Media Meltdown and also Media Bias 101

[pfife]

Washington Post reporter being all liberal biased

 

[mtutiger]

Not a specific instance, but rather that the results of the California Recall did not meet the absolute breathlessness of the mainstream media reporting about it. Almost like the political horserace version of Al Capone's Vault.

And I have seen very little post-mortem or introspection since then

Edited October 2, 2021 by mtutiger

[pfife]

There have been a bunch of articles about how it was actually a success for Elder.   

[mtutiger]

9 hours ago, pfife said:

There have been a bunch of articles about how it was actually a success for Elder.   

I assume they all talked about how Elder winning 47% of 40% of the electorate was smashing success? 

Like, teach these people some math!

[mtutiger]

WTF 

[oblong]

Is that The NY Times pitch bot?

[Tigerbomb13]

It appears that ridiculous tweet was deleted. 

[pfife]

 

[Archie]

9 hours ago, pfife said:

 

Disabled vets don't pay property tax.  Its not much of a payback for  the loss of your legs or other functions. 

Fox is no different than any other so called news source. They sensationalize what they want you hear and don't talk about what they don't want you to know.  I don't know off any news source that doesn't do that.  All of them are biased. 

[oblong]

I was struck by the high property tax on their IL home.... I thought I had high taxes where I live but I pay about half that and my house is worth more.

 

[Motown Bombers]

8 minutes ago, oblong said:

I was struck by the high property tax on their IL home.... I thought I had high taxes where I live but I pay about half that and my house is worth more.

 

I used to work in the escrow department of a mortgage company and managed the tax files for customers. Michigan is on the higher end of property tax rates along with other upper Midwest states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. I'm assuming their home is quite expensive and has a high assessed value. I've found Illinois to not be any higher than Michigan when given similar taxable values.

Contrast to popular belief, California is actually pretty low on property tax. Their tax rate is only around 1% but the taxable value on homes is so much higher. You would pay roughly double in property tax on a similarly assessed house in Michigan. Texas is another state I was surprised by how high the property tax was given their lack of regulations and terrible power grid. 

[Motown Bombers]

8 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

I used to work in the escrow department of a mortgage company and managed the tax files for customers. Michigan is on the higher end of property tax rates along with other upper Midwest states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. I'm assuming their home is quite expensive and has a high assessed value. I've found Illinois to not be any higher than Michigan when given similar taxable values.

Contrast to popular belief, California is actually pretty low on property tax. Their tax rate is only around 1% but the taxable value on homes is so much higher. You would pay roughly double in property tax on a similarly assessed house in Michigan. Texas is another state I was surprised by how high the property tax was given their lack of regulations and terrible power grid. 

In regards to Duckworth, I've dealt with thousands of disabled veteran exemptions. Every state does it. From my experience, I saw more people in red states like Texas using the disabled vet exemption. 

[CMRivdogs]

Zillow estimates the average home price in Hoffman Estates at around $320 thousand. I would guess they live on the edge of HE and Barrington, which would put it closer to $400 thousand. Still not bad for the NW suburbs.

I ran a quick Zillow check on a house we owned about 25 years ago on the Aurora/Naperville line. It seems to fall in that range.

[oblong]

1 hour ago, Motown Bombers said:

I used to work in the escrow department of a mortgage company and managed the tax files for customers. Michigan is on the higher end of property tax rates along with other upper Midwest states like Wisconsin and Minnesota. I'm assuming their home is quite expensive and has a high assessed value. I've found Illinois to not be any higher than Michigan when given similar taxable values.

Contrast to popular belief, California is actually pretty low on property tax. Their tax rate is only around 1% but the taxable value on homes is so much higher. You would pay roughly double in property tax on a similarly assessed house in Michigan. Texas is another state I was surprised by how high the property tax was given their lack of regulations and terrible power grid. 

The article said they avoided about 45K in taxes since 2015 on a house assessed at 250K.  I don't know if that's the taxable value or the home's value.  I read the article last night and going off memory.

[Motown Bombers]

14 minutes ago, oblong said:

The article said they avoided about 45K in taxes since 2015 on a house assessed at 250K.  I don't know if that's the taxable value or the home's value.  I read the article last night and going off memory.

That breaks down to $7,500 a year. In my neighborhood, if my home was worth $250k, my taxes would be $8,400 a year. That is using an SEV of $125k. It also depends to if she is homestead or non-homestead. She has a house in Virginia so one of them would need to be non-homestead. 

[oblong]

14 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

That breaks down to $7,500 a year. In my neighborhood, if my home was worth $250k, my taxes would be $8,400 a year. That is using an SEV of $125k. It also depends to if she is homestead or non-homestead. She has a house in Virginia so one of them would need to be non-homestead. 

They pay property taxes on the house in Virginia.  That house was over $1M.  Not sure if that answers your questions.  

I pay about $5K a year. 

