The governor of VA (who is a very liberal) is proposing to get rid of auto safety inspections. I don’t know if this is to help poor people or not, but surprisingly I have heard a lot of mixed opinions from folks. I think much of the resistance may be coming from a place of “If I had to get it done all those years, by golly, so should you young folk!!”
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Don’t know exactly how much inspections help with safety, but Texas allows a poverty exemption for emissions failures. I think this is a good idea, as folks having money problems can still get to work. I’d prefer they expand it beyond a year though (you only get a year’s pass on it – have to fix it the next time around).
Please PM me. I’d gladly send $100 your way. Get your DL renewed, and I’m sure you can find a use for the extra. Honestly happy to do this for you. I could do Venmo or Cash app and you could have it today.
StG
Yeah, and I’ve lived and driven in Texas, too. It’s not always the thirty bucks, it’s the money the garage wants in “necessary” repairs to make the car pass inspection in the first place. Bald tires? Yeah, I need those and won’t argue. Five hundred dollars over and above that for who knows what? Guess again. And once the garage has the car in for inspection, getting it to another mechanic for a second opinion or cheaper repairs is impossible, so he can charge what he wants. Or you go to a garage with low standards, which negates the point of the inspection.
:dubious:
Bold mine
Wait a sec, what’s the issue here, isn’t this exactly what urgent care is for.
(Not the ER part)
40? I’m jealous. I’d be happy to work more hours every week, but neither job will give me more hours, and I could not work a 3rd job around the 1st 2. The first limits me to 25 hours because they don’t want to chance that I might work 30 hours and they’d have to give me insurance, and the 2nd doesn’t operate more than 24 hours per week. I do not have the job history, transportation, or qualifications that would get me anything better in this city.
Another aspect of poverty is that free and cheap food is neither healthy or good for dieting. Go to a food bank and you will receive mostly carbohydrates–rice, pasta, and breads-- and very little if any protein. Get food from a food drive and you get boxes of mac and cheese and no milk or butter. Or 3 boxes of hamburger helper, 3 bags of pot roast sauces and 2 chicken slow-cooker sauces and not any meat at all. Cans of pumpkin. You do get many pounds of dry beans and lentils, and many cans of beans, but nothing to cook them with. Spaghetti noodles, and canned tomatoes, no seasonings or things to add to make a palatable sauce.
Another aspect is that some of us would do just about anything to stay off of government assistance, because that not only steals time, it also kills the spirit.
It is, but urgent care is a bandaid. They can diagnose and treat a cough, but having a primary care provider that the person sees regularly can make sure that the right problem is being treated. For example, a cough is a symptom that may be from a cold, allergies, or any number of other problems. A primary care provider will diagnose and manage the cause of the cough. An urgent care will treat the cough. If the problem is something like an acute bronchitis or pneumonia, an urgent care might be OK, but if it’s a chronic problem like allergies or asthma, management is better than a bandaid.
There are often exceptions like this, but it’s questionable how well they work, largely because the education budget isn’t there.
Like, do people who can take advantage of this know they can take advantage of it? How do they find out? Is it simple and easy to do, or is it another excursion into a labyrinthine bureaucratic process. Section (b) from your link requires that the applicant provide proof in writing of multiple things “in a form approved by the department”. In the best possible scenario, the mechanic who tests the cars has the form ready to go and it’s really simple to find the accompanying documentation. That seems unlikely to be the case to me for a lot of reasons, but I could be wrong.
It doesn’t take very long for the effort required to conform to the poverty exception to exceed the value you get from it in the first place. If you’re struggling to make ends meet, “spend a few hours finding/printing/filling out/mailing forms that may or may not be accepted” looks like a pretty bad investment of time.
I didn’t know states still did this. None of the states in which I’ve registered vehicles have done it since the 90s. I figured maybe California was still doing emissions testing, but I didn’t know so many states still did safety/emissions testing. That’s insane to me. I’d love to see a study on how road safety compares between states still doing this, and those that aren’t.
I would be happy about that. A few years ago they failed me because a fog light was out. He said he could either charge me $ARM to remove the remaining operational fog light or a $LEG to replace the defective one.
Apparently you can have no working fog lights or both working fog lights, but if you have only one working, you fail the inspection. This made me think that safety inspections are not 100% concerned about safety.
…Or more rapidly depreciate or destroy an asset. Example, my wife’s parents. They are very poor and retired fixed-income but at least own their house and land. The problem is that both are essentially depreciating into worthlessness due to neglect that they can’t afford to address. Major parts of their land are eroding and flooding which could be fixed with some drainage projects. Their house is at a tear-down-to-the-studs state for any sort of sale, upgrade or fix.
When they die and the house/property get passed on, it will most likely be simplest to sell it as-is to a tear-down developer, as none of their kids will want to shell out the repair cost just to get it into minimal state let alone be any sort of appreciable asset to carry forward.
This study implies inspections do lower mortality rates.
https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.58.6.1090
Huge caveat though (that probably nullifies the entire study). It was from 1968. Car reliability and car safety standards are drastically better now.
This more recent article from 2018 implies they don’t make a difference.
You also get (in the US anyway) a tax break for the depreciation on the property.
Of course that gets deducted from the property’s basis, so if you sell it later, you get a bigger capital gain tax hit, though there are ways to postpone that.
