VOTE!!!
Posted on November 6, 2006 9 Comments
For those of you who require prompting to get to the polls tomorrow (November 7, 2006)…
Take out your last paycheck. See the 1/3 of your salary that goes to federal taxes, state taxes, social security, Medicare? If you don’t vote, the politicians get to decide where it all goes.
Got that? The government is working with a big pot of your hard-earned money. When you vote, you decide where it goes.
Vote on Tuesday, November 7, 2006.
(And if you don’t know who to vote for, check out www.vote-smart.org. All you need to view your candidates is your 9-digit zip code, which you can conveniently find on the back of any fashion magazine or catalogue lying around your place.)
I’ll see you at the polling place! Remember, the “I voted” sticker is the trendiest accessory you can wear tomorrow 
Category: Old Posts
Comments
9 Responses to “VOTE!!!”
Leave a Reply
About the Author
Archives
Categories
Tags
November 6th, 2006 @ 6:43 pm
For a real eye-opening experience, you could be a poll worker, not for this election of course, but in the future. You can find out a lot about our electoral process that way.
November 6th, 2006 @ 7:04 pm
YES!!!!!
i agree, and i’ll be wearing my fashion excessory tomorrow!
November 6th, 2006 @ 8:14 pm
I agree; voting is so important!
Thankfully, Texas does not have state income tax, but it makes me wonder if we pay the difference through higher gas taxes, property taxes, ect.
November 7th, 2006 @ 4:42 am
I vote in EVERY election…it’s very important! And every vote does count…even if you don’t vote for the “winning” candidate, casting your vote expresses your opinion, and opinions that get expressed through votes get greater consideration from the winners.
November 7th, 2006 @ 8:20 am
already on it
….for some reason i feel like i’m not allowed on this site. Is this normal?
November 7th, 2006 @ 3:01 pm
Rock the Vote.
November 7th, 2006 @ 3:28 pm
Dustin, is it because of the pink??? Because I did change my font color to brown…it used to be hot pink! You’re always welcome here
November 8th, 2006 @ 10:24 am
> Thankfully, Texas does not have state income tax, but it makes me wonder if we pay the difference through higher > gas taxes, property taxes, ect.
From somebody living in California, not even close. We pay some of the highest prices for gas in the nation. I’m in Silicon Valley, and gas is currently around $2.40/gal. San Francisco is usually higher. We have a 8.25% sales tax. California has a progressive income tax like the federal government. I’m in the 25% federal marginal tax bracket. The California income tax makes me pay another 8.3% on top of that. The cost of living in California is much higher so the unfairness of the bracket cut-offs is magnified because with the same income in a different state you might be doing well, but in California you’re trying to make ends meet. (I heard we overtook Hawaii in terms of expensive cost of living.)
I don’t think we have a special long term capital gains rate like the federal government and we pay at our state marginal bracket so we get gouged extra if we sell stocks/mutual funds, etc.
Property taxes are a little strange here. Prop 13 which was passed in 1978 limited how much property taxes could increase. I don’t fully understand it since I’m not a property owner and will probably not be for a very long time (if ever) in California. But I think it essentially limits how much an owner’s property taxes can increase per year. The problem was that property values were increasing way faster than people’s income. So average families in homes would see their property taxes increase faster than their wages because their home values (on paper) kept rising. People risked losing their homes because they could no longer afford the property taxes. So the tax payers revolted saying it’s unfair to raise their taxes on homes they are simply living in, not selling for profit. Prop 13 was passed and the amount you pay on property taxes is based on the value you pay on your home, not the current and ever-rising market value of your property. One side effect though is that if you’ve owned the same property for a long time, your property taxes are way lower than your next-door neighbor’s taxes who bought last year.
But for me, this is all moot, because the cost of housing is astronomical. The median price of a home is over $700,000. It’s probably not even a big home. (Think small lot, few rooms, window that looks directly into your next-door’s neighbors house which is 6 feet away.) The median price of a condo is $500,000 which is also insane.
Then the city likes to get their cut too. (They get part of that 8.25% sales tax.) Then I know the city of San Jose has been shaking down the self-employed to pay the business license tax. They’ve been harassing avon ladies, newspaper delivery kids, and teenage babysitters (all true, I swear). Apparently they have to pay for the expensive Light Rail system which nobody rides. Anybody remember that Simpson’s episode with the Monorail? That’s us, except our planners were too unimaginiative to at least build something nifty like a monorail so they build a boring old train that goes nowhere useful and managed to not build the part that goes to the airport. You might have seen the tracks on the San Jose Grand Prix where the city planners thought of the brilliant idea to make the race track cross the train tracks. Have you ever seen a low-riding vehicle hit a massive set of bumps while traveling at well over 100mph? It’s not good. And the city planners managed to repeat the brilliant idea the second year instead of moving the track to one of the zillion areas the light rail doesn’t go. And all this at (great) taxpayer expense I might add.
November 17th, 2006 @ 6:46 pm
Anonymous from California. You live in a blue state, you regularly elect Democrats, what did you expect? You lie in the bed you make.