1,786 research outputs found
Strict Property Tax Caps: A Case Study of Massachusetts\u27s Proposition 2 1/2, its Shortcomings, and the Path Forward
Strict property tax caps are statutory measures that limit municipalities from raising property taxes by more than a certain percentage each fiscal year. In addition, they place a ceiling on the total amount of real and personal property tax revenue a municipality can raise annually. Often spearheaded by voter initiative, strict property tax caps are championed by proponents as a way to limit taxes and increase civic participation. Conversely, detractors frame caps as artificial barriers that improperly constrain local governments in their taxing powers.
Massachusetts voters approved a strict property tax cap, Proposition 2 1â2, in 1980. Proposition 2 1â2 provides that communities may increase taxes on real and personal property annually by no more than 2.5% of the total fair cash value of such property. Further, it states that the total annual property tax revenue raised by municipalities cannot surpass 2.5% of the assessed value of all taxable property in each community.
In the three-and-a-half decades since Proposition 2 1â2 was adopted, many cities and towns have found that they cannot raise sufficient revenue to meet their communitiesâ needs because of the restrictions imposed by the cap. However, the statute does contain a side-step maneuver: a community can override its levy limit with a majority vote.
This Note examines the total number of override votesâattempted and successfulâfrom 1980 through 2010. In doing so, it assesses the impact Proposition 2 1â2 has had and is continuing to have on municipalities, namely the services local governments provide to their residents. The data indicates that the number of proposed override votes has increased over time, as communities have found that they are unable to meet their needs under the 2.5% increase limit. Further, the vote totals make clear that successful override votes happen more frequently in wealthier communities versus poorer communities.
Based on this data, this Note argues that Proposition 2 1â2âs 2.5% levy cap is an unrealistic and artificial barrier. Strict property tax caps place arbitrary limits on the amounts municipalities can raise taxes, without regard to changes in inflation, the cost of providing services, or community needs. The Note concludes by suggesting potential alternatives moving forward
Building Civic Infrastructure: Implementing Community Partnership Grant Programmes in South Africa
This article examines recent efforts to establish Community Partnership Grant Programmes (CPG) in six South African communities. CPG programmes provide the financial and organizational infrastructure to support citizen-initiated neighbourhood projects
Techniques for Constructing Efficient Lock-free Data Structures
Building a library of concurrent data structures is an essential way to
simplify the difficult task of developing concurrent software. Lock-free data
structures, in which processes can help one another to complete operations,
offer the following progress guarantee: If processes take infinitely many
steps, then infinitely many operations are performed. Handcrafted lock-free
data structures can be very efficient, but are notoriously difficult to
implement. We introduce numerous tools that support the development of
efficient lock-free data structures, and especially trees.Comment: PhD thesis, Univ Toronto (2017
Relaxed Schedulers Can Efficiently Parallelize Iterative Algorithms
There has been significant progress in understanding the parallelism inherent
to iterative sequential algorithms: for many classic algorithms, the depth of
the dependence structure is now well understood, and scheduling techniques have
been developed to exploit this shallow dependence structure for efficient
parallel implementations. A related, applied research strand has studied
methods by which certain iterative task-based algorithms can be efficiently
parallelized via relaxed concurrent priority schedulers. These allow for high
concurrency when inserting and removing tasks, at the cost of executing
superfluous work due to the relaxed semantics of the scheduler.
In this work, we take a step towards unifying these two research directions,
by showing that there exists a family of relaxed priority schedulers that can
efficiently and deterministically execute classic iterative algorithms such as
greedy maximal independent set (MIS) and matching. Our primary result shows
that, given a randomized scheduler with an expected relaxation factor of in
terms of the maximum allowed priority inversions on a task, and any graph on
vertices, the scheduler is able to execute greedy MIS with only an additive
factor of poly() expected additional iterations compared to an exact (but
not scalable) scheduler. This counter-intuitive result demonstrates that the
overhead of relaxation when computing MIS is not dependent on the input size or
structure of the input graph. Experimental results show that this overhead can
be clearly offset by the gain in performance due to the highly scalable
scheduler. In sum, we present an efficient method to deterministically
parallelize iterative sequential algorithms, with provable runtime guarantees
in terms of the number of executed tasks to completion.Comment: PODC 2018, pages 377-386 in proceeding
Accounting, accountants and accountability regimes in pluralistic societies: taking multiple perspectives seriously
Purpose â The purpose of this paper is to synthesize work in the emerging field of how accounting and
accountability can be reoriented to better promote pluralistic democracy which recognizes and addresses
differentials in power, beliefs and desires of constituencies. An agenda for future research and engagement
is outlined, drawing on this and insights fromother papers in this special issue of the Accounting, Auditing
and Accountability Journal (AAAJ) aimed at taking multiple perspectives seriously.
Design/methodology/approach â The paper reviews and synthesizes the central themes associated
with accounting, accountants and accountability regimes in pluralistic societies, especially with respect to the
research studies in this AAAJ special issue, and it identifies possibilities for future research and engagement.
Findings â Three central themes are identified: the challenges of achieving critical, pluralistic
engagement in and through mainstream institutions; the possibilities of taking multiple perspectives
seriously through decentred understandings of governance and democracy; and the value of an
agonistic ethos of engagement in accounting. The articles in this issue contribute to these themes,
albeit differently, and in combination with the extant social science literature reviewed here, open up
pathways for future research and engagement.
Practical implications â This work seeks to encourage the development of pluralistic accounting
and accountability systems drawing on conceptual and practice-based resources across disciplines and
by considering the standpoints of diverse interested constituencies, including academics, policymakers,
business leaders and social movements.
Originality/value â How accounting can reflect and enact pluralistic democracy, not least to involve
civil society, and how problems related to power differentials and seemingly incompatible aims can be
addressed has been largely neglected. This issue provides empirical, practical and theoretical material
to advance further work in the area.
Paper type Research pape
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