The Red Queen’s Race

I am late posting. This past week, I finished Office Actions on all three of the cases on my Amended docket, so I’m down to zero.

I also did some work on a Regular New application, considering some of the documents listed on the Information Disclosure Statements. I’m nowhere near finished with the case.

Bethel Cafe

I have found an Ethiopian restaurant, the Bethel Cafe, maybe three quarters of a mile from my apartment. I ate dinner there Saturday, and enjoyed my meal pretty well: assorted vegetable dishes on an injera, with another injera to scoop up the food. I suspect that the spiciness was toned down a bit from what Ethiopians in Ethiopia would eat, but the food did have flavor.

It’s been a couple of years since I ate Ethiopian food, and although this isn’t what I would want to eat every day, it did make a nice change from what I cook for myself.

Belated Henry George Day Report

On Tuesday, September 2, Henry George’s 186th birthday, I put on my Henry George Sesquicentennial tie, and went around wishing the people I saw on my perambulations a happy Henry George Day. I managed to talk a bit with a few of them about the man and his ideas.

I also scratched off some numbers from a Virginia lottery ticket which I had bought a few days before the big day; then I scratched off more on Wednesday and Thursday. I didn’t win any money to donate to Georgist organizations, though, so I am making an appeal: if you think that we should tax the idle rich more and the producers lest, if you think that people should be taxed on the basis of the special privileges which they receive, in particular the privilege of owning land, rather than on what they achieve by their own efforts, then consider making a donation.

In particular, you can donate to the Center for the Study of Economics, https://urbantoolsconsult.org. Checks can be mailed to P.O. Box 400, Collingswood NJ 08108. If you have business before the Patent Office, if you are a fellow federal employee, or if it would be otherwise improper for me suggest that you make a donation, this does not apply to you.

Among other things, the CSE is involved in Baltimore, where Baltimore Thrive is trying to reform the city’s property tax, to tax land more and buildings less. They have also exposed problems with current assessments. A small, not very valuable house is assessed at tens of thousands of dollars for the house. Additionally, there can be an assessment of nine thousand dollars or so for the land under the house, