Month: May 2004

Final Exam

I have my EMIS 8363 Engineering Finance final exam in 1 hour. The professor allows open book, open notes, and a calculator or PDA or laptop to be used during the exam. (No internet connection allowed!)

I see two ways to properly study for this exam:

  1. Pore through massive amounts of material and work lots of practice problems.
  2. Skim everything and concentrate on just knowing where everything is in the notes and textbook.

Given that I am an “efficient engineer” (per David Russo) I have chosen door number 2.

I don’t know how well I’ll do. I just want to get it over with.

Time for Marie Callender’s Country Fried Chicken meal. (Ugh.)

Warning for 16 over the limit

A coworker got a warning this morning for doing 16 MPH over a 60 MPH speed limit. He was driving on the Dallas North Tollway at around 6:50 AM when this happened.

If the North Texas Tollway Authority bothered to follow commonly accepted speed zoning procedures, or even follow state law, then the speed limit would undoubtedly be the state legal maximum, 10 MPH higher than currently posted.

However, the state cannot create laws of science. Had the state not enacted an arbitrary speed limit cap, informal observations strongly suggest that the correct speed limit could easily be 75 MPH, perhaps higher. In that case my hapless coworker would have been going a screaming 1 MPH over the limit.

Texas School Finance Conundrum

A current proposal to “reform“ school finances in the Texas Legislature will transfer a substantial portion of school taxes from federally deductible property taxes to nondeductible taxes like sales taxes.

Dallas County Appraisal District says I will owe $2,410.07 to Dallas ISD for tax year 2004. At this time in my life I am able to deduct the full amount of this tax from my income taxes. The true cost of this tax to me is only $1606.71 due to the tax deduction.

If the $1.05 per $100 tax rate sticks, I will only owe $1543.50, or a true cost to me of $1029.00.

If I pay Dallas ISD $2,410.07 in year x but only pay $1543.50 in year x+1, the difference of $866.57 has to be made up with new taxes. I am not a fool; I know that no matter where the new taxes are levied—payroll, video gambling, additional sales tax, whatever—all this $866.57 is still coming out of my wallet in the end. Businesses will pass on the payroll tax in the form of higher prices or employ fewer people, video gambling will inevitably increase poverty and therefore increase the usage of social services and law enforcement (which Dallas already does not have enough of!), and sales taxes are just simply more nondeductible taxes. And that doesn’t even count snowball effects like the higher crime and higher ignorance that come from poverty, the increased poverty from potentially reduced payrolls, etc.

If that’s not bad enough, I lose the deductibility of this $866.57!

Because all these fancy new taxes will eventually hit me in the pocketbook anyway, and because I lose the deductibility of that $866.57, even if net receipts to Texas school districts stay exactly the same, my net school taxes will increase by $216.64 per year. In essence, removing the deductibility of our school taxes is a huge giveaway to the IRS because all of that $216.64 goes straight to Uncle Sam. And this $216.64 doesn’t even begin to take into account the snowball effects!

My high school band director called himself a “radical Republican.” He advocated ripping out the current school financing system and replacing it with an income tax. Back in high school I thought he was crazy, but now I completely understand where he is coming from. I am very willing to pay a well-implemented, simple income tax as a replacement for the current school financing system if that means I can deduct that tax.