What are your pet peeve's?

[Willy]

Re: Property Taxes. Speaking from my local level... (and not bothering about the perhaps illegality of collecting these taxes... for I see that there are some very valid services that those taxes buy.)

My city gets the money it spends mainly from two sources. A portion comes from it's share of the State/County/Municipality Gross Receipts Tax, commonly known as a sales tax. Another chunk comes from it's share of the property taxes. Now, I don't like paying any kind of taxes, fees, etc. BUT, if those taxes I mentioned were abolished tomorrow for whatever reason I see some consequences I don't like as well. The fire, emergency medical and police departments would stop functioning as their employees wouldn't have any paychecks coming in. OK, I've never made direct use of the fire department by having a fire, however I do like having them there, willing, able and ready. I have made use of the emergency medical services on the occasion of an auto accident that was no fault of my own. (one reason I hate DWI so much). On that same occasion I was glad there were police quickly on site.

Other consequences would include the closure of both of our public libraries. The city owned and operated swimming pools would close, or have to charge so much per person per use nobody could afford to go there. The skateboard park would deteriorate. Ditto, the softball and soccer sports fields as well as the public R/C aircraft field.

Nobody would be cleaning the streets or emptying the public trash receptacles around the cities parks. The grass in the parks would not be irrigated, nor would the grounds be maintained.

Eventually the paved roads would develop potholes and they would not be repaired. Not, not repaired in a timely manner; simply not repaired at all. Traffic lights would go out of order and stay that way. When I moved here there was one traffic light. That was with less than 20,000 people. Now the population is 80,000. Traffic is much heavier than it used to be. However, because of the expanding population tax base the roads keep being improved and the main thoroughfares widened. The traffic lights are controlled by a computerized system that alters the timing as needed for the most efficient flow.

I can not imagine the chaos that would result. My taxes have gone up but not in any outrageous manner. We pay about $1600 a year on the suburban home that could now be sold for around 175-180K. I could pay less in taxes and have less traffic if I moved to a smaller town. But I'd also have fewer services. The fire department would likely be a volunteer type. Nothing against VFD, but they'd likely arrive in time to water down the ashes. Same for EMT services, they'd more likely be 20 minutes to a half hour or more away rather than a few minutes.

I like independence. But in my view there are pluses to living in and taking part in a modern society, and to do so there must be compromises made. I'm willing to pay my property taxes because I see the above as benefiting my life.

OMMV

I like my independence also but I pay allmost $2,000.00 a year in taxes and live on a dirt county road with a few pot holes, no street lights, VFD is 13 miles away and can't get here during the winter. This is one reason I have my own fire fighting system hoses and undergound water tank. I do not like all the rest of the stuff that comes with a modern society like punk kids hanging out on the streets in front of my place with nothing to do, wondering if I will have a parking spot when I get home, nosey neibors calling the cops on me for pounding on stuff at 12:00 Midnight if I want to, ect ect. Now if I want to go swiming I use my lake, I burn my paper and haul the rest to the dump a few time a year. Our skate board park in town is all painted up and the kids sell drugs there. They also want more money to rebuild it again after they tore it up. I for one would not want one of those near me nor a city park. I like being in the middle of no-where doing pretty much as I please even shooting a gun out the window if needed at varmits. The nearest home is 1/2 mile away and no one is there most of the time. No they can have city life I have no use for it except to go there once in a while to get things I need and go back home. I am not upset you enjoy these things or think it is wrong just not my life style at all. Guess I am a country boy at heart. I get less for my taxes but like it that way, if our road was paved they would drive to fast on it and there would be more wrecks. Mark

[benevolance]

I deal in cars and the taxes they charge on them are one of the biggest scams in America... and there are plenty to compete with.

If a car is bought and sold  a dozen times they want the taxes on it... every time. In some states you cannot give a car to someone because that prevents the government from taxing you on it...

Don as for property taxes... the fire department gets funding so does the ambulance service from your phone bill...There is a 911 fee on the phone bill... you pay it every month.

And if you ever get sick, and the ambulance comes... unless you are covered with insurance the ambulance will send you a bill for taking you to the hospital...So while we pay the 911 fee... if we use the service we have to pay for it...thus making the tax bogus and illegal in my view.

As far as I am concerned the county should budget accordingly...If money needs to be raised for fire protection...raise the cost of drivers licenses in that county by a couple bucks...If you live in that county you pay the fee and you automatically get fire protection...Simple

If you save your money buy land and fix it up they charge you more in taxes because you have increased the value...The cost of the fire protection is not increased.... but you pay ten times the taxes if you take vacant land and make improvements to it and build on it...

