It's easier to ignore, why fight it?
It's the way things are. Learn to live with it.
You're right, but what are you going to do about it?
We've surrounded ourselves with pricks. We've planted ourselves a rosebush and made our bed amongst the thorns, best plan: don't roll around.
You can fight, you won't get anywhere.
You have to fight, it's your obligation, your responsibility. If you don't fight, the pricks will multiply, they will take even more and greater liberties with your time and finances. Every fight, win or lose, is a victory.
By pricks I mean the City. I mean the Government. I mean the Corporations and Companies who waste our time on hold, in line, who rob us blind with service charges, with system access fees, with delivery fees. I mean the Banks who charge us to handle our money, charge us for everything, who have created artificial inflation and economies by printing and lending even more artificial money, then expecting us to bail them out when projected earnings fall short....
Corporations when dealing with other corporations have what are called "Service Level Agreements" - SLA's; wherin companies that don't honor their contracts within agreed response times to agreed standards are subject to financial penalties. Send the companies you deal with a Service Level Agreement outlining what you expect from them. Enclose it with your first bill payment, or send it via registered letter. Or don't send it - The contract they hold you to is implicit, not signed, by accepting their product it is presumed that you accept their standards and levels of service. Your own contract can be implicit as well, by accepting you as a customer make them accept your standards and expectations. But know what your standards and expectations are, write them down, be clear, know when they have been violated.
When necessary, make the businesses you deal with aware of your own personal SLA. If they have failed to live up to it, send them bills for your time and expenses. Charge them interest and service fees on unpaid balances. If they continue to resist, send the bills to collection agencies with adjustments for the commission the collection agency will charge. Don't take a lawyers word that you don't have a case, lawyers have been taught to "think" inside the system; their morality is for sale, realize that the jury you help select will not be comprised of lawyers, it will be comprised of people as irate, fed up, and pissed off as yourself. Share your pain, They will understand. Make them understand that their decision will be the first of many steps towards real change.
Deal with people, not companies. By this I mean find local businesses that will value your patronage. Consider the time you spend in line at a large supermarket to save possibly $5 on groceries, then think of the pleasure you'd take in bringing your business to a smaller enterprise that didn't keep you waiting in line and valued your business. Create value and diversity in your neighborhood, avoid the big box marts, the mega stores and shopping malls like the plague. Think of the diversity and choice that is lost as the smaller businesses give way to make room for the larger ones. And remember that the lower prices are offered by paying lower wages, skimping on benefits, shortened training and no enrichment programs. Their lower prices are only ever a temporary incentive to squash the smaller businesses; when all competition is gone you will be paying the highest price possible.
It's your responsibility.
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And much in the news is the intention of the City of Calgary to raise property taxes, yet again. For the nth time in as many years, and for several years to come, a staggered, slow motion robbery of criminal incompetence.
The tax increases are necessary, we're told, as a result of the cities overwhelming success, we need to pay for new sewers, roads, traffic lights, better delivery of utilities, trash collection....the list is endless.
Now note that I'm not a property owner, and these tax hikes, I believe, in the end will benefit me indirectly by lowering the value of properties.
But the increases are wrong. It's money misspent. In the past 5 years house prices in the Calgary region have doubled, tripled in value. From which it is reasonable to extrapolate that property taxes have as well doubled and tripled. Yet for some reason this is not enough.
It comes down to leadership, or lack thereof. Our Mayor, Dave Bronconnier, has always been quick to ask for a handout. In this instance, as mayor, he doesn't have to ask, he can demand. And so he does.
I have no doubt some of the money will go, indirectly, towards the causes stated. I have some serious doubts that this will in any ways serve to mitigate the stresses upon the city, or otherwise improve delivery of municipal services. I am absolutely certain that a prolonged strategy of raising taxes to finance the cancerous growth of the cities suburbs can only be viewed as insane.
There are other solutions.
For example, I'd suggest that property taxes be based on entirely different criterion than "The assessed value of homes". People should not be penalized for taking pride in or renovating their properties. If anything this should be encouraged. Such an approach does nothing to halt or control the growth of low density suburbs that sap the cities resources without contributing anything in return.
A better approach might be to divide the city into zones, with those zones nearest the center of the city paying the lowest property taxes, while those towards the outskirts pay higher. The logic behind this is straightforward - high density inner urban areas are easier and cheaper to maintain (think parks, public transport, delivery of services such as trash, energy, water...) than those less dense areas further from the center.
To further refine this, let's use property taxes to encourage density in our urban areas, freeing up our prime agricultural land for .... what else, agriculture! (I'm full of wacky and counter-intuitive ideas like this).
To do this we could assign a flat rate tax per zone based on the number of square feet/meters each property occupies at ground level. Someone who owns a 1500 sq foot lot with a one bedroom bungalow on it in Zone 1 pays the same property tax as someone who builds a 10 story apartment complex on the same sized lot in the same Zone. The effect of this is to encourage people to make good use of urban space. Side effects include reduced municipal costs in terms of delivery of services such as transport, waste removal, etc. Fewer roads and sewers would need to be built or maintained, in time a reasonable public transport network could be developed, the benefits are endless. And Calgary would, in time, begin to resemble an urban area as opposed to an endless suburb.
There are many more sound strategies that could be used to reduce property taxes and improve the living environment our city offers.
The first step we need to take is to replace our mayor.
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