I'm writing up a cheque to pay my half-year installment to the city of Vancouver. It's 33% bigger than the one that I wrote a half-year ago. Imagine my surprise when I read the front page of the "city news" from the city of vancouver that says for properties of roughly our value, increases will be 2.99%
How do they manage this discrepancy? Ah, well it turns out they "forgot" to mention that the 2.99% is for those houses that have the same value this year compared to last year. Oh, but Vancouver property values went up 10% last year and that's what they did to our values. So it's meaningless to compare last year vs this year and use the same property value!
I hate it when I get marketing material from a government that tries to convince me it's doing a good job meanwhile blatantly abusing statistics. Especially when I get the tax notice form in the same envelope! I guess they've been learning a lesson from W and Karl Rove about propaganda and bald faced lying.
And it's even scarier that the big translink gobble hasn't kicked in yet.
Yep - its Bush's fault that your socialist form of government is trying to tax itself into prosperity (yet another liberal idea that never works).
Great observation - not.
John,
you know that my reference to Bush was around public relations, not around taxation policies.
I totally agree that we have a socialist government that's taxing way too much - that's part of the point of my entry!