Sheesh, the property taxes in my area aren’t even half that. Of course, Utah does awesome things like try to raise taxes on food (the sales tax for food already exists, they just want to raise it higher).
I pay something like 1.5% in Minneapolis. I’m mostly annoyed that my valuation went up like 11 freaking percent, so I’m paying that much more tax this year.
No doubt because the $6b hi-speed rail bond is now $68b and he is thinking maybe we can’t afford it. Also, didn’t we pass water bonds in 2014 that have never produced anything regards to water storage.
I now vote no on every state bond measure.
I do vote yes on local taxes as warranted. Like our zoo tax, road tax, library tax and school bonds.
I pay 1.5% here in Greensboro. That is the highest taxes in the state. Wake has higher sales tax though.
They’re trying to cap income taxes here in NC at 5.5% via constitutional amendment. (guessing the state bastards think it’s a way to get Republicans to turn out at the polls)
The most popular things in America (according to a Fox News poll): Bernie Sanders and Planned Parenthood. Even Obamacare outpolls the Orange-Tinted One.
Wouldn’t beer and potato chips rank even higher?
Probably football and hamburgers too. So, most popular things: Political Division.
Is Trump Dragging Down the European Far-Right?
Perhaps the most optimistic scenario is that Trump discredits a lot of bad ideas while not doing too much irreversible damage.
So far that’s the case. Despite a lot of sound and fury, Trump has been totally unproductive. The budget he revealed today is just a blueprint, and there’s no way anything like it passes through both chambers of congress.
He already has what looks like a big failure on his hands with the healthcare bill. He has gone to bat for something that seems to have no chance of passing.
Plus there’s the whole travel ban thing that continues to go badly for him. And there’s no way anything approaching a wall gets built, at least between now and the 2018 elections.
The historic irony is the gross stupidity of the right always damages the causes they espouse. The end result of Trump isn’t going to be a reversion to a new antiglobalized nationalism with a reinvigorated lower class white demographic. The result is going to be a complete rejection and discrediting of anti-immigration and anti-globalization politics and the burying and not-regretted destruction of the lower class whites as a political and economic force, if not their more or less actual extinction as a separate ethnic demographic.
Sounds great! Where do I sign up as a gravedigger?
It would be nice if that discrediting could happen before the UK pisses away its future later this month.
I’d be curious what the Favorable rating would be if it instead said “The 2010 health care law, also known as The Affordable Care Act”.
I’m also shocked that a Fox News poll shows a 57% favorable rating for Planner Parenthood. Isn’t that one of the Fox go-to whipping posts these days?
Nobody thinks of things as ‘somewhat unfavourable’ anymore. We either fall in love with something, think it’s a good thing but admit it has its problems and half-measures, or think it’s an outrage. Growing up in protestant Christianity nothing was classified as somewhat unfavourable, it was either Godly on the way to being Godly or from the devil. It was a very simplistic view of the world and now in my adult life I see it’s no different. A mind clogged up with strongly unfavourables has neither the energy or the memory to focus on the things that are truly strongly unfavourable.
In the spirit of the thread title and my own therapeutic purposes I am now going to list things that I find only somewhat unfavourable:
- People who pee on the floor in public bathrooms in places that I can still step around.
- Toasters that won’t burn right.
- George H. Bush.
- Facebook.
- Spiders (below a certain size and ferocity).
Mild body odor, houses that smell strongly of onions or curry or pets, people who hold your hand in a shake a little too long, soggy or cold fries, getting the wrong drive thru order but it’s still something you don’t mind eating, dental work, elevators that move too slow or too fast, cars that hang out a little too long after the light turns green, people who tell you about that special vacation they took day after day, that person in the office who keeps bothering you, and funyuns.
That article is complete nonsense. Most people here don’t give a shit about Trump, don’t even know what he’s about. They just occasionally hear about some thing he says or does and that’s it. There is zero sense here that Trump is doing badly because, let’s face it, he’s primarily fucking over US citizens right now. Pretending that his policies so far had significant influence on the outcome of this election is ludicrous.
What really happened is the same that has happened for the past three elections. Wilders was high in the polls in the weeks before the election only to gain less seats in the end. It’s the same thing every time, people say that they are going to vote far right just to put some scare in the establishment, but not follow through on it because in the end most of the voters here don’t want anything different.
Yet the worst part about all this is that it’s consistently framed as a ‘loss’ for the far right. It’s not. Wilders’ party grew by a third and is now the second biggest. This ‘loss’ only exists in the framing of the media (mostly foreign) based off a prediction that was never going to happen.
Not that there aren’t a whole lot of voters disgusted with the establishment. There are. The labour party was gutted (and good riddance) but as we don’t have a two-party system here those voters don’t have just one way to go. In a two-party system losses on the left go to the right and vice versa. In a 28(!) party election disgusted voters can go anywhere. A lot of those lost labour party voters just went further left or to a different centrist party. The predicted ‘landslide’ simply cannot happen here.
The upcoming election in France is going to be far more troublesome.
Thanks for crushing my fragile optimism. I guess we are still waiting for signs that the fever will break.
Well, I wouldn’t let it crush you optimism too much. Sure, GPVV won 5 seats more for 20 seats total, but they are complete shut out.
The center right party that leads lost 8 seats, which I don’t feel to bad about, because it means they need to partner up a bit more, and give a bit more to the other members of the government.
That being said, GL (Groenlinks) the green party picked up 10 seats, for 14 seats total, which is nice (I’m not a huge fan of the Green Party, but it’s nice they have a bit more of a voice), and the center left party (D66) also picked up 7 seats. The biggest loser is the PvdA, the Labor party, losing 29 seats, which is not a good thing at all.
It seems the take away is, if you a center right or left party that is in power, you are going to lose seats, but not necessary that the far right will pick up said seats.
Also, it’s interesting that the DENK - a party formed by Turkish-Dutch members of the PvdA got 3 seats.
Dutch Politics seems so much more fun then US. It’s got so many factions. It would make a way better TBS game then US politics.