<p>Message to self: Only buy where ultra rich buy.</p>
<p>People I know in real life think I understand economics. 
If you are talking about the tax on CEOs, they have ways to get around it. If you are talking about the new tax in California, adding a 1 percent tax to taxable income over 1 million a year isn’t going to stop anybody from accumulating wealth.</p>
<p>A sad situation. Local couple had a farm for 6 generations and their township had some ajoining land and wanted a community golf course. Said it would be ‘good economically for the township.’ I’m sure this ruling will affect that case.
The only place where a ruling like this may be beneficial is in large cities which have vacant, abandoned properties which the city wants to redevelop.
Frankly I think the whole thing is sad for any homeowner.</p>
<p>Here in CA we have several new measures that intend to tax those making over $1Myr following the success of the mental health tax. They are now evaluating making the mark $500,000/yr. Earlier this week I sat in on discussions about the implications. Many people will start calling other places home. 2 or 3% of a million dollars, much less a half, is a lot of money. All this while Cali goes down the tubes. Go figure.</p>
<p>Zagat, people may move to Nevada or elsewhere, so they don’t have to pay ANY state income tax, but nobody is moving because of an extra 1% tax. If a person makes 2 million dollars in California, he now has to pay an extra $10,000 a year of tax. Nobody who makes 2 Million is moving out of California because of an extra $10000 a year in taxes. It would cost these people a lot more than 10,000 to move.</p>
<p>I’m not talking about people moving. I went to a tax seminar earlier this week. Fact, most people with over $10 million have more than one home. Fact, many are telecommuting. We now have the benefit of deciding where home is. Real estate taxes have kept many calling Cali home. That advantage may soon dissapear much to our detriment.</p>
<p>That’s a problem. When I see those luxurious condos go up in Las Vegas, I see many people like you are describing, buying those places and stating those residences as the main ones.</p>
<p>In Cali, we already have high state income tax. Low real estate tax and high appreciation seemed to balance it. With the bubble bursting in question and the new found popularity of just taxing the wealthy…I wish I were in the positin to have to decide. Some people I really respect pointed out that it’s more the suggestion than the dollar amount. The concept that Cali is less tplerant of wealth creation. Not good! 2 years ago, the typical home in Vegas appreciated over 50%!</p>
<p>“Have a hard time seeing how ruling in favor of the corporate folk at the expense of the poor is socialism.”</p>
<p>Rich people understand their class interest. As a corporate class, rather than as individuals, they unite together to extend their hold over those of other classes. They do it through control of governments, and governance. As a corporate class, started around the time of Andrew Jackson, forever ending any semblance of “free markets”, which is their real enemy.</p>
<p>This is the “socialism of the rich”. From each according to the degree to which it can be extorted, to each according to their wealth and power.</p>
<p>Zagat, do you think the bubble is going to burst? And if it does, won’t Vegas feel the bursting too?</p>
<p>Mini, you are right. Just read Ellwood Cubberly’s essay “New Conceptions and Present Tendecies”, this past week. It was written in 1909 and what he wanted was to educate the classes differently. My guess is you have read this. </p>
<p>The upper class has been keeping the lower classes down forever, usually in the names of democracy and capitalism.</p>
<p>I’m reading the book “The Way Schools Work”. I think you recommended that book on this site before.</p>
<p>
Meh As long as the corporate oligarchy behind both parties can keep us actively divided over gay marriage, abortion, racial issues, etc., they can do with us as they please with the rest of this stuff. Its pick your poison folks!</p>
<p>
Eight states Arkansas, Florida, Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Montana, South Carolina, and Washington have outlawed the use of eminent domain for economic development unless it is to eliminate blight according to my newspaper. Perhaps citizens of the rest could begin massive letter writing campaigns to their state representatives demanding similar laws. This can be dealt with on the state level. Then again, see my first point …</p>
<p>
Not so fast A 100 year old ruling can be just as activist as one issued today. Show me how the authors of the Constitution intended for public use to include a richer taxpayer on the property and Ill happily concede this point. </p>
<p>I do wonder how they define just compensation. Can they totally lowball somebody on property value? Also, how do they quantify intrinsic value if at all? Perhaps this outlines the importance of keeping the Second Amendment up and running. The right to bear arms was put in place so we can rise up and overthrow a tyrannical government local or federal - and this kind of action is surely pushing the envelope Not that I’m a gun nut or anything … ;)</p>
<p>“Mini, you are right. Just read Ellwood Cubberly’s essay “New Conceptions and Present Tendecies”, this past week. It was written in 1909 and what he wanted was to educate the classes differently. My guess is you have read this.”</p>
