[wingnut]
Nah. Some people/races/cultures are just incapable of behaving properly…
[/wingnut]

But if the gang-bangers get any worse, whole sections of the city (North Philadephia and Northeast Philly) could wind up like huge prison camps.

My experience is that crime in cities (barring other developments such as authoritarian crackdown or ramming a freeway through the middle of the liveliest parts) gets worse as the local economy takes a dive, and improves as the economy does. It’s quite striking. I wonder if there could be some kind of correlation…

In what city can you live in the suburbs at less than an hour commute from the city and pay *less* for a house than you could pay for a townhouse in the city?

My previous job was for a ready-mixed concrete producer in the suburbs of Philadelphia, and I had a 62 minute commute from small-town Jim Thorpe, Pennsylvania, to Conshohocken. I could have lived up to fifteen minutes closer in Lehighton or Franklin Township.

But that was more of an “exurbs” commute than a suburbs one. I knew guys who lived only 10 miles from the plant who still needed about 45 minutes to get to work!

Philadelphia is on the knife-edge of change — and no one knows in which direction it will fall. If the people living in the city can take control of their neighborhoods, there are people who want to move into the city and fix it up. But if the gang-bangers get any worse, whole sections of the city (North Philadephia and Northeast Philly) could wind up like huge prison camps.

I’m sure some suburbs of Boston are less expensive than the city while others are much more expensive.
Depends on population, the local economy, presence of arts/culture/education/extent of gentifrication…

You inferred something I did not imply - that I am currently paying taxes.

I am moving into a second career so I am in school. I do not work. I do not at present earn any income. Further, my partner’s income puts her just over the individual cut-off amount.

So we lose on many many counts.

(I can read, you know - I understand statutory construction. And also newspaper articles.)

Thanks for playing, though.

Here in Baltimore, a 2000 sq ft house in Hampden (an up-and-coming neighborhood that is gentrifying) cost us $220 K in 2005, which was near the height of the boom in home prices. We even got a yard. The same house in White Marsh, Columbia, or Towson would have had a much bigger yard but cost over $300K. To get a *cheaper* house I’d have had to live in Harford County, where overdevelopment and lack of infrastructure ensures that I would spend a half hour commute going *anywhere*, including the grocery store.

My parents live in New York State. They are an hour and a half away from the City, in another massively overdeveloped and under-roaded area where going anywhere takes half an hour or more, and yet their modest ranch house is valued at $400K or something. Try to get closer to the City than that and you could spend close to a million for a modest house. of course the City itself is insane, and any frther out than my parents is genuinely rural and has *nowhere* to shop … not just “half an hour to the Japanese restaurant” but “half an hour to the grocery store because there are hardly any of them.” Which is why I recommend living nowhere near New York State.

But houses in Baltimore can be had for much more reasonable prices than the same size house in the suburbs. So I’m not sure where the “cities are too expensive” meme comes from, unless cities include “all of the suburbs within any kind of reasonable commute distance”.

In my opinion, not being a racist and being willing to live somewhere you might actually run into a lot of black people produces a sizable housing discount. More white people should try it. If you’re lucky and you do your research ahead of time you can even find a decent school in a reasonably priced area, as long as you’re not scared of your kids meeting black people at school.

Even the people in the Northeast you refer to are being billed by local companies for their heating oil. It’s a local expenditure. They’re not being billed by Venezuela.

I do buy heating oil — though we’re looking into conversion to natural gas — and while I write my checks to a local company (and a friend of mine), in the long run some of that money goes to Hugo Chavez.

The same is true of buying something from WalMart: it goes to the local store, and some to the walton family, but a good part of it goes to the People’s Republic, or to Myanmar or any of a host of other places beyond our borders. That’s one of the prices we pay for not doing our own consumer goods manufacturing anymore.

I’m not opposed to this rebate plan, but I don’t think very highly of it, either. It’s like getting novacaine at the dentist’s office: novacaine doesn’t eliminate pain, but simply postpones it until you’re out of the chair so that the dentist can do his work. The $1,500 we’ll (supposedly) get (married couple, with one child still a minor, though the numbers and calculations may change before this is passed) will come in useful when it arrives, but we’ll have to pay for it next year, when the $1,500 would also be useful.

And, as I think about it, it might be more painful in 2009: our younger daughter turns 17 this July, so we’ll no longer be eligible for the per-child tax credit for her in tax year 2008 and 2009. In a way, we’ll be getting the advance payment for her for tax year 2009 when she won’t be eligible as a tax credit in 2009!

Here’s the problem with the plan: you’re giving money to people who didn’t contribute taxes. This is “from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” Pure socialism, and fucked up.

What universe do you live in where people making less than 75k/y don’t pay taxes, cause I might want to move there. Even if someone is so destitute that they don’t pay income tax, they’re certainly paying sales tax.