Coral Gables Watch

Got Your Property Tax Bill from Miami-Dade and Coral Gables?

The so-called property tax bill (“Notice of Proposed Property Taxes and Proposed or Adopted Non-Ad Valorem Assessments” Miami-Dade County Taxing Authorities) shows that your tax bill may go up by 9.3%.

If you live in Coral Gables, 24% of the increase is from the City of Coral Gables, 37% is from Miami-Dade County, 21% is from the school district, and 14% is from voter-approved debt payments, and the balance in minor items.

These are huge increases in property taxes given that the inflation rate is around 1% or less.  One may wonder if governments can be so insensitive about the consequences of such big increases.

Impact of the Economic Stimulus Program

The economic stimulus program (American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009–ARRA) is estimated to have the following nontrivial impacts by the independent CBO.  Thus it should have been much larger and not smaller, as some have suggested.

…CBO [Congressional Budget Office] estimates that in the second quarter of calendar year 2010, ARRA’s policies:

Raised the level of real (inflation-adjusted) gross domestic product (GDP) by between 1.7 percent and 4.5 percent,

Lowered the unemployment rate by between 0.7 percentage points and 1.8 percentage points,

Increased the number of people employed by between 1.4 million and 3.3 million, and

Increased the number of full-time-equivalent (FTE) jobs by 2.0 million to 4.8 million compared with what those amounts would have been otherwise. (Increases in FTE jobs include shifts from part-time to full-time work or overtime and are thus generally larger than increases in the number of employed workers.)

via Director’s Blog » Blog Archive » Estimated Impact of the Stimulus Package on Employment and Economic Output.