberal claptrap. Leperflesh fucked around with this message at 22:38 on May 28, 2014 |
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May 28, 2014 22:31
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natetimm posted:If you can find me another state where people are sitting on 400k houses they bought for 40k in the 70s where the median income for the state is about 30-40k a year then maybe you can use that state as a comparison. Wanted to get back to this, because it looks like Hawaii fits the criteria. Per capita money income in past 12 months (2012 dollars):2008-2012 $29,227 [source] Median home value: $499k [source] Hawaii historical home values, adjusted to 2000 dollars: [source] pre:State 2000 1990 1980 1970 1960 1950 1940 California $211,500 $249,800 $167,300 $88,700 $74,400 $57,900 $36,700 Hawaii $272,700 $313,400 $233,800 $134,800 $103,000 $74,400 NA quote:Among states, the District of Columbia (treated as a state in these tabulations) had the highest median home value from 1940 to 1950. In 1960, Hawaii became the leader and has remained there through 2000 (Hawaii became a state in 1959). here's a table of Hawaii's property tax rates for 2013-14.
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May 28, 2014 23:00
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Not as far as Tracy, but a long commute is in your future if you want to own a home. With an income of 110k gross, you can probably afford a house in various parts of the East Bay. There are still modest homes at around $300k in my neck of the woods, for example (Concord).
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May 28, 2014 23:22
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Rent-A-Cop posted:What is wrong with people from Silicon Valley? A lot, but that guy does not represent everyone or even a majority of people in Silicon Valley. Internet self-diagnosed aspberger libertarians notwithstanding. Keep in mind that high tech only employs like 15% of people in the bay area. It gets a lot of media attention and is definitely an important sector here, but Google/Facebook/Apple employees are not representative of the region or its people. (I get annoyed being lumped in, even though I work at a big software company, because most of us are actually just normal people with social skills and well-rounded lives. Startup slaves and venture capitalists and stereotypical programmer nerds are a minority.)
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May 29, 2014 08:46
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Shbobdb posted:Slightly paraphrased (not exaggerated, it just isn't a word-for-word quote. She said stuff like this all the time) from one particular ex-coworker: Sounds like your republican sample consists of idiots who don't have a clue what prop 13 actually does; they're against it because they're stupid, rather than because of an actual ideological alignment with the actual law.
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May 29, 2014 08:48
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Craptacular! posted:I just want to say the grandmother story definitely exists. My elderly mother owns two houses, living in one and renting the other. Rent and social security make up her only income. Her rent is among the most reasonable values in town when we look at Craigslist etc. If you raise property taxes on her dramatically, she will just have to raise the rent, which will probably squeeze out the people living there now. I'm not saying Mom should be considered a savior, but they're a nice family who couldn't believe they didn't have to live in apartments anymore. Well, two things: first, your grandma owns two California homes outright? Congratulations, she's probably a wealthy person. OK, so she's using a big chunk of her wealth as an investment and living off of the proceeds - that's the rental house. But if her property taxes went up and she felt that she couldn't afford to pay them with that arrangement, she could sell the rental property, and take the proceeds - which, if the house has a median value in California, could be like $400k - and invest them in bonds and then live on the income. A property is not the only way to make your nest egg pay for you. Second: a rental house that goes up for sale is not necessarily taken off of the rental market. Plenty of investors buy properties to rent out. If the property already has a renter occupying it, and that renter is a good one, that's an incentive to a cash investor to buy it as an investment property. Of course, if that rent is well below market, the tenant might well get booted. But one of the reasons rents are super high is because of people clinging to homes they'd otherwise sell because they've got such fantastic grandfathered Prop 13 tax rates. I made assumptions about her property values here, of course, but if her properties are worth a lot less than the average, then her