It also helps to spread your lifetime Soc Sec benefits over more tax years, thereby lowering the total tax you pay (because pushing higher payouts into fewer tax years by delayed filing will typically increase your marginal tax bracket).
> the monthly payment is about 1/4 of what I was paying for health insurance before I was eligible.
Maybe not, if you take into account the >$500/month subsidy of your Medicare Part A benefits (assuming you had the minimum number of calendar quarters paid in). And your Part B payment (the one usually deducted from your Soc Sec payment) is also partly subsidized unless your income is high enough to trigger IRMAA adjustment.
Unlike Pournelle, Niven is still alive (87 year old), but I don't think he is writing new science fiction these days (although he has collaborated on some stories this century and has made guest appearances at some conferences in the last few years).
I too prefer POP. I don't read email on my phone, I alternate between a desktop and notebook computer for that (and most everything else), and simply copy my Thunderbird profile back and forth (using robocopy) when I switch. I have four primary mail identities, and use the Thunderbird unified folders to easily manage it all.
>Time turns out to be a great universal organizer, just like how a photo collection is wonderfully organized by date more than by any other single dimension.
I have found this same thing to be true. I even tell my family that if for some reason they need to access all our critical info on my computer, the most recent files in each directory are almost always the most interesting ones.
To begin with, your premise is that the only primary sources are press conferences and that press conferences only provide information in response to questions.
But even taking it literally, isn't that one of the things LLMs could actually do? You're essentially asking how a text generator could generate text. The real question is whether the questions would be any good, but the answer isn't necessarily no.
Author here. Our blog generally concerns property tax reform for our regular readership which is admittedly less clear to a new reader coming in cold: the intuitions I’m referring to is the average homeowner kind of assumes any tax reform (such as shifting taxes off buildings and onto land) is designed to impoverish them personally. The purpose of these maps is to show such people where land value in cities is really concentrated - Ie, not the m the suburbs. Mono centric city value might be intuitive to academics, but it’s not among regular everyday people.
Do you mean people underestimate how steep the gradient is, or they don't know it at all?
It seems kind of dubious to me that "everyday" people don't understand that land in cities is worth more than land in suburbs. It seems very transparent that you get a smaller lot size for the same price.
Both. They do understand that it’s worth “more” in the city but they vastly underestimate the magnitude, and they vastly underestimate what that means in terms of where the total bulk of land value is concentrated, and therefore what the distribution of winners and losers will be in any tax shift scenario.
> I was waiting to read about what these "wildly incorrect intuitions" were, but it's never explained. The maps correctly matched my own intuitions.
If you are into land value tax discourse maybe, but from my experience at least there is a big lack of awareness of the impact of economic activities on land values as they are not reflected by anything that people get in contact with. That's especially true because neither rents nor property taxes (the one thing people might have exposure to) fully capture it.
I had guessed land in Manhattan vs the bronx as 7x more valuable, based on living in the Bronx and paying rent. For the joys of living in the Bronx my rent was under $1k and I had a separate bathroom that was part of my studio apartment. Meanwhile Manhattan apartments wanted $2k and I had to use a bathroom shared with the floor.
Same. My assumption, before seeing this, was "ok, I'm going to guess land in a city is worth 100 or 1000x land anywhere else", and I guess I overestimated a bit.
>Death is a popular escape from deferred taxes. When you die, your obligations to the government vanish. Your heirs inherit assets/property at market value. Their assets depreciate from new cost bases.
The article only addresses a subset of economic activity. The larger portion of the adult population are wage earners or retirees, not business owners. For them, large investments in Traditional IRAs or 401k plans are most definitely not able to escape upon death the income taxes that were deferred.
>People sometimes get into trouble with this if they rapidly depreciate real estate and then sell it. Even if you sell for less than your purchase price it is possible to owe taxes.
But in the U.S. you can't rapidly depreciate real estate, it is generally straight-line over 27.5 or 39 years (residential vs. non-residential). The gain on real estate due to depreciation is technically referred to as Section 1250 gain, and if there is no gain (which is calculated against your adjusted basis, not purchase price), then it follows that there is no Sec. 1250 gain (often mistakenly called "depreciation recapture").
No, you can do cost segregation to classify some of the real property as Section 1245 (which is accelerated vs Section 1250). People doing this and then selling is how they get unexpected tax bills.
The “unexpected tax bill” usually comes from people not realizing they pulled those deductions forward earlier.
Also worth noting, if you don’t sell (or you 1031), that recapture can be deferred, which is why a lot of investors still use cost segregation aggressively.
This is a pretty clear breakdown of how 1245 vs 1250 recapture actually works on sale if anyone wants the full picture:
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