I realize that this is not the forum for this, but the value of a home has little to do with the ability to pay taxes on the property, especially if market value has outstripped wage increases. You can't sell of a few bricks from a house to pay the taxes, you have to dump the whole thing when you can't afford it Of course, one could ban private ownership of homes and the government could assign a few extra families to live with the homeowner. Probably not too far fetched in Berkley :-)
Bob at PC
________________________________
From: phys-l-bounces@carnot.physics.buffalo.edu on behalf of Bernard Cleyet
Sent: Sat 3/1/2008 6:54 PM
To: Forum for Physics Educators
Cc: Peter Kwiek
Subject: Re: [Phys-l] innumeracy
Yes, this is serious. It implies the student(s) don't know the
population of their city and can't extrapolate to the population of
each larger group, city, county, state, nation, and nations.
Another point raised [The resistance to funding what we think is very
necessary.] reminds me of the insignificance of that amount compared
to the capitalization of their resident city. a typical home is,
say, $1/3 million in a city of, say 100k there are v. ~ 20k homes.
that's $2/3 billion and that's a fraction of the total
capitalization. I think we are grossly under-taxed, especially in
Calif.