taxes would not be as high either. Generally speaking though, someone who owns outright two homes in California is sitting on upwards of three quarters of a million dollars in equity, and shouldn't really be thought of as "poor." natetimm posted:You do understand "household" typically means multiple incomes, right? The first number he gave was individual income, at $48k. You quoted individual income in part to use the smallest possible number you could to compare to the big number of median home value, but when it comes to home ownership, it's household income that matters because most homeowners are married couples with two incomes. You should address the fact that you said individuals in california average "$30k to $40k" and yet his number says $48k. natetimm posted:People invested in dropping Prop 13 aren't interested in the human element because they have such a boner for sticking it to boomers and corporations. The "human element" is a sob story designed to tug at your heart strings; and, of course, most of us arguing with you have specifically addressed it anyway. An end to Prop 13 does not have to ignore people with low wealth/incomes who would be disproportionately impacted by it. Several goons have suggested options. quote:They're fully invested in the "tax more" mentality even though CA is raking the taxes in at the moment. This is dishonest and you know it. Several goons, including myself, have specifically pointed out that an end to prop 13 can (and in my opnion should) be revenue-neutral. That's not "tax more," it's "tax more fairly." CA is currently "raking in" taxes that land disproportionately on people who bought homes more recently, while giving a disproportionate break to people who bought homes a longer time ago. And of course, commercial property too. quote:Really, they're just the next group of speculators looking to manipulate the CA house market and gently caress over the middle class for their own ideology. You keep saying this and it keeps not being true. It is the middle class specifically that would benefit from an end to prop 13. Prove me wrong. quote:Prop 13 actually came into being because someone killed themselves over not being able to pay their property taxes and being forced to sell their home. No. Prop 13 came into being because businesses recognized an opportunity to manipulate voters into giving them a gigantic tax break. They used the tragedy you refer to as the face of their enormous money grab, and millions of voters bought into it. An honest attempt to help out people whose property taxes were unaffordable would not have included commercial property. It would still have been misguided, but at least it would have been honest. quote:It's keeping tons of people closer to their place of work and needed services in a state with overall lovely public transportation and frankly the argument that the state doesn't get enough money from everyone is bullshit. Well this is a new argument. How so? Are you suggesting that retired grandmas who owned their homes for 30+ years can't get to work if they have to sell and move into the burbs? The people protected the most by Prop 13 are the ones who have owned homes the longest - that's not the young, middle-class, have-to-get-to-work sector; it's older people, mostly retired or about to be. quote:CA still needs its low-skilled workers to survive, and with the job market at that scale already swamped with cheap labor, prop 13 is one of the few things enabling families to remain in their homes in the face of pressure to sell from all kinds of different interest groups, whether they are property management speculators or neo-liberals towing the ideological line that somehow CA would be better if we moved all the poors further out and juiced them for a shitload more in taxes. It's basically a bunch of whiners complaining that it's not fair Californians came together and democratically decided to insulate themselves from volatile market forces and speculation. Obviously they should submit to their intellectual superiors who know what's best for them and be forced to sell their homes for the good of glorious redistribution instead of keeping the property in the family and obtaining more economic freedom. It sucks that corporations managed to get advantages along with homeowners when the measure passed, but nobody with a brain is going to vote against their own interests for the sake of neo-liberal fairness and gently caress themselves over. So many people have addressed your claims and you still doggedly stick to them. I don't think anyone is getting through to you. Ending prop 13 is not a "neo liberal" idea. It's a liberal one, right at its core; one of the central tenets of liberalism is progressive taxation, while conservatives seek regressive tax policies. Prop 13 disproportionately benefits the wealthy landowners at the direct expense of the working class. Ending 13 is a liberal cause.
