NASA has engaged a Chicago company, Ocean Tomo, to auction off “a suite of 25 patents.” This is considered to be transferring technology to the private sector. I guess an auction is better than sleazy private deals. The main point to remember is that a patent is not the right to use an invention, it is only the right to prevent others from doing so. (via slashdot)
Author: taxpayer
Unbroken record on overtaxing those who use land…
…and undertaxing those who just sit on land, waiting for its value to rise.
The 2006 data are now published, and once again the Cook County Assessor has overassessed houses (and the lots they occupy) in Chicago relative to vacant land. As in the previous year, data from actual sales show that, as a percentage of sales price, assessments on houses (including land) average 50% higher than assessments on vacant land. This is the reverse of the legal requirement, under which real estate which includes houses is supposed to be assessed at a 1/3 lower percentage of value than vacant land.
This amounts to is a further penalty on homeowners (and owners of condo’s, and 2-4 flats, too), as owners of vacant land aren’t carrying their legal (let alone fair) share of the tax burden.
Is Cook County uniquely corrupt or incompetent in this regard? Other Illinois counties do not even pretend to assess residential parcels at a lower percentage of value than vacant parcels. Rather, they are obligated to assess everything at the same percentage of value. In most cases where data are reported, however, the assessment as a percentage of sales price is considerably lower for vacant parcels than for improved real estate.
Source: Data compiled by the Illinois Department of Revenue, which can be seen here (look at the “ratio” links under “property tax.”
Nobody understands the income tax
That’s what Albert Einstein is reputed to have said, tho I’ve never found it documented. He might have meant that nobody understands the logic of a tax system that penalizes productivity and “put[s] a premium upon unscrupulousness and a tax upon conscience.” More likely he meant that no one understands how to calculate it. A recent prominent example could be Charles Rangel, who maybe really didn’t understand that he had to pay taxes on the income from renting his Dominican villa.
But today’s a twofer, because we also have a report that “[s]ome of the country’s biggest investment banks and brokerage firms…marketed allegedly abusive transactions that helped foreign hedge-fund investors avoid billions of dollars in U. S. taxes…” The big news isn’t that they cheated, but that they got caught. I bet they’ll be a lot more careful in the future.
The income tax is inherently difficult to administer. Many very smart people spend their working hours figuring out ways to avoid taxes. Other smart people spend their working hours figuring out how to eliminate the ways discovered by the first group of smart people. (Later those in the second group join the first group, whose work is more lucrative.)
Meanwhile, we ordinary taxpayers have to deal with more and more complexities, most inserted by the second group in a futile attempt to stop the first group.
Fairness in school funding
The Reader’s Ben Joravsky is one of many in the media making a big hoopla about how Chicago Public Schools spend a lot less per pupil than New Trier High School does ($10,049 vs. $20,811, according to Joravsky). Leaving aside the question of whether more money results in better education, some basic facts seem to be getting lost here.
(1) Comparing Chicago’s k-12 district to New Trier’s high school district isn’t meaningful. High schools always spend more than elementary schools, per pupil. I’m not going to try to explain why, tho it seems high school teachers are paid better than elementary school teachers. and maybe more specialized equipment and smaller classes are needed.
(2) Compared to most other districts, Chicago is wealthy. Since advocates say the main reason for the disparities is that some districts have a bigger tax base (more assessed value of real estate per student) than others, we’d think that Chicago’s tax base must be pretty poor. Sure, New Trier’s tax base is more than seven times as much, per student, as Chicago’s. That leaves plenty for them to share with the elementary feeder districts.
But how does Chicago compare to the 394 other K-12 districts in Illinois? Chicago’s $165,380 per student is higher than 92% of the other K-12 districts. And that’s even after allowing for the scandalous TIF extractions that have Joravsky rightfully concerned. (Check my work with the figures from here. Look on the left side under “file type” and download the xls spreadsheet.) Most of the K-12 districts have a tax base of less than $100,000/student.
(3) Disparities of local tax base can be remedied without raising income or sales taxes. If for some reason it’s necessary to increase state funding for local schools, that can be done without raising the income tax or sales tax. Wealthier districts could be required to “donate” part of their revenues to poor districts. Or the statewide real estate tax can be resurrected. Ideally, it would exclude improvements from the tax base.
