PROPERTY TAX AND TAX REFORM IN TEXAS: AN EQUITY CONCERN

The Governor of Texas has proposed a tax reform that lowers property tax and eliminates the franchise tax. The lost revenues are replaced by raising the sales tax and instituting a modified value-added tax. The issues are not unique to Texas, many states are considering tax issues. The current tax system is based on an economy that no longer exists and is not providing sufficient revenues. Given the changed economy of the state, modification of the tax system is reasonable. But the proposal increases regressive taxes and decreases the only progressive tax in the system. Overall the proposal is more regressive than the existing tax system.Agricultural and Food Policy,

TEXAS TAXES: A COMPARISON WITH OTHER STATES

This document is part of an educational series on Texas taxes. State and local taxes in Texas are compared with those of the fifty states and the District of Columbia. Taxes are compared per capita and per $1,000 of personal income. The taxes include: all state and local taxes, property taxes, sales and gross receipts taxes, personal income taxes, corporate income taxes and corporate franchise taxes. For each tax the national average, median, maximum and minimum are given along with the corresponding tax for Texas and Texas's rank nationally. Texas state revenue comes primarily from the sales tax and local revenue from the property tax. It is one of only four states with neither a corporate nor a personal income tax. For all state and local taxes, Texas ranks 35th per capita and 40th per$1,000 of personal income. Despite this relatively low rank among all states, tax reform is a continuing priority issue in Texas. The reason for this may be the heavy reliance on sales and property taxes to support state and local governmental services. While the overall tax burden is relatively low, the burden of these two taxes ranks relatively high and may disadvantage certain industries.Public Economics,

Evaluating learning and teaching technologies in further education

With the current emphasis on quality assessment and the role of evaluation in quality assessment, it is likely that teachers in post‐compulsory education will increasingly be expected to evaluate their teaching, especially when making changes to their teaching methods. In Further Education (FE), there have been a number of developments to foster the use of Information and Learning Technologies (ILT), following the publication of the Higginson Report in 1996. However, there is some evidence that the adoption of ILT has been patchy

Dances of life and death: interpretations of early modern religious identity from rural parish chuches and their landscapes along the Hampshire/Sussex border 1500-1800. Volume 1 (thesis), volume 2 (appendix)

This thesis enters a territory infrequently visited by English archaeologists – the early modern period. I have chosen a research area encompassing fifty neighbouring arish churches along the border of East Hampshire and West Sussex and studied what survives of their post-medieval material culture. Though these medieval churches have generally been altered in the 19th century many of them still retain material, architectural, landscape and documentary clues which reveal important aspects of their early modern condition and the religious experiences of their parishioners in life and death. A major aim has been to show that far from being stripped of imagery and cultural artefacts, other materials were introduced, designed to communicate new forms of Protestant ritual to parishioners who may frequently have been bewildered by the rapid religious changes of the 16th and 17th centuries.Having described the area and visited its historical biography in Part One and in order to capture a sense of what it was like to participate in parish religion, I concentrate on four themes emanating from my studies of these churches: space, sensory experience, the performance of memory and gender. Thus Part Two deals with the spatial qualities of new architectural innovations and the effects of the reorganisation of church furniture and is followed by an account of the sensory experiences which religious participation evoked. These discussions centre on the lives of parishioners. Part Three turns to parishioners’ encounters with death and their understandings of the ways in which the church and churchyard framed and enabled the performance of social memory. The final discussion chapter is a series of case studies centred on tombs commissioned by individual gentlewomen for their families and themselves and their nuanced interpretations of mortuary imagery.A major element of this study lies in the way it develops contemporary methodological frameworks within early modern social archaeology. This allows a wider synthesis to be achieved using thematic regional approaches which run alongside the contextual exploration of the sample’s locales over this long transitional period. My approach is also informed by theoretical issues emanating from a number of associated disciplines such as history, art history and anthropology. This is an unusual standpoint which aims to provide a particularly multilayered exploration of an area and time rich in archaeological material which builds on and develops current scholarly thinking in this particular realm of social archaeology

Making the Invisible Visible: A Geospatial History of the Japanese-American Community in Tacoma, Washington 1888 to 1942

Introduction:Prior to World War II, the urban core area of Tacoma, Washington served as the hub of a culturally rich Japanese-American community. Beginning in the late 1880’s, the booming railroad, timber, and agriculture industries attracted workers to this region, including many Japanese immigrants. Tacoma’s “Japantown” or Nihon Machiencompassed the area between 11thand 19thStreets and Pacific and Tacoma Avenues. Japantownexperienced its zenith between 1900 and 1920. After 1920, “it began a slow decline, culminating with the internment of Japanese-Americans during World War II” (Morrison 2, 41,42). This once culturally dynamic area is now in need of recognition and preservation. The goal of this project, therefore, has been to collect and analyze primary data from various historical archive sources (such as books, old maps, and newspaper clippings) in order to identify any geospatial patterns that exist between the visual representation of Tacoma’s Pre-World War II Japanese community and contemporary Tacoma. These analyses can then offer insights into recognizing and preserving important historical elements.https://digitalcommons.tacoma.uw.edu/gis_projects/1024/thumbnail.jp