Property taxes

A levy of just $2 for every$1000 of unimproved land value would raise $7 billion a year with an annual charge of$772 on the median-priced Sydney home, $560 on the median-priced Melbourne home, and lower average rates in other cities and the regions, according to this report. Summary Property Taxes, the second working paper in Grattan’s Budget Repair series, finds that a levy of just$2 for every $1000 of unimproved land value would raise$7 billion a year with an annual charge of $772 on the median-priced Sydney home,$560 on the median-priced Melbourne home, and lower average rates in other cities and the regions. The first working paper, Fiscal Challenges for Australia, found that state budgets are under pressure, with spending in health, education and other areas growing faster than GDP. State revenues are also threatened by the Commonwealth’s decision in last year’s budget to substantially reduce promised funding to the states for hospitals and schools. Current attention is focussed on the worsening Commonwealth deficit, but states and territories have a looming funding gap, and have provided little insight into how they are going to fill it. A broad-based property levy calculated from the council rates base would be the best revenue measure to fill that gap. While property taxes can be unpopular because they are highly visible and hard to avoid, they are also efficient and fair, and don’t change incentives to work, save and invest. Unlike capital, property is immobile – it cannot shift offshore to avoid taxes. Over the last 25 years, tax on property and property transactions have been the only significant growth taxes for states, with revenues keeping pace with the economy. Grattan’s proposal is manageable for property landowners, and protects low-income people. Low-income retirees with high-value houses could defer paying the levy until their house is sold. The levy could also be used to fund the reduction and eventual abolition of stamp duties, among the most inefficient and inequitable state taxes. Shifting from stamp duty to a property levy would provide more stable revenues for states and add up to $9 billion in annual GDP. &nbsp

Microbial metal resistance and metabolism across dynamic landscapes: high-throughput environmental microbiology.

Multidimensional gradients of inorganic compounds influence microbial activity in diverse pristine and anthropogenically perturbed environments. Here, we suggest that high-throughput cultivation and genetics can be systematically applied to generate quantitative models linking gene function, microbial community activity, and geochemical parameters. Metal resistance determinants represent a uniquely universal set of parameters around which to study and evaluate microbial fitness because they represent a record of the environment in which all microbial life evolved. By cultivating microbial isolates and enrichments in laboratory gradients of inorganic ions, we can generate quantitative predictions of limits on microbial range in the environment, obtain more accurate gene annotations, and identify useful strategies for predicting and engineering the trajectory of natural ecosystems

The Keynote Papers and the Current Financial Crisis

One hesitates to write history as it happens, or to draw policy lessons from current events. The conference took place in May 2008 - after the government-assisted takeover of Bear Stearns but before a capital market downturn fueled a system-wide liquidity crisis, with successive insolvencies at IndyMac, Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, Lehman, AIG, WaMu, and, as I write, Citigroup. But it would be odd to comment on capital market regulation without mentioning the events of the last three months. I am first to acknowledge that anything I might have written in May would not have foreseen the crisis or linked capital market regulation to financial institutions, which in the US have been conventionally treated as discrete in discourse and institutions (e.g., U.S. Treasury 2008; Leuz and Wysocki 2008)

On the 2-part of the Birch-Swinnerton-Dyer conjecture for elliptic curves with complex multiplication

Given an elliptic curve E over Q with complex multiplication having good reduction at 2, we investigate the 2-adic valuation of the algebraic part of the L-value at 1 for a family of quadratic twists. In particular, we prove a lower bound for this valuation in terms of the Tamagawa number in a form predicted by the conjecture of Birch and Swinnerton-Dyer