Texas schools get funding from natural resources
The Texas General Land Office is that state’s oldest agency, and originally responsible for giving out land titles. But today it continues to manage 20.3 million acres of land and mineral rights. (That’s 466 square miles, just a tiny piece of the state.) Revenue, about $800 million annually, goes into the School Fund, supplementing the $22 billion already there, the income from which goes to public schools.
While this demonstrates that land rent can be used to fund schools statewide, the GLO is hardly a pure implementation of Georgist theory. It continues to sell (and buy) land, and gets involved in developments which might not make economic sense but benefit insiders.
Auction of landing slots could at least help pay for infrastructure
Articles from the New York Sun indicate that there’s serious interest in auctioning landing slots at the New York area airports. Mayor Bloomberg and the Bush Administration are in favor, Port Authority less enthused. No mention of what they’d be worth, but a US DOT official said
[T]he whole point of the auctions was to generate the proceeds necessary to build out an upgraded infrastructure at participating airports.
which implies that they’re not expecting to even cover the full cost of existing infrastructure, let alone the rent (that is, what the site and the right to operate an airport would be worth if the airport didn’t exist). The earlier article notes that it would incentivize carriers to operate larger aircraft, presumably providing more capacity.
Pedestrian directions now available on Google maps
So, for instance, suppose I want to get some of that free land in Marquette, Kansas, but I don’t have a car or bicycle. Google will provide directions, a total of 314 segments for the 766-mile trip. Google estimates it’ll take me 10 days and 10 hours, which works out to just over 3 miles per hour. I guess they assume I sleepwalk, but take breaks occasionally. I don’t imagine their database worries about whether there are sidewalks, but they do say “Walking directions are in beta. Use caution when walking in unfamiliar areas.”
Open source approach to reducing CO2
- First, you heat limestone to a very high temperature, until it breaks down into lime and carbon dioxide.
- Then you put the lime into the sea, where it reacts with carbon dioxide dissolved in the seawater.
- The second step absorbs twice as much CO2 as the first releases, the released CO2 has industrial uses, and the heating can be done with “free” energy.
So says Cquestrate founder Tim Kruger. He says it works in theory, but needs to be demonstrated as practical. Most intriguing, he’s doing it as open source, so it will be free of patents and anyone can try it.
According to the site, Kruger is a management consultant, so it’s not hard to see how he could benefit from this innovation even without IP “rights.”
Thanks to the Undercover Economist.
Solar power brings more land speculation
I shouldn’t be surprised to read, in Fortune, that speculators are buying up sites with good potential for solar power generation. The article indicates that these are largely desert areas near major cities of the West, and particularly the Mojave near Los Angeles. Prices have increased from $500 to $10,000 (or more) per acre. Much of the site is government (BLM) land intended as a nature reserve; it’s not (currently) for sale but can be leased (prices not discussed in the article.) Continue reading Solar power brings more land speculation
Trip Report: KC Transit
My recent trip to Kansas City involved a conference at a hotel which doesn’t have regular bus service, but can be reached by KCATA’s Metroflex. It’s a route-deviation service; you call 24 hours ahead and they drop you off at any point within the area served by the particular route. Unfortunately the Megabus terminal at 3rd and Grand is a distance from the 10th & Main Metroflex hub, but two or three KCATA routes make the connection even until fairly late at night.
Going to the conference hotel worked pretty well and I was dropped off right at the hotel entrance. Returning, the bus didn’t show on time, I called and was told that there was no record of my request but fortunately the bus was nearby and would be diverted. True enough, except that it drove around the hotel and didn’t come to the entrance. I ran after it, with luggage, managed to flag it down. Turns out that the small buses go to the hotel, but the big buses have to stay on the public street. I suppose locals learn to deal with this, just as Chicagoans learn that some of the announcements on the ‘L’ are incorrect because the operator pushed the wrong button, or the right button the wrong number of times, or was required to push the button even if it makes no sense.
Connecting back from Metroflex to Megabus, I got a brief ride on their version of BRT, known as MAX. Actually I had some trouble finding the Max stop, but downtown KC has lots of friendly homeless people and one of them showed me the way. The Max bus itself is something I’ve never seen, with low-floor bowling-alley seating on the right side and forward-facing seats on a raised platform on the left side of the bus.
KCATA doesn’t publish a system map, nor do they display one on their web site, but they were happy to mail me a more or less complete set of hardcopy schedules. Each schedule contains a map for that route, so it was possible to piece together how to get where I needed to go.