[CMRivdogs]

31 minutes ago, oblong said:

The article said they avoided about 45K in taxes since 2015 on a house assessed at 250K.  I don't know if that's the taxable value or the home's value.  I read the article last night and going off memory.

Isn’t assessed value about 50% or so of market value. I think that’s what we were running in Farmington Hills

[Motown Bombers]

1 minute ago, oblong said:

They pay property taxes on the house in Virginia.  That house was over $1M.  Not sure if that answers your questions.  

I pay about $5K a year. 

Disabled vet exemptions usually don't apply to non-homestead. She could only claim it on one of the properties and it's smart she chose the one in Illinois. I tend to find Illinois property taxes are higher than Virginia. 

[Motown Bombers]

3 minutes ago, CMRivdogs said:

Isn’t assessed value about 50% or so of market value. I think that’s what we were running in Farmington Hills

Michigan has an SEV value. If the market value of your house is $250k, than the SEV is $125K. Other states do it differently. My millage rate is 6.7% so the taxes would be 6.7% of $125k if that house were in Michigan. California, for example, does it by full value. Their rate is roughly 1% so the taxes would be 1% of $250k.

I spent a lot of time managing taxes and made mental notes of what blue states had the lowest property taxes in case I needed to flee. 

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, Motown Bombers said:

Michigan has an SEV value. If the market value of your house is $250k, than the SEV is $125K. Other states do it differently. My millage rate is 6.7% so the taxes would be 6.7% of $125k if that house were in Michigan. California, for example, does it by full value. Their rate is roughly 1% so the taxes would be 1% of $250k.

I spent a lot of time managing taxes and made mental notes of what blue states had the lowest property taxes in case I needed to flee. 

And of course the additional complication in MI is that your 'taxable' value can be significantly lower than the SEV because of PropA.

Quote

Proposal A dramatically decreased the amount of property taxes paid by Michigan residents and limited future increases. Starting in calendar year 1995, property taxes have been levied on taxable value instead of state equalized value. Taxable value increases are constitutionally limited to 5 percent or the rate of inflation, whichever is less. When a property is sold, the tax base reverts to state equalized value and annual taxable values are then capped once again.

For as long as you own a home, your tax increase is capped in an given year if property values increase faster than inflation or 5%. So over a number of years your tax basis can end up significantly less than the SEV.

California property taxes are low because voters passed 'Prop 2.5" a number of years ago. It caps property taxes based on 2.5% of the property value, and I think that like in MI that is actually 2.5% of  50%.

[Motown Bombers]

4 minutes ago, gehringer_2 said:

And of course the additional complication in MI is that your 'taxable' value can be significantly lower than the SEV because of PropA.

For as long as you own a home, your tax increase is capped in an given year if property values increase faster than inflation or 5%. So over a number of years your tax basis can end up significantly less than the SEV.

California property taxes are low because voters passed 'Prop 2.5" a number of years ago. It caps property taxes based on 2.5% of the property value, and I think that like in MI that is actually 2.5% of  50%.

In California, the rate is still roughly 1% of your taxable value. In California, they cannot raise your taxable value more than 2% per year. People who live in their homes for a long time, pay lower property tax. This was also fun because we would get a customer who bought a house and the previous owner lived there 20 years. The taxable value is reset based on the new market value so the taxes are a lot higher and a supplemental bill is sent to the new owner. 

Every states has a different way of doing it and when they collect. The majority of our customers were from California so I remember them the most. 

[oblong]

8 minutes ago, Motown Bombers said:

In California, the rate is still roughly 1% of your taxable value. In California, they cannot raise your taxable value more than 2% per year. People who live in their homes for a long time, pay lower property tax. This was also fun because we would get a customer who bought a house and the previous owner lived there 20 years. The taxable value is reset based on the new market value so the taxes are a lot higher and a supplemental bill is sent to the new owner. 

Every states has a different way of doing it and when they collect. The majority of our customers were from California so I remember them the most. 

That happens here in Dearborn where people are buying single story houses, knocking them down, save one wall to avoid it being called "New Construction", then they build a 5K sq foot mansion with circular driveway, no back yard, no greenspace, blocking the views of neighbors, often with no respect give to building codes, guy just shows up with a backhoe and starts digging, no Miss Digg, etc..... then they bitch because the taxes went from $3000 a year to $12K a year.

 

 

[gehringer_2]

1 hour ago, oblong said:

That happens here in Dearborn where people are buying single story houses, knocking them down, save one wall to avoid it being called "New Construction",

yeah - some friends have a 2000 sq ft place on a lake up north with one old log cabin wall because of that. But more recently my BIL who has a  lakefront cottage that they were considering rebuilding into a 12 month home last year told me they've now done away with the old one wall rules. ☹️

Edited October 4, 2021 by gehringer_2

[Motor City Sonics]

Funny, the Facebook whistleblower is on 60 Minutes last night..............news spreads,  stock starts going down and suddenly today facebook is gone, down, zero, zilch, nada. 

Quite a coincidence, eh?  

[pfife]

That interview was really something.  Screw facebook