Tampa Bay’s coming storm
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
The reason this happens is simple: other people's money is subsidizing the losses.
First, Florida is extremely fiscally conservative. Taxes for anything are a hard sell. Without additional taxes, our infrastructure will continue to lag, causing far more damage than would've been had we ponied up the taxes in the first place. Also, infrastructure is not prioritized over glitzy marketing. St Petersburg is in dire need of a waste water treatment plant upgrade, but it's mayor is going to spend the money on a development project instead ("The Pier").
Second, insurance: the state has a high risk pool that you can join as an insurer of last resort, and they'll insure you across multiple losses. As long as we continue to issue insurance (taxpayer sponsored!) for properties that are subject to repeated losses or sea level rise, we'll continue to throw good money after bad.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/flori...
The parent article discusses a "direct hit" being inevitable-- Well, at least as I type this, the projection of Irma's path goes right through Tampa Bay...
I estimate my CH tax averages to 20 percent my gross income, which is pathetically low by European standards, and before any of my fellow U.S. countrymen balk at this, consider that we have a working and efficient society here. It is mostly free market with some degree of state-run business. Where the state runs something, it runs it typically better than the private or public sector does in the U.S. All of this is to say, comparing taxes between the two is apples and oranges.
Another consideration: there are stupid voters here like anywhere else; but after they burn their hands on the metaphorical stove once, they recognize their mistakes and attempt to correct. I would give this country a higher social durability rating than any part of the United States. Not having the whole mythology of predestined preeminice shoved down their throats helps.
Last I checked when living in the U.S., my average tax was about 30-something percent when combining federal and state.
CH also has a yearly tax of wealth (property, stock, bank assets, etc.), but it is effectively so miniscule that it remains unnoticed for ordinary people. For me, it would be 0.1 percent on total wealth per annum.
Tax rate is orthogonal to the effectiveness of society, governance, and civil society. A starve-the-beast mentality injures all three of these. Sorry. I hate to put it so bluntly and bust anyone's bubble. You get what you believe in and pay for.
CH:
- 8 million people
- 41’285 km2
- $700 billion GDP
- 25% foreigners (Zürich exceeds 30%)
- Powerful Local Governments (26 Kantone - each managing local immigration quotas)
- Minor Ocean Access (Rhein port in Basel; they have a large merchant marine)
- Majority of residents are renters — independent of wealth.
S.F. Bay Area:
- 8 million people
- 7,384 Km2
- $780 billion GDP
- 37% foreigners
- Powerful Local Governments (NIMBY)
- Major Ocean Access
- Majority of residents are renters — independent of wealth.
Try overlaying CH onto the Bay Area. It's pretty shocking: http://overlapmaps.com/index.php
I lived in S.F. before moving to CH. I always keep the magnitude of these similarities in mind when reflecting on the lost opportunities and potential within the Bay Area. From an efficacy and infrastructure capitalization perspective, they are light years apart (Spoiler alert: CH is in better shape).
Why would a fellow US countrymen balk at this? Aren't taxes there much higher? You have a federal tax, a state tax and sometimes a local city tax, closer to the 30% you mentioned.
Its interesting to me that tax rates are a function of the canton, is there no federal tax then?
Do you wind up paying net 20% in taxes then after the partial credit or is the 20% just the Swiss part of your total tax obligations?
CH VAT on the other hand is high...it's not like Switzerland doesn't have taxes. They are just different.
But if you actually buy things, pay rent, etc...you will spend a lot more than in the states, so it's really a wash. And like I said, Swiss still have taxes, just not high income taxes...again, it's hard to compare.
Disclaimer: I lived in Lausanne, not Zurich, but I expect they are similar.
RE: federal tax — taxed on three levels federal, cantonal, and community. Each has its own scale. Too numerous to enumerate here.
RE: percentage and recipient state — Swiss is equitable. I pay that first. The U.S. fraction is a mess to calculate. I pay a differential of the two with some measure of tax credits and income exclusion, meaning hypothetically a remaining higher marginal percentage to the U.S. There are exclusions and credits, but they only go so far. Often they completely fail in localities where the nominal cost of living and pay is higher than the U.S. Think: Scandinavia and Switzerland. You don't get much sympathy arguing about this with countrymen, because the see the nominal amount and assume you live like a sheikh — until they visit and then comprehend that the economics are vastly different. Frankly it is very peeving since the United States' Revolutionary War motto was, "No Taxation without Representation." Sure we can vote from abroad, but no aspect of the U.S. political system acknowledges us or affords special treatment. Our votes are tied to this vague concept of last state of affiliation. God forbid someone lose a U.S. state driver license abroad and then have to reprove residence to that state for them to issue a new one. Happened to a friend here, and the process would have made Kafka blush. So the Swiss fraction is the base I always pay. I pay some amount extra to the U.S. At least CH has no capital gains taxes! This is one of the big reasons expats are very careful to follow the criteria each U.S. state has to avoid them claiming you were a tax resident and thus be subject to extra taxation without representation. Don't get this wrong. I believe in taxes and happily pay. I just want the society to have collective agreement that we will have successful governance and do something good. This whole half-assed approach the U.S. has been taking for decades makes me never want to return. I feel zero connection to the U.S. body politic. I regard it the same as a fuck up alcoholic relative whom the family has repeatedly helped but who always lets them down. Sorry. Among expats, this is very common theme.
