ChronBlog Class Warfare

Bringing it hard today.....

Most of you will never "see" my house either.

How dare they sell this house?

If only we all could enjoy Chesapeake's 1% tax rate. - This is the actual lead-in headline on the home page.

Tax break for Landry's - owned by Billionaire Tillman Fertita - on agenda. - Whether or not you're for these types of tax abatements (I'm not) whether or not the company in question is owned by a Billionaire is irrellevent.

In all of these stories the question isn't whether or not the subjects are wealthy, it's whether or not we're dealing with good public policy.  As someone who's against drilling subsidies and tax abatements I think they're bad public policy, but that holds the same for "green initiatives" or tax abatements "for the community" as well.  Bad tax policy is bad tax policy.

The home headline is just ridiculous.

There are, and always have been, rich and poor people on this planet, even in Socialist and Communist countries there was a wealthy class that lived off the backs of the poor.  The Politburo had Dachas while the proletariat had bread lines.  Income disparity is very real, and not really all that bad of a thing.  Oddly enough, in progressive states, such as California, the income disparity is greater, on average, than the rest of the nation.  My guess is that this is partially driven by the lack of wealthy businesspeople willing to invest in jobs that are sure to be taxed out of profitability.

I understand that ChronBlog, for all of its ballyhooing about the death of newspapers and their comparative worth to a community, is a bad newspaper whose current editorial slant is doing more harm than good to Houston and her repuation, but that doesn't mean that this type of shoddy, attention-grabbing, schlock should go unchallenged.  Certainly not when they bemoan a low tax rate while supporting (on the editorial side) almost every tax increase that's come down the pipe.  At least be intellectually honest and suggest that Chesapeake's tax rate should be dramitically increased.  That's the argument ChronBlog is making, not that the populace should be taxed less.  It's not that the poor are being put upon, but that the "rich" are not being burdened enough.....

Except newspapers of course, these for-profit enterprises should be given special treatment, as if their contribution to society somehow outweighs that of the oil and gas industry.