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Economic Competitiveness


PVDJack

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the car tax is ridiculously high here though.

I didn't realize the car tax was so high. It should be lowered, not eliminated. I find it worrisome also that Lincoln Park revenue is what is being used to offset the car tax. The tax should indeed apply to all cars, if only in consideration of emissions.

I don't know if it was always clear, but use tax has always been on the books, and use tax applies to all internet transactions.

Yes, you're supposed to report all out of state purchases, including online. Personally I think that's ridiculous. If that's the case, states should give a rebate to non-residents. Forcing online retailers to charge tax directly will be a problem for the smaller retailers, they don't want to have to keep track of one state, which is why I think some will simply stop shipping to us. The big ones like Amazon will be able to apply the tax.

First, it's the only state I've ever lived in where I pay any car tax at all.

Massachusetts has a local excise tax, but not all municipalities charge it. I had a car for a very short time when I lived in Waltham and I remember the tax being something like $40 (on an ancient car).

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I'm as pro-mass transit as anyone here, but everyone should know that RI's car tax is amazingly high. First, it's the only state I've ever lived in where I pay any car tax at all. Secondly, it's based on their value of your car, which may (or may not) have any relationship with reality. Third, I've known people who have leased and they have to pay as well, despite not truly owning the vehicle.

I know people who go to great lengths to illegally (and unethically) register their cars in other nearby states to avoid the tax. If you own a $30,000 car, for example, that tax becomes one of your biggest payments of the year.

- Garris

i actually called the tax assesor's office in providence about this. i wanted to know how they determined the value. it's the private party value in the kelley blue book. maybe i should've left my car registered at my mother's house in CT... insurance was half what it is now and tax is almost nothing compared to what providence is.

Yes, you're supposed to report all out of state purchases, including online. Personally I think that's ridiculous. If that's the case, states should give a rebate to non-residents. Forcing online retailers to charge tax directly will be a problem for the smaller retailers, they don't want to have to keep track of one state, which is why I think some will simply stop shipping to us. The big ones like Amazon will be able to apply the tax.

Massachusetts has a local excise tax, but not all municipalities charge it. I had a car for a very short time when I lived in Waltham and I remember the tax being something like $40 (on an ancient car).

double taxation on sales is a terrible idea. maybe states need to agree on making a flat sales tax rate at 5%. that'll piss off states with none (NH and DE, the ones i know of). it'll also probably feed the black market and lead to more tax fraud.

$40 is nothing... if you had a car in providence that was only worth $1000, you'd be paying $76! i was paying less than that on a car worth 4 times as much!!! i think the phase out of the car tax is just about complete though...

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I commute to MA, but live in RI, so the car tax in my mind should be eliminated. I pay enough tax thank you very much.

Cotuit and AriPVD have different opinions, but that is becasue they have different perspectives. They dont need cars. While I think that is great, not all of us can work and live in the same city.

I paid 25 dollars per thousand in MA. My wife and I have two cars, and the taxes for both will be about 3k this year. That is absolutely criminal.

It is not enough that I moved here and bought a home here? I have to pay a ridiculous amount of car tax too? If Providence or RI in general had enough high paying jobs to allow me to work in RI, I would gladly do so. But they dont, so dont punish me because I need a car to get to my job. That out of state job enables me to live in Providence and buy a home here. Shop here, eat here, etc etc. Providence attracts people, but it needs to become more attractive to make people want to live here. Taxing the crap out of us is not the answer.

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I find it interesting that I didnt get my 2004 Car Tax bill from the City of Providence until October 2005. They broke it up into 4 payments and I paid the first one then, but I didnt know at the time there was a car tax, so I had not budgeted for it. Heating oil this winter has taken priority, so I guess the car tax will have to wait... As long as they dont come after me or something... :-o

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Cotuit and AriPVD have different opinions, but that is becasue they have different perspectives.

I didn't realize how high the tax was. Knowing that, the tax should have been restructered and reduced, not eliminated. Considering how high the tax was, that seems like a big hit to the budget when we are cutting social programs and squeezing all we can out of the sales tax to make ends meet (not to mention other cuts like the DMV closings).

Not knowing that total elimination was an option, I would imagine that the voters would have been pleased to hear about a drastic reduction in the tax, Carcieri could have still been a tax cut hero, but kept a little money flowing in at the same time. Our aging infrastructure and the beating it takes from the weather mean that we need more money to take care of things. I see it as only fair that the people who utilize that infrastructure should have to pay for it.