<p>Just the tip of the iceberg - remember - I am an education writer:</p>
<p>U.S. Commissioner of Education William Torrey Harris, who could be said to have overseen the birth of the modern public education system in America, wrote in 1889, Our schools have been scientifically designed to prevent over-education from happening The average American [should be] content with their humble role in life, because theyre not tempted to think about any other role.</p>
<p>Beginning around 1905, a new organizational scheme for public education the Gary Plan (named after the town in Indiana in which it was first implemented) – was initiated. Under the Gary Plan, school subjects were departmentalized, entailing the constant movement of children from class to class thus inhibiting any deeply engaged exploration of any subject and requiring schoolteachers to teach the same subject and same lesson again and again, like factory workers assigned to tightening a single bolt. (There were other, more appealing elements, such as ongoing links between the schools and community life, which, however, were never integrated into other Gary-like experiments taking place throughout the rest of the country.) A 1916 analytical report by the New York educator Abraham Flexner found the Gary Plan to be a total failure, offering insubstantial programs and a general atmosphere which habituated students to inferior performance. </p>
<p>There were protests. In New York City, thousands of children and their primarily immigrant parents protested their children being given half-rations of education. Thousands of demonstrators shut down Public School #171, which had adopted the Gary Plan, and riots spread to schools and neighborhoods throughout Manhattan, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. More than 300 children were arrested, most of them Jewish. The cause of the protest was that the Gary Plan deliberately dumbed down the school, thus limiting the opportunities available to low-income children. While the Gary Plan itself disappeared, its worst aspects a platoon approach to scheduling designed to allow double enrollment of pupils in a single building and hence save money – was quickly adopted by school systems throughout the nation.</p>
<p>Closely following on the heels of the New York School riots, the chair of the Psychology Department at Princeton University and the nations leading psychometrician, Henry Herbert Goddard, published his public policy opus Human Efficiency and Levels of Intelligence (Princeton University Press, 1920). Noting that government schooling was about the perfect organization of the hive, Goddard argued that social and economic inequality was both good and necessary because some people are smarter (and hence more deserving) than others. Intelligence testing would be a useful tool to convince the lower classes of their inferiority, and discourage them from attempting to rise above their rightful station. Through the training of hundreds of the nations educational psychologists, Goddards thinking quickly became a guiding force in American education. Nowadays, parents, no less than teachers, school administrators, or college admissions officers, think nothing of limiting the opportunities available to children solely on the basis of test results, and based on tests employing questions that they havent even seen, all confirming the self-fulfilling prophecy that the kids (and the parents!) receive both the education and opportunities they deserve!</p>
<hr>
<p>From 1900 to 1930, virtually every major educator in the U.S. other than John Dewey (and notably including David Starr Jordan, president of Stanford University; Charles W. Eliot, president of Harvard University; University of Wisconsin President Glenn Frank; University of Chicago educator Charles Judd; Henry Fairfield Osborn, president of the American Museum of Natural History; Edward Lee Thorndike of Columbia Teachers College; and Robert M. Yerkes, Harvard professor and president of the American Psychological Association) supported a program of eugenics, or selective breeding, as imperative to defend and improve the quality of the national character. This was the source of much of Adolf Hitlers thinking on this issue. In 1931, the New York Commissioner of Education asked (in the publication Eugenical News) whether since the greatest care is exercised in the breeding of live stock, is it not vastly more important that the human race be improved? and shouldnt teachers do whatever is in their power to prevent the haphazard mating of human beings? </p>
<p>Often repeating the slogan popularized by Princeton University biologist E.G. Conklin that, Wooden legs are not inherited, but wooden heads are, a strong belief in biological determinism and eugenics (as well as the futility of environmental changes) was taught through biology textbooks in junior high and high schools well after Hitler came to power (some of them actively praised his efforts), and even as late as 1948. In the widely used textbook Animal Biology written by University of Wisconsin biologist M.F. Guyer (Fourth Edition New York, NY: Harper Brothers, 1948), we find the following gem: The greatest danger to any democracy is that abler members and less prolific types shall be swamped by the overproduction of inferior strains. This has been the fate of past civilizations why not America? So much for assuming sex education in the schools is a recent development!</p>
