In Palm Beach County, Fla., buyers who find fire-sale bargains at foreclosed home auctions picking up, say, $400,000 houses for $100,000 or less are also realizing they’re required in many cases to pay the same property taxes, as if the homes were still valued at $400,000. In Miami-Dade County to the south, where one in four homeowners are 30 days or more behind in their mortgage payments, residents are bracing for what Mayor Carlos Alvarez says could be an imminent property tax hike to fill an almost $400 million budget hole a move that veteran Miami realtors like Alex Shay insist would set recovery back.
Tag Archives: house
Dumbing Down Regulation
If only our financial regulations were dumber! It’s not a cry you hear often. But phrased a little differently, it may be the most cogent criticism of the convoluted regulatory approach of recent decades–and one that applies to most of the Obama Administration’s financial-reform proposals. The argument goes like this: the biggest flaw in current financial regulation is not that there is too little of it or too much, but that it relies on regulators knowing best.
What Does the Energy Bill Really Mean for CO2 Cuts?
With a razor-thin margin of just seven votes, the House of Representatives on Friday evening passed the American Clean Energy and Security Act the first bill to put a fixed and declining cap on U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. Republicans and Democrats in the House spent much of the day sparring in sharp language over the bill, which will reduce U.S
The Global Warming Bill’s Rough Ride Through Congress
D.C.’s Metro Rail Crash and America’s Aging Transit System
Investigators are still sorting through the wreckage of Monday’s crash of two Metro rail cars in Washington, D.C., the deadliest in the system’s 33-year history, which killed nine people and injured scores of others. Federal officials said on Tuesday that the train that rear-ended another was an older model that lacked equipment that might have helped avert the collision and, according to the Washington Post, had been overdue for needed brake work
‘Anomalies’ discovered in Metro track control circuit
Transportation investigators Wednesday discovered "anomalies" in an essential control circuit of a track where a fatal crash between two Washington subway trains killed nine people. Each section of the transit system’s track contains a circuit that transmits and receives signals that generate speed commands for trains, said Debbie Hersman of the National Transportation Safety Board. She said the circuits are “vital providing information to the operators and the train itself when on automatic.” Investigators found no problems in five of the six circuits on the 740-foot-long stretch of track in the crash area
Nixon library releases tapes, papers from early in 2nd term
The Nixon Presidential Library released 154 hours of tape recordings and 30,000 pages of documents from the Nixon White House on Tuesday, offering a revealing look at the state of mind of America’s 37th president at the start of what would prove to be his disastrous abbreviated second term. The recordings, encompassing almost 1,000 conversations in January and February of 1973, cover a range of topics, including, among other things, the conclusion of the Vietnam Paris peace talks, the Supreme Court’s controversial Roe v. Wade abortion rights ruling, the death of former President Lyndon Johnson, and a rapidly metastasizing Watergate scandal