This of course is an area where the New England states could and should be coordinating efforts. Imagine if there were a road and transit funds pool that the 6 states collected to be spent on regional road and transit needs? Repaving Route 195 wouldn't have to stop at the state line for example, and would not have to be bid and paid for on seperate contracts. There's an article from the Hartford Courant posted in this thread outlining how piss poor our regional transit is in New England, and how as a heavily urban region this is hurting us.

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I commute to MA, but live in RI, so the car tax in my mind should be eliminated. I pay enough tax thank you very much.

Cotuit and AriPVD have different opinions, but that is becasue they have different perspectives. They dont need cars. While I think that is great, not all of us can work and live in the same city.

I paid 25 dollars per thousand in MA. My wife and I have two cars, and the taxes for both will be about 3k this year. That is absolutely criminal.

It is not enough that I moved here and bought a home here? I have to pay a ridiculous amount of car tax too? If Providence or RI in general had enough high paying jobs to allow me to work in RI, I would gladly do so. But they dont, so dont punish me because I need a car to get to my job. That out of state job enables me to live in Providence and buy a home here. Shop here, eat here, etc etc. Providence attracts people, but it needs to become more attractive to make people want to live here. Taxing the crap out of us is not the answer.

do you use RI roads? that's what the car tax should be covering. i can understand your viewpoint, but people in MA pay car tax even if they commute to providence. i think the car tax is important, but the rates make it downright theft. even $25 per thousand is a lot in my opinion. the only issue i have with it is the rate and the fact that it isn't applied across the board.

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do you use RI roads? that's what the car tax should be covering. i can understand your viewpoint, but people in MA pay car tax even if they commute to providence. i think the car tax is important, but the rates make it downright theft. even $25 per thousand is a lot in my opinion. the only issue i have with it is the rate and the fact that it isn't applied across the board.

Gas tax also goes into the roads and RI has the third-highest gas tax in the nation. Gas tax pays for state roads and also state contributions to interstate improvements.

Car taxes can go into local roads and yet Providence has the worst roads of any metro I have been in. Which I'm only point out because of the irony, not to disagree with your point.

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Gas tax also goes into the roads and RI has the third-highest gas tax in the nation. Gas tax pays for state roads and also state contributions to interstate improvements.

Car taxes can go into local roads and yet Providence has the worst roads of any metro I have been in. Which I'm only point out because of the irony, not to disagree with your point.

i totally agree... the roads in the city are terrible, including some of the state roads (smith street for example). patching pot holes doesn't work anymore. every pot hole i've seen patched in the past year has been re-opened and worsened with the first plowing this year (if you can even call it a plowing).

do you have the rankings of gas tax? gas is less expensive here than a lot of other places i've been recently (but that could be because of the cost to deliver it in addition to the tax).

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do you use RI roads? that's what the car tax should be covering. i can understand your viewpoint, but people in MA pay car tax even if they commute to providence. i think the car tax is important, but the rates make it downright theft. even $25 per thousand is a lot in my opinion. the only issue i have with it is the rate and the fact that it isn't applied across the board.

Of course I do. And I see your point. However, how do other states get away without the car tax? And what about the sales tax on cars? That should go to roads too.

Or if you have to have a car tax, I would much rather have it charged upfront when I buy the car and have it rolled into my car payments. 1500 bucks all at once for a car is a lot, spread out it would be more manageable.

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i totally agree... the roads in the city are terrible, including some of the state roads (smith street for example). patching pot holes doesn't work anymore. every pot hole i've seen patched in the past year has been re-opened and worsened with the first plowing this year (if you can even call it a plowing).

do you have the rankings of gas tax? gas is less expensive here than a lot of other places i've been recently (but that could be because of the cost to deliver it in addition to the tax).

Here is some data from 2002, where RI is actually 4th (Hawaii, Nevada, and Wisconsin). Wisconsin indexes theirs to inflation and therefore now have a lower tax however for all intents and purposes they are the same.

If you google you will get pages and pages but different places use different protions. I just linked the first government report. for whatever reason I think an official state report should have more credibility. I may be naive in this respect, however... :(

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Of course I do. And I see your point. However, how do other states get away without the car tax? And what about the sales tax on cars? That should go to roads too.

Or if you have to have a car tax, I would much rather have it charged upfront when I buy the car and have it rolled into my car payments. 1500 bucks all at once for a car is a lot, spread out it would be more manageable.

$1500 for a car is too much. period. like i said, the tax should be a lot less than it is currently and should be applied across the board.

let's say you pay for your car outright. that adds another $1500 to the price (although if you can afford to pay outright, you can probably afford the tax as well). the other thing is, the tax goes to the city, not the state.

sales tax on cars is the same as it is on everything else, 7%. it probably goes to something else. also, there are a lot more cars on the road than being bought each year. road maintenance is an ongoing thing, you need a fairly constant supply of money to cover it. the car tax does that. and if you reduce both, but apply the car tax across the board (far more cars in this city are not taxed than are taxed), i'm sure they'll get the same amount of money, if not more, than they were before.

i don't know about states that don't have a car tax, i'm sure there's other taxes that are higher in those places.

