"Bill Putney" <bptn (AT) kinez (DOT) net> wrote

But, these are systems, with lots of aspects, and you cannot understand them
unless you treat all of the aspects together.

It is like taxes. The government finds that it's difficult to extract tax
money from
the citizenry if they take it out in large lumps, like a once in a year
property
tax payment. So they lower the property tax and stick in a sales tax that
takes the money in nickles and dimes. Either way the citizenry pays the
same amount of taxes, it is just the entire tax systems are different.

You can't argue that since one state has no sales tax that they all ought
not to,
since your not comparing the 2 states' tax systems, your just comparing
one aspect. You have to look at the entire systems and all aspects of them.

Why? These are accidents, not intentional things. Why should someone
who kills another driver by accident get out of going to prison just because
they happen to have a lot of insurance?

Whether or not they are insured has nothing to do with a finding of
criminal liability.

A 10 year old issue is not relevant as to how CA behaves today, that is too
old.

The brush clearance issue is a conflect between
the FEDERAL Endangered Species Act and what the CA homeowners
in those areas want. And as I said, the homeowners can simply choose
NOT to own homes in a habitat reserve, and those that do can carry plenty
of fire insurance.

Except that guess what - the gay community is now getting what "it" wanted
for years, the fortune 1000 are all putting gay/straight neutral language
in their health insurance policies, states are moving to enact civil
recognition
laws, etc.

All due to what you call dishonest politics. Maybe so, but it worked.

In the final analysis of this emissions thing, here's the deal. When you
can
step off the plane onto the tarmac in LAX and look straight up, and see
-orange-, not blue, sky, well then obviously the pollution rules are not
working there. And if they aren't working there, how are they working
everywhere else? How are you going to argue that there's such a thing
as an acceptable level of pollution? OK, so it's acceptable if we can't
see it?

Well, so CA is going to take steps to get that sky blue again. They are
going to use their population as the muscle to force very tight emissions
rules to get their own skies blue again. And damn everyone else in every
other state. How else are they supposed to act? Is there any other way
to get their skies blue again? Or are you going to just say that since they
have a high population density, that all those people are just going to have
to suffer and suck up more pollution so that the rest of the country
doesen't
have to spend some extra money?

It isn't CA's responsibility to worry about the rest of the country.
They must make an extreme decision because the reasonable approaches
have been tried and aren't working there.

Ted

Ted Mittelstaedt wrote:

But different taxes target different groups too. For example, senior citizens
might prefer high income taxes and low property taxes than the converse.
Although the systems may differ (and some states may leave certain services to
counties, while other states may have no county governments/taxes at all), the
total tax burden for all taxes combined can vary widely too. Justice Brandeis
called the states 50 laboratories of democracy, and it's great that each state
can choose its own destiny. It's not great when the federal government steps in
and tries to micromanage items that they have no constitutional duty to control.

True. Although you can look at a state like New Hampshire which has no sales
taxes AND no income taxes and conclude that their property tax must be sky
high. While it is higher than many states, the total tax burden for New
Hampshire residents is relatively low compared to almost every other state.