I lived in South Carolina, just outside of Charlotte, for six years. I still own a really nice two bed two bath condo there that I only paid $120k for. I liked it there and that was the first time I was able to buy my own place. I could never afford to buy in Boston.
Like every USMB nutbag, DTMB is a wealthy guy with several income properties. He's just really pissed off at the world because. Just because.
Weeeeeeeee!
If you live in the SE, you don't need millions too own property. Land is dirt cheap due to lack of developments.
Something else I've noticed. You can survive, even own a car, and live comfortably on 7.25 in the rural SE. But you are still homeless or living in a crazy man shack at 15 bucks in San Fran!
You've noticed that, huh? Living comfortably on 7.25 per hour?
Race to the bottom, folks. Consider yourselves lucky to be getting what you are getting. What? Pitchforks? What pitchforks?
I swear we must get the stupidest liberals in here...
Tax Burdens Tilt Coastal, and System’s Fairness Is Debated
Hell the smart ones have been bitching about the "Unfairness" of the cost of living for a while.
Tax Burdens Tilt Coastal, and System’s Fairness Is Debated
THE wealthy have been the subject of much discussion lately, from the protesters on Wall Street to lawmakers in Washington. President Obama has even provided a definition of who’s wealthy in arguing that taxes should be raised for those households with incomes of at least $250,000 a year.
But is that really the marker of wealth? After all, earning $250,000 a year in New York does not buy as much as it does in, say, Iowa or Alabama.
Or put another way: Why doesn’t the tax code account for regional differences in tax burdens?
While the question begins with households earning more than $250,000 a year in places like Boston, New York and San Francisco, the issue of fairness is not just for the top 2 percent to ponder. Workers at all income levels are affected by regional differences in federal taxes. Local taxes may also be high in these areas, though economists argue that residents at least get something for those taxes, like good schools and safe neighborhoods. According to David Yves Albouy, an assistant professor of economics at the University of Michigan and an expert on geographic tax inequality,
teachers in New York may be among the highest paid in the country, but their salaries don’t give them any extra buying power because the cost of living is so high.
*Snip*
CURRENT SYSTEM The debate over regional differences is nothing new, Dr. Thorndike said. When the modern tax code went into effect in 1913, “it was viewed as a way to tax those rich Northerners, and to be fair, that’s what it was,” he said.
But starting in World War II, when the tax base widened beyond the wealthiest people, he said, the tax system had to be sold as a shared sacrifice. With this came the idea of horizontal equity — that people at the same level pay the same rate across America.
GEOGRAPHICALLY FAIR SYSTEMSo how would you make the tax system fairer for people who live in more expensive regions?
A cost-of-living adjustment is one way. The military offers that to soldiers stationed in different parts of the country. But measures of the cost of living are considered pretty inaccurate.We have good consumer price indices, but they just show the change in prices between Detroit and New York City,” said Rudolph G. Penner, a former director of the Congressional Budget Office. “They don’t show a true cost of living in different places.”
He added that measuring such costs for tax purposes could be too abstract. “If you like mountains, you have a certain level of happiness in Colorado that you can’t have in Kansas,” he said.