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Car taxes can go into local roads and yet Providence has the worst roads of any metro I have been in. Which I'm only point out because of the irony, not to disagree with your point.

Some of the problems with Providence's roads have been traced to the fact that many state roads inexplicably end at the city line. Roads that are state roads in Cranston or NP or Johnston... for whatever reason become city roads once they cross into Providence. The mayor has been trying to address this. And of course, the fact that the previous administration allowed maintenance in general to lag, and when they did maintain anything, did a terribly piss-poor job at it.

Of course this history of poor maintenance highlights why the car tax should not be completely eliminated. Unfortunately we need to pay for the shortcomings of those who came before us.

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Some of the problems with Providence's roads have been traced to the fact that many state roads inexplicably end at the city line. Roads that are state roads in Cranston or NP or Johnston... for whatever reason become city roads once they cross into Providence. The mayor has been trying to address this. And of course, the fact that the previous administration allowed maintenance in general to lag, and when they did maintain anything, did a terribly piss-poor job at it.

I remember reading about that.

Another Buddy-Linc feud costing the residents of Providence? I wonder.

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Ronald A. Wolk: In Worcester, a model school for R.I. [ProJo.com]

It's an old story: We want our schools to be better; we just don't want to change them. Put another way, we seem to care more about our schools than we do about our kids. And that's a prescription for disaster.
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a few good articles in the projo

check out-- http://www.projo.com

"R.I. consumers, businesses show signs of pessimism"

-->http://www.projo.com/business/content/projo_20060215_surv15x.127effaa.html

I wonder who the heck they surveyed for this one. The public's image of Providence has dropped in the past year, it is supposedly getting worse... um hello??

"Economist urges state to get more competitive" -->http://www.projo.com/business/content/projo_20060215_econ15x.127f09fa.html

The only comment I have on this article is that Mass. ranks # 1, New Hampshire ranks #2 and we rank 37th (according to the article), so for our state being next the the top competitive economic state, I think we are doing pretty good for where we are right now, but I agree that improvements need to be made faster. Get the state wireless, make that tax free weekend happen, get businesses here... and I'm beginning to think that this minimum wage increase isn't such a great idea either. The only thing that it will do is encourage our high school drop out population to stay here and try and make a living off of that minimum wage. Is there a way to decrease this wage sometime in the future?

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"Economist urges state to get more competitive" -->http://www.projo.com/business/content/projo_20060215_econ15x.127f09fa.html

The only comment I have on this article is that Mass. ranks # 1, New Hampshire ranks #2 and we rank 37th (according to the article), so for our state being next the the top competitive economic state, I think we are doing pretty good for where we are right now, but I agree that improvements need to be made faster. Get the state wireless, make that tax free weekend happen, get businesses here... and I'm beginning to think that this minimum wage increase isn't such a great idea either. The only thing that it will do is encourage our high school drop out population to stay here and try and make a living off of that minimum wage. Is there a way to decrease this wage sometime in the future?

Kudos to our leaders for taking the time and effort to make RI the first state to actually seek the researchers' advice.

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This article struck me as relevant to Providence:

Joel Kotkin: For thriving cities, it's not enough to be cool

Dense, arty neighbourhoods have failed to attract talent and capital, writes Joel Kotkin. What people really want is affordable space

While the author makes a valid point that being hip is not enough, his premise that growth should focus on giving people their dream of a single family home and a back yard is not sustainable in the long term. Any good city plan requires balanced growth.

As far as the article applying to providence; I agree it is worth a read, but while I think we are arty and hip, I believe that perception is based on a reputation built some years ago and not the current reality. We have some good projects but overall the city

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While the author makes a valid point that being hip is not enough, his premise that growth should focus on giving people their dream of a single family home and a back yard is not sustainable in the long term. Any good city plan requires balanced growth.

As far as the article applying to providence; I agree it is worth a read, but while I think we are arty and hip, I believe that perception is based on a reputation built some years ago and not the current reality. We have some good projects but overall the city

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While the author makes a valid point that being hip is not enough, his premise that growth should focus on giving people their dream of a single family home and a back yard is not sustainable in the long term. Any good city plan requires balanced growth.

As far as the article applying to providence; I agree it is worth a read, but while I think we are arty and hip, I believe that perception is based on a reputation built some years ago and not the current reality. We have some good projects but overall the city

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