Just wanted to say that taxes in Texas are less favorable than eg California when it comes to middle class citizens - no income tax, but very high property taxes.
So yeah, great place to build something, and save cash on tech to cleanup your waste. Yay Texas!
I swear people must die 10 years sooner in that stretch.
No Texas county breaks the top 10 for counties with the shortest life expectancy: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._counties_with_sho...
10 years less than the national average would get you to 69, and be #5 on the list. For comparison, #50 is only 6y below the national average.
CA property taxes are highly regressive. Old boomers get to pay sub 0.1% tax rates because of Prop 13 while new, young, and poorer buyers get to pay tax on inflated property valuations.
When it comes to increasing class mobility high property tax >>> high income tax.
From my understanding part of the problem also is even landlords and businesses benefit from prop 13 and same with people that own multiple properties. Honestly, I think something like Idaho's Homeowners Exemption is better. The owner has to live in it to qualify. https://tax.idaho.gov/i-1051.cfm
Also states like Nevda have done some other interesting things like letting family farms get a Limited Allodial Title for a period in time before stopping. I just think prop 13 was not planned out very well and applies to too many entities, but the idea of not wanting to force people out their homes is certainly a problem other states worry about.
Unproductive assets like real estate should not be enablers of generational wealth.
Property taxes are weird as they are basically one of the few taxes that continue to happen even without any transactions. Almost all other taxes happen when there is a transaction. For example sales tax, when you buy something; Income tax when you get paid; Tariffs when something is imported ect... Property taxes can also can increase without you doing anything so if your income is fixed or does not increase fast enough you could lose your house due to a tax lien.
If your worried about generational wealth that's why we have inheritance and estate taxes. The federal estate tax can get as high as 40%. However, a home is a productive asset if people are living in it. It may not be as productive as some other uses of property like running a business from it, farming the land ect...
Like I said, you won't lose your house within your lifetime at current property tax rates. I see no reason why we should guarantee owners' houses for any longer than that instead of freeing up those houses on the market for new owners.
Tax deferral is a great idea, tax relief not so much.
Check figures 2.c on page 18 and 2.o on page 34 in UT's report on this (https://energy.utexas.edu/sites/default/files/UTAustin%20%28...) for a sense of the scope of how unexpected capacity outages break down.
Yes--a lot of wind was offline. But all of the expected wind capacity could have been met and the grid would have still needed to shed quite a bit of load. In fact, all of the expected wind, solar, coal, and nuclear could have been online and the grid would have still had to shed a meaningful amount.
The scale of the natural gas outages was larger than the entire load-shed, afaict.
EDIT: Okay there was some loss in capacity in wind power, but the greatest loss in capacity was natural gas plants, which lost 15GW of capacity. I confused natural gas with coal as I don’t consider either to be climate friendly. Wind lost about 3GW of capacity.
See at 7:50 here: https://youtu.be/08mwXICY4JM
By the way, natgas is actually much friendlier (well, less hostile) to the environment than coal, if you're looking at carbon/kWh or all of the other things released into the atmosphere when you burn coal.
However, you can much more easily make a giant mound of coal next to your power plant, than store up enough natgas (LNG is much more expensive to store). So, the power plants required natgas to show up in the pipeline, and when the temperature dropped and everybody cranked up the heat, not only in Texas, the natgas pressure in the pipelines dropped. Oil (liquid) and coal (solid) are just fundamentally easier to stockpile than natgas or wind (gas) or solar (light).
A big freakin' battery would help with this, but that isn't a cost-effective option (yet?).
The Natural Gas distribution system just fell apart two years ago.