I am all for having a universal fee like the driver's license... where you want a service there is a clear cut price to it and you get to decide whether you want it or not... and the costs are fixed and reasonable...

Don I just paid $1300 in taxes for my acre of property... there is no way in God's green earth it costs that much to put out a fire on my land... if I lived here for 30 years and had one fire and they come here to put it out with a couple of trucks and half a dozen men... they get 75,000 in taxes from me before interest for an hours worth of work using equipment that is paid for...

It is a scam!

I would rather they ask me if I want fire coverage and tell me what it costs per year and I will decide whether or not I want it...

[benevolance]

and another thing

talking of  fire protection...Most areas have volunteer fire fighters that are not paid... the firehouses are free basically not taxed or anything like that...Many times the trucks and equipment is donated or whatever... Yet Paying thousands of dollars per year on land you own is justifiable because they offer fire protection?

If they agreed to let me have all the monies collected from the county I would start a firefighting company and I would become insanely wealthy....Because it is a scam....

[Willy]

Benevolance; The last big wildfire we had was in 2001 and was 78,000 acres in size. Lost 9 homes all the way around me but I saved my own place. The fire dept would not come in to dangerouse for them? I am a VFF but only do Wildland Fires in the area around us. We don't have good equipment to fight fires with and I am better set up then the fire department on the hill. The one in town gets great tax money but takes 1/2-1 hour during the day to get here (in good weather) and I pay taxes for them also. Your pretty much on your own here if there is a fire and that is just kind of what living in the country is about. The same goes for police protection your on your own they can show up hours later, one reason for owning a few guns around the place. Notice in the picture the fine equipment sitting in the road. Notice there is no regular fire dept rigs on the road either. Well all these guys got in there trucks and left, I asked arn't you going to do something about the fire? I was told it is to big we will wait till it gets to a place we can stop it at. I asked well can we cut some fire lines around the homes before it gets her? I was told we are tring to find equipment to do it with. From where I took that picture I was a mile from my home and the fire took all night to get to my place and burned 35 of my 40 acres. There never was a fire fighter on my property except my wife, daughter and I and we were told to leave also. Mark


This what was left behind my home after it burned around it. It burned under the trees on the back side of the lake also and took out at least 180 smaller trees in the process, but my family won the war with this one with a lot of hard work!

[Homegrown Tomatoes]

I agree... My property taxes here are $4K a year on about 1/4 acre and an old house....  of that $4K, $700 of it is just for the garage, which is a tiny cinder-block construction so narrow that DH took one of the side mirrors off parking it one time, and if the garage door is down, you can't walk around either the front or the back of the car.  Let's say we pay $700/year on the taxes just for that garage... then in the time we've lived here, we've already paid $2100 JUST FOR THE TAXES ON THAT DUMB GARAGE!!!!!  We could've built a newer garage for that money.  The locals tell me that the property tax is the reason we have such "wonderful" public schools here.... I contacted our school district and tried to get access for an exchange student we were trying to host and ended up getting chewed out by the superintendant because I homeschool my preschool aged kids.  He basically blacklisted our family from ever hosting an exchange student while he is the administrator because we taught our preschoolers to read at home!!!  My tax dollars at work.... my husband's tax dollars at work.  Meanwhile, they've resurfaced the roads every summer since we moved here, even though there weren't any visible potholes.  Our property is vandalized and the county sheriff who responds shrugs and tells us it's because we're an "interracial couple" and that we have to deal with it because we live in the "white trash capitol" of Wisconsin (those are his words, not mine!!)  Some neighbor calls the cops when I let my dog out to pee in cold weather, and TWO county sheriff's deputies show up and tell me to keep my dog in and watch out for the neighbor???  

My other beef is this:  They raise taxes to pay for building a new school building, etc., but those taxes NEVER are lowered back to the original level even after the building or whatever is completely paid for...  if there's a surplus, do the taxpayers ever get it back??  It is a racket.  

[ScottA]

if there's a surplus, do the taxpayers ever get it back??  It is a racket. 

There is never a surplus and here's why. If they get close to the end of the fiscal year and see they have extra money remaining they will dream up something stupid to spend it on. I've gotten several of these do nothing jobs because of a budget surplus. I once got paid $65 an hour to drive around and make maps of cleanout and water meter locations on district property. They told me up front how much they needed to spend and expected the bill to match. I was happy to oblige them since it meant I got to spend several days drawing service rates to ride around in the truck and draw pictures.

And then there was the famous emergency door lock oiling marathon. 1000 door locks in one week with a seperate work order and bill for each lock. Almost forgot about that one.

