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["WF Smith" <WarrenSmith AT PalmettoBuilders.net>]

> monts, and then people will have to use more heating oil. All his
> friends in the
> oil business will get richer and richer. Just another part of the plot.

You're right. I know it's not for me to understand, but a few things that
puzzled me were yesterday's announcement of 337,000 new jobs created in
October, the drop in the price of crude, and the NYSE's rally. I guess Bush
was just too dumb to release these numbers and cause all this on monday of
this week. If he had done so, he might have won re-election outright without
resorting to having Karl Rove re-program all the electronic voting machines.

Taking my tongue out of my cheek, though, a really stupid thing happened
locally. (It'll take me just a minute to get to what was really stupid but
bear with me). We voted on a "local option sales tax", whereby our county's
sales tax would go up by 1%, with the proceeds to purportedly go to property
tax relief. All the local guvmint types and movers and shakers were in
favor, writing letters to the editor and whatnot. In fact, my accountant
wife read the fine details and calculated we would save between
$1400-$1600/yr ourselves if it went down as planned. We wondered how much
would be skimmed for "administrative costs" but figured what the hey, it
can't be more than 10%. Then, our normally astute mayor stupidly told the
news how the City would really benefit by having the additional funds for
parks & rec, etc., exposing their loophole. We had already decided to vote
against it, our tax savings notwithstanding, but that was the nail in the
coffin. My thinking was that we'd get one, two or three years of less
property taxes then thay'd revert to the original level and we'd still be
saddled with the additional sales tax. Plus, it looked like a regressive
tax, taking the 1% from non-property owners who likely would not not see a
reduction in rent. (We weren't planning to re-write any of our leases for
our tenants).

Anyway, here's the stupid part...Thursday, in our mailbox, were over a dozen
property tax notices due by January 1st. Had those dolts mailed those things
a few days earlier property owners would have headed to the polls with
thoughts of those tax liabilities in the back of their minds. The local
option sales tax failed miserably.
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