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May 29, 2014 18:00
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natetimm posted:You'll probably have to get into the details more. Additionally if it's income neutral then why is it even worth proposing? There's obviously some kind of statistic you're trying to alter with the proposal and "income neutral" can mean a lot of things spread out over millions of people. Do you not understand what "revenue neutral" means? If the State of California collects $X in property taxes today, a revenue-neutral repeal of 13 means A) property tax rates are normalized, which means raising actual tax rates on houses with rates that have been kept artificially low for decades and B) lowering overall tax rates to compensate. It's not "tax-and-spend liberalism" because there's no loving spending and it's not loving raising the average tax paid by the average homeowner either. It's "fair and equitable progressive taxation" because now one guy isn't paying a fraction of the tax of the next guy, on two properties worth exactly the same, just because the first guy's parents bought the house in 1950 and then gave it to him in their will. The grand history of the advent and implementation of progressive taxation over the last century and a half has at its foundation and goal two fundamental principles: first, that the wealthy can afford to give back more, and moreover ought to because they have benefited the most from the government and its services; and second, that allowing wealth to accumulate generationally into the hands of an increasingly rich aristocracy is really really bad, widening the gap between rich and poor, concentrating power in the hands of the elite and away from the lower-classed majority, crushing economic mobility and opportunity. Progressive taxation policy fights the tendency for the rich to get richer while the poor get poorer. Proposition 13 directly contributes to concentration of wealth with the wealthy, by providing a financial subsidy to property owners the longer they keep their property in their families. Because it doesn't even keep up with inflation, nevermind rising property values, every decade that passes the property that is owned outright - unencumbered by mortgage - is taxed less and less in real dollars. Eventually, these property owners are paying almost nothing. That financial incentive keeps older properties off the market. New homebuyers - young people, immigrants, the people who need to get to work - are pushed towards new development. New development is on the fringe, in the outskirts. They have to have huge commutes. Old properties closer to the job centers gentrify as their owners accumulate lifetimes of wealth - and become wealthy - while paying disproportionately low taxes on their grandfathered prop 13 homes. Prop 13 is a reapportionment of the property tax burden onto the people who can least afford it, and away from those who can most afford it. People with mortgages have to pay more, people with paid-off properties get to pay less. If you are a liberal and you believe that taxation should be progressive, that the wealthy should pay a higher rate than the poor, or at the very least that tax policy should not be structured to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor, then you have to conclude prop 13 is terrible.
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May 29, 2014 21:49
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Craptacular! posted:I'd say in the current swing of things that Prop 13 is probably my only real shot as an uneducated and unskilled person at attaining any kind of wealth. My Dad was not institutional wealth, but he was able to buy a house (which we sold) in his twenties because wages were closer to the cost of living. I don't understand. Are you saying that prop 13 makes it more likely that you'll be able to buy a house? Because it does the opposite. Or are you saying that you will only be able to afford to own a house in the long term because prop 13 will keep your taxes low? Because any economist will tell you that money now is worth more than money later, so the fact your taxes later will be lower (as they stay behind inflation) doesn't make up for the fact that, due to prop 13, your taxes will be much much higher now (to compensate for all the people who are paying less taxes due to prop 13). And prop 13 proponents are part of the NIMBY alliance. They get to enjoy skyrocketing house prices and their consequential skyrocketing personal net worth, without having to pay poportionately-fair taxes on that rising net worth. E.g., they get to get rich without even having to pay the capital gains taxes that most people who get rich off of investments have to pay. If you're not saying any of those things, then I don't really understand. Do you view real estate as the only option for uneducated, unskilled people to build wealth? Because nationwide and historically, single-family homes have been a terrible investment. As an investment category it carries enormous transaction costs, is highly illiquid, requires huge costs just to maintain value, and is heavily taxed. You would be better off building wealth by taking advantage of tax-advantaged retirement investments, such as an IRA, combined with tax-efficient non-IRA investments if you don't have access to a 401(k) or similar retirement plan through work. The house buying thread goes into a lot more detail on this, if you're interested.
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May 30, 2014 00:11
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natetimm posted:Their fair share is determined by the law, not the overarching liberal sentiment of "what I, an intellectual god among men think it should be." If you don't like buying in and paying higher taxes don't do it. This is a Libertarian argument (let the market decide: if you don't agree with the conditions, go elsewhere) natetimm posted:Their fair share is determined by the law, not the overarching liberal sentiment of "what I, an intellectual god among men think it should be." If you don't like buying in and paying higher taxes don't do it. And yet here you are accusing your opponents of being libertarians. Which is ridiculous: you'll never find a libertarian that is promoting progressive taxation or (especially) raising taxes on any segment of the population. This is also a legalistic argument; fairness is not "determined by the law". Rather, we use laws to try to codify societal perception of fairness. "It's the law, therefore it's fair" is so completely ridiculous that I can scarcely believe you actually said it. If the law said YOU should pay all the taxes and I should pay no taxes, would you accept my argument that it's the law, and therefore that arrangement must be fair? Of course you loving wouldn't.
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May 30, 2014 00:14
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Yes, being forced to pay another $200 a month in taxes on my half-million-dollar house is such a burden I am forced to sell. And have half a million dollars. However will I survive?
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May 30, 2014 00:24
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