Switzerland 33%
USA 37%
Switzerland 0.7%
USA 3.3%
Hope you're safe. As another Tampa Bay resident to another, what you've said is spot on and a damn shame.
Neglecting infrastructure is not "fiscally conservative". It is fiscally reckless.
Ditto with Texas, Alaska.
Maybe "welfare queen states"?
Watching this year's politics unfold, it's a bit amazing to me just how much of what we're currently encountering was reflected in "The West Wing". Then again, while the faces and ads change, much of our national policy and politics is actually of a long-standing nature.
I chose a YouTube clip of the relevant moment that also includes a couple of minutes in front of it, for some context. I added a time parameter to skip to the relevant moment within it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyqzPu5pX6U&t=120
The administration of the sitting President, President Bartlet, has negotiated his opponent in the upcoming election, Governor Ritchie of Florida, into having one "real" debate, as opposed to two debates with a format so constrained it would have allowed only for sloganeering. (Ritchie wanted less debates -- the reason he agreed to this.)
The first debate question, and response, speaks directly to the parent's point.
If you have never watched "The West Wing", might I suggest giving it a try? Yes, it is an ensemble show that therefore cannot exactly reflect the nature of the Oval Office and West Wing (i.e. there are more people involved). But it was advised by a number of key people from the Clinton administrations, and the writers speak very informatively and, ultimately, very elegantly, to key issues of our national policies -- and to the character of many people devoted to public service and that we wish to see in public service. On both sides of the aisle, actually -- as demonstrated in the show.
Hurricanes aren't like earthquakes where something builds up over time to make an event more likely if there has not been one recently. It's like saying "The roulette wheel is due to hit number 2."
You can make the general claim that sea levels are rising globally, but to make the claim that global warming is specifically responsible for climate event A requires a lot of evidence.
This is based off my memory of a class from years ago, so I am likely oversimplifying it.
This produces both shear stress (i.e. stress that promotes sliding on the fault) and normal stress (i.e. stress that resist sliding on the fault due to friction).
One common manifestation of the elastic rebound theory says that there is some relatively fixed stress ratio at which the shear stress overcomes the frictional resistance to slip and the fault slides rapidly in an earthquake. The basic assumption (which is supported by data for some well-studied faults such as the San Andreas) is that the rates of strain accumulation are generally constant through time, and therefore earthquakes on a fault are quasiperiodic in time and have more or less similar magnitudes. These are called 'characteristic earthquakes'.
In this situation, then the likelihood of an earthquake on a given part of a fault does increase with time since the last earthquake. I wrote a blog post quantifying this for the southern San Andreas Fault [1], using data from the geologic record and only a few assumptions (basically just that the geologic record contains all of the earthquakes).
However, though very few researchers disagree with the fundamental principles of elastic rebound theory, there is an ongoing scientific debate over whether earthquakes are periodic and characteristic, or more or less random. Many statistical seismologists believe that they are the common form of 'random', i.e. that the likelihood of an earthquake doesn't change with time since the last earthquake. Some faults (and especially larger fault systems) seem to behave in this fashion, but for an individual fault this implies very different earthquake physics. There are huge fights in places like California between senior scientists over this topic when doing seismic hazard modeling. Additionally there are other statistical distributions than either characteristic/quasiperiodic and random (Poissonian) that produce different behavior [2,3]--with some models, the longer it's been since the last earthquake, the longer it will be until the next, and with others after some time for stress to renew on the fault, it becomes basically random.
For storms, floods, etc. the likelihood of a big event happening in a given year is more or less equal every year and therefore 'random' with the exception of some multiyear cycles such as El Niño. However, over shorter timescales, they aren't. Big storms are more likely to occur during rainy seasons rather than dry seasons, and big floods are more likely soon after previous big floods (i.e. days to weeks) because the meterological conditions that generate them may be persistent and the groundwater is still high, which means that it takes less rain to get the same river levels.
[1]: http://rocksandwater.net/blog/2016/07/wrightwood-recurrence/ [2]: https://pdfs.semanticscholar.org/3071/de51c5abc4f770b0b11ede... [3]: http://windofweef.jp/library/o_m/disaster_prevention/img/10....
In brief and simplifying:
Relative to each other, the Pacific plate is moving to the northeast and the North American plate to the southwest (absolute motion is a bit different) and a fairly constant rate of about 25cm per year. Being solid rock these plates don't slide past each other continuously (except in a few rare places) but build up stress over time near the contact between the two plates (fault). When the stress is high enough, the fault breaks loose at a single location and propagates a distance from there. How far the break propagates and how much the plates move relative to each other determines the size of the earthquake.
How plates move on the large scale relative to each other changes on the million year timescale, so on the 10,000 yr timescale, where you will have about 50-100 ~7.5 to 8.0 magnitude earthquakes on the San Andreas under San Francisco, the mean frequency and standard deviation of earthquakes won't change much. Geologist can determine when large past earthquakes occurred by digging trenches through faults and looking at the physical displacement of sediments [2].
How to predict earthquakes by better than 30% chance in the next 30 years (this is the current best estimate for the Hayward fault near where I live) is on-going and with no success so far. Looking at changes in ground conductivity some weeks and days before an earthquake is the most promising path at the moment, but has not yet been proven to work.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plate_tectonics [2] https://earthquake.usgs.gov/learn/topics/safz-paleo/