I read an article a few years back about how the rich are complaining that the poor get all these Federal tax subsidies and benefits… while the rich are getting PLENTY of benefits. The home mortgage interest deduction was the prime example given, IIRC, though there were others. If I’m paying 3,000 a month on a mortgage (36,000 a year), versus 3,000 on rent, and I’m in a 25% tax bracket, I’m saving 9,000 a year on my taxes while a renter is out the full 36K.
I think this is the article.. The mortgage deduction has been tightened down since that article, though we still benefit. I’d argue against #8, the Social Security earnings limit, because your benefit doesn’t go up as you earn more than that figure, and I think that the annuity calculations are such that your benefit doesn’t scale directly from your earnings anyway - i.e. someone who earned 20,000 a year his whole career gets more than 1/5th of what someone who earned 100,000 a year his whole career. This cite seems to support that.
Social security pays out using a 90-32-15 formula.
They determine your income (up to about 120k as was mentioned in the other article, since income above 120k isn’t taxed for social security*) by adding the income up to 120k for the highest paying 35 years of your career, then divide that number by 420 to get your average monthly income.
Then to determine your benefits, they use the 90-32-15 formula. For the first ~$1000 in monthly income, you get 90% back in SS payments. From about $1000-6000 you get 32% back, and from $6000-10000 you get 15% back. So if your average monthly wage was $8,000, you get about $900 back on your first thousand in income, then you get about $1,600 back on income from 1-6k, then you get $300 back in income from 6-8k. If your monthly income was only $1000, you get $900 a month in SS payments.
*I think before Bill Clinton and 1993, medicare wasn’t taxed above 120k either. But Clinton to his credit eliminated the cap and helped keep medicare solvent.
Either way, the SS tax is 12.4% so self employed people making over 6 figures are saving a lot of money by not paying a SS tax in income above 120k.
A small hammer would fix that for free I’d think.
[emphasis added]
Yeah the cost of the mortgage interest deduction was around $60bil/yr before the 2018 tax reform and now around $25bil/yr, so now maybe still a big number in populist bumper sticker terms (‘$25 billion, with a b!!’) but pretty much a rounding error in terms of total federal taxation. It gets way more attention than it deserves at this point, though I’d readily go along with article’s suggestion to scrap it altogether.
I also agree it’s purely subjective to say that limit on social security taxable income is a ‘tax loophole’ when the benefit is also capped. It might poll better to lift that cap than any other given tax increase (even on ‘the wealthy’) but there’s nothing objectively unfair about a program all along said to be intended to provide each citizen (more or less) a capped pension if they ‘pay in’ a capped amount. Similarly Medicare. If very high income people used many times as much Medicare, then it would be obviously unfair to have a cap on the amount of income taxed for it. Otherwise it’s pretty much the same as saying 37% top federal marginal is a ‘tax break’ because it ‘should’ be 74%. You can say it would be better for the general welfare if it was 74% (or anyway higher than it is), but it’s not a ‘tax break’ or ‘loophole’ particularly that it happens not to be that high now.
But you’re suggesting that taking less of someone’s money is somehow benefiting them?
She’s suggesting that under certain circumstances* , paying a $3000/mo mortgage payment is less than paying $3000 month in rent, because some portion of that mortgage payment will be tax-deductible interest. Let’s say of the $36K I pay in mortgage payments for a given year , $35K is interest and I save $8750 in taxes by deducting that $35K from my income. My mortgage payments have effectively cost me $27,250 after the tax deduction while the renter has paid $36K. It’s a benefit for paying a mortgage rather than rent and a disadvantage to paying rent rather than a mortgage- which is two different ways to say the same thing.
That’s like saying you’ll be raped just a little bit less if you’re willing to pay credit card interest on a box of condoms, though. :rolleyes:
True in the example, but let’s examine it a little further for specific relevance to ‘ways being broke makes cost of living higher’
A $3k pmt on a 30 yr mortgage at today’s rates (30 yr at 3.75% say) starts at a $689.5k principal, near the new limit of $750k mortgage balance on which the deduction applies. Also even the first yr’s interest on that mortgage would be around $25.6k, principal repayment is a lot more even in the early years than it was when mortgage rates were double digit. IOW barely bigger than the new $24k standard deduction for a couple, though the couple that can afford that (say $689.5/80%=$861k) house probably has the new max $10k state and local property tax deduction and perhaps other deductions, but being able to take advantage of the whole $26k, IOW to have more than $24k of other deductions, would still not be that common.
Anyway the pretty limited effect of the mortgage interest deduction now (cost of around $25bil/yr v ~$3.2 tril/yr total federal revenue) is mainly to advantage well off people with pretty high incomes and expensive homes v. people with pretty high incomes and expensive rents. In a more median comparison it’s largely disappeared as a factor, because a more median mortgage of say. $200k requires $7k+ interest, less than even the single std deduction of ca. $12k and far below the couple level of $24k. Besides people discussing unfairness to the poor, which is really not so directly* relevant to that deduction, I think a lot of people who own or consider buying homes haven’t yet caught up with how much less valuable this deduction has become.
*expect under the general idea that taxes not being higher than they are on people who aren’t poor (whether that’s middle class and ‘rich’ or just ‘rich’ people) is itself unfair to poor people. But a) that’s a value judgement, not as objective as it being more expensive to use a check cashing place than having enough for a no fee bank account, etc and b) big new social spending programs are much more likely if middle class people can also receive them, since they are so much more numerous as voters, but then they cost a lot more also.