[MountainDon]

.. as far as VFD goes... When we moved here our fire dept was Volunteer. When the city reorganized the police, fire, EMT into the DPS, with a fully trained, certified, whatever firemen, our home insurance went down.

It's difficult to compare city/suburban living with country.

... as far as home schooling goes... That's one reason why I believe in education vouchers. You pay for schools through taxes, but if you home school or send to private school you spend money and never see the results. I'm not sure how to equitize (I don't think that's areal word.) the home schooling vs. public school. You should probably at least get books and other materials at no charge. Never looked into that option. Ourselves, we'd rather use private schools in place of public or home schooling. Once again, to each his own, this is my opinion, OMMV, and so on.

... as for school buildings... School buildings are normally paid for with bond issues or time limited mill levies, which do have finite expiration dates. At least around here and back home.

... as for the 911 fee... The 911 surcharge funds the cost of providing emergency services communications . It has nothing to do with actual fire fighting equipment, or the fire fighters paychecks. Equipment purchases come out of the taxes the city collects, or as you stated VFD's get donations of equipment, hand me downs. Frequently they are older pieces of equipment that no one else wants. Nothing wrong with that unless those pieces of equipment are not up to the job. In the Jemez around my property there are 2 VFD stations. Most of their equipment is reasonably new and in excellent repair and was funded by the county, which was funded by taxes. It is more often than used in fighting wildfires than actual non wildfire caused residential fires. And the wildfire danger is very real up there. Fortunately there's also equipment and men funded by the Forest Service in the area. There's an aerial tanker slurry mixing base in Albuquerque, about 50-60 miles south. Nice to have as well. Somebodies taxes pay for that too.

Don I just paid $1300 in taxes for my acre of property... there is no way in God's green earth it costs that much to put out a fire on my land... i

Of course not. There are other things, as mentioned before.

And yes, those budget things get played out all over the place. But unless there's real accountability in managing money, no civil "servant" is ever going to be rewarded for actually being efficient at spending the publics money.

[Sassy]

Has anybody heard about the "Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports" - that's the actual money a city has (I think these are incorporated cities) this report comes out every year for each city in every state.  I can't even begin to explain the complexity of how the budget really works...  but from what I've seen in these reports, there's a tremendous amount of $$$ available to the cities from investments of our money - pensions, etc that we don't see, & they won't touch - the city leaders just keep crying that the kids aren't going to have any money for their schools, we'll have to cut back services blah blah blah, so they need more taxes, when in actuality, there really is a lot of money... 

There reports are out there for anyone to look at, but IIRC, they've changed some of the reporting in the last few years so that they aren't quite as transparent - kinda like a lot of other gov't reports...

MtnDon or anyone else - what can you tell me about these? 

[sparks]

Hi Folks, I pulled my post behind Mountain Don's earlier in this thread. My response was to the subject matter, NOT Mountain Don's post. The timing was very bad. I've contacted MD and hope there is no ill will. My post probably would have had better meaning as a stand alone somewhere else.......sparks

[MountainDon]

Go read your PM sparks.... no problems here 

[MountainDon]

Sassy I never heard of Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports prior to your post. I did a google and came up with lots of hits. Now have to read some. Try going a google on "Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports" adding your state, county, city, etc. I found Albuquerque now trying for my town. Rio Rancho.

Also found this     http://www.cafrman.com/    and    http://www.the7thfire.com/Politics%20and%20History/CAFR.htm      which have links to some info. Don't know anything about the site or their "take" on things. You know I don't believe everything I read online. 

[MountainDon]

OK, a quick look reminded me of a part of the story. States have funds invested. The bell that rung was that in recent years NM has had a scandal regarding kickbacks and other nefarious illegal goings on with some of it's funds and the state government overseers.

[glenn kangiser]

Political scandals and corruption start at the local level and get larger as the government entity gets bigger.

[Sassy]

This deception is one of my pet peeves.  I'll try to explain the basics on it (I'd watched the video linked below 2-3 yrs ago)  This thread & talking about taxes made me look it up again - I watched part of it tonite - the 1st few minutes of the video has some really bad music, fast forward that - listen to the message, not necessarily the pictures...  There's an interview with Walter J. Burien, Jr. who was a commodity trading adviser. 

Here goes...  Say, we have a household budget of $100 week - I tell Glenn that we've spent $200 & we're $100 in the hole... he's gonna have to get a 2nd job.  I don't tell him that I have a side business where I'm making $1000 week.  So, the household budget is $100, we've gone over budget by $100, but the income for the week was actually $1000.  What am I doing with the other $900 wk?  Could be spending it, investing it, whatever.  All Glenn knows is that we are $100 over-budget... 