<p>Such thinking was still to be found in the biology textbooks in the 1960s. I remember being taught about the inherited feeblemindedness and criminality of the Kallikak and Jukes families, and the inherited superiority of the Edwards. Growing up in New York City, I never met any Edwardses, but my 9th grade homeroom teacher was name Kavelak, and behind his back we used to joke about his name incessantly.</p>
<p>–</p>
<p>Harris also saw the links between poor school environments including bad air and the rightful purposes of education some hundred years ago. In “The Philosophy of Education”, published in 1906, Harris wrote: Ninety nine (students) out of a hundred are automata, careful to walk in prescribed paths, careful to follow the prescribed custom. This is not an accident but the result of substantial education, which, scientifically defined, is the subsumption of the individual. He wrote further, The great purpose of school can be realized better in dark, airless, ugly places… It is to master the physical self, to transcend the beauty of nature. School should develop the power to withdraw from the external world.</p>
<p>Mini, I appreciate your taking the time to write the last post. We haven’t progressed too much over the last 70 years.</p>
<p>Have you seen the video that was originally on PBS last year about Central Park East School? I think the school is in NY. This is a school that refused to have the Black students cram for the standardized tests mandated by “No Child Left Behind”. The students did pretty well on the test anyway, but not well enough, because the superintendant of schools visited Central Park East and threatened to close the school. She said there wasn’t enough “instruction” going on (not enough teaching for the test). This is the part of the video I like. A teacher named Dennis said the superintendant doesn’t get it. “School isn’t about instruction. It is about teaching the kids how to learn, teaching the kids the love of learning, so that they want to learn the rest of their lives”.
Dennis is a great teacher.</p>
<p>I’m busy working on a speech this weekend called “The Curriculum of Beauty”. The thing is, the superintendent DID get it, but the teacher didn’t.</p>
<p>Children and teachers are often the only beautiful things in school. But leave either there long enough, and they often take on the shape of the ugly place in whcih they are confined. (Happens to prison guards, too).</p>
<p>I think we’ve strayed off topic! LOL!</p>
<p>No Mini, we haven’t strayed off topic. The upper classes take advantage of the lower classes in real life as in this Supreme Court decision, and the lower classes are taken advantage of in the schools to perpetuate our system.</p>
<p>Good luck on your speech and I am printing your post #72.</p>
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</p>
<p><sarcasm>Yes! the time has come for the ultimate revolution. Go forth and sow the seeds of revolution among the proletariat! We shall fight the oppressors, and we shall win! </sarcasm></p>
<p>Ohh, wait - that’s been tried. Face it, life’s not fair. </p>
<p>Never has been, never will be.</p>
<p>Trying to undermine something as vital as property rights in an effort to make life “fair” is futile and foolish.</p>
<p>“Not so fast A 100 year old ruling can be just as activist as one issued today. Show me how the authors of the Constitution intended for public use to include a richer taxpayer on the property and Ill happily concede this point.”</p>
<p>You missed the issue that was being decided, and which provides indication that Scalia & Co. are the activist judges, going beyond what the Founding Fathers intended (and which does not have anything to do with the repeated rulingS (there are so many!) that took place over the past 100 years on this issue.) And that is this: the issue at hand was not whether the rich could take from the poor, but whether eminent domain was subject to federal judicial review. And we know the Founding Fathers did not intend there to be, because Marbury v. Madison, which established even the possibility of such review, didn’t happen until 1809. What Scalia & Co. were proposing was a clear expansion of federal governmental powers - judicial powers - of which is it clear the authors of the Constitution never even conceived of. That’s what makes them (and not the conservatives) the “activist” judges.</p>
<p>What the Constitutional writers DID write, however, were 5th and 10th Amendments. Hey, I don’t like it much myself, but likes and dislikes is not what the decision was about.</p>
<p>Under your definition no judge on any federal bench, ever hasn’t been an activist.</p>
<p>Scalia is not an activist judge. He reads the law, he reads the constitution - he sees if there’s a violation.</p>
<p>Some of the more liberal justices are very activist. Not for using judicial review, but for abusing it (affirmative action comes to mind).</p>
<p>If you think an unprecedented expansion of the powers of the federal government - in this case the judicial branch, with powers that we know with 100% certainty did not exist when the Constitution was written - is not “activist”, more power to you.</p>
<p>Try to follow:</p>
<p>Judicial review != activism</p>
<p>Quick follow up: What should the supreme court do then?</p>