Compare that with cities - they have a "budget" for expenses...  they don't tell you all the income they have.  Just that they went over "budget" & start crying for increased taxes because of the deficit on the "budget" & tell us to tighten our belts...  otherwise they are going to have to start cutting "services". 

You'll just have to muddle through some of the links MtnDon posted & try to listen to this video - it will really make you "peeved"!!!   

BTW, look at Alaska - the citizens there get checks every year from the gov't & they don't pay any state taxes - how do they do that?  Could it be that Alaska is sharing some of the wealth with it's citizens instead of skimming off all the money for global investments?  Our gov't is the biggest stock holder there is.  Check this out to see if it's true - our gov't owns most of Motorola - who did Gov Guiliani buy the new radios from for the NYFD with a no-bid contract a few months before 911?  Motorola...  hmmmm 
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-5195274119869140315

[tanya]

People who act like they understand the rules but then try to circumvent them for thier own purposes.  People who think that just because someone isn't working at a 9-5 job they are on "welfare" and taking advantage of others.  It is amazing to me to see how many people think I am on welfare simply because I am not working every day at a 9-5 I tend to save money by living extremely thifty and I am not interested in impressing anyone.  I work a lot of different jobs when necessary everything from cleaning to counseling but now that I  have decided to do what I truly love and farm people really wonder.  Secretely I like that.   I am a damn good farmer though and I love growing food my own fresh food most importantly but some to sell too is fine.  Another pet peeve of mine is just your everyday simple minded "important" busy body.  I have plenty more peeves but it is so late I am not going to dredge them out of the depths of my tired mind.  Since I complained now I have to think up something nice to say too so I will say some things I love are people who ask busy bodies what makes them so special and when the cat comes home after being missing. 

[benevolance]

When I was in college I would fix and sell cars part time for money...And because I had a great downtown location from the house I was renting with 5 other guys I could sell the wheels off of cars from that house...

All my other college buddies were broke and I always had money...I used to hear crap all the time that I sold drugs because I always had hundreds of dollars in my pocket and my cupboard was always full of food...Always made me laugh...But it goes along with what you are saying.. people talk and they have nothing better to do than speculate about what you might or might not be doing... Especially if you do something different from what they think you should be doing.

[akemt]

I'm totally on this constitutionalist bandwagon!  Current top pet peeves?

(Not speaking to anyone in particular or responding to any posts specifically)

People who don't think we are socialist.  Have you read the 10 planks of the communist manifesto?  The Declaration of Independence?
Then people who believe that somehow being socialist will end differently for us than everyone else in history.

RE income taxes (and all other unconstitutional laws) you have to look at it this way:  We only give the government the right to do for us what we have the right to do for ourselves.

Example:  We have the right to protect our person and property.  If we're busy, say at work, we can delegate that power to a police officer because it is a right we already have.

If you can't work and thus don't have any money, do you as an individual have the right to take the money of your neighbor to support yourself?  Of course not, that is theft.  Yet, our government does it.  Does that mean it isn't theft?  Thus we lose freedoms and become (became, actually) socialist. 

Yes, services derived from taxes are nice, but we should have the right to opt out of the service and its decided taxation at the very least.  The real problem is that socialism grows upon itself always getting more and more hungry for funds and regulations, and thus needing to take away more and more freedom.  It won't stop without a full-on revolution...and I don't see one coming anytime soon.  The Boston Tea Party was over what?  A 4% sales tax?  Now we're getting national ID's.  Can you say, "Show me your papers" in Russian?

Another issue at the base of it all is the idea that we aren't smart enough to know what is best for us...the government must decide for us.  Again, a loss of freedom. 

As we take God out of our government, we remove the base on which it was created.  If you read what our founding fathers said about that, it's pretty clear.  If you remove God from government, the "unalienable" rights (meaning given by God) are no longer unalienable but instead are granted by the government itself.  Oy. 

Other peeves...almost the exact list written in the original post.  And yes, it is the current generation.  I blame it on government mandated and directed education and how it affects the family and individual.  There are many more things that come into play than that, but that changes core values, etc, and has a drastic effect over generations.  So much of what our society sees as "normal" is anything but good for us.  Personally, I think we're losing one of our strongest generations ever.

I best stop my ranting.  How's that for a first post as a member?  LOL  Letting it all hang out, I guess...

[glenn kangiser]

  to the forum, Catherine.  What a nice way to enter the forum...full on rant...and full on correct.

We are supposed to be a Republic but the mob took over and called us a democracy and now they can't even get that right.  What a good peeve you have and looking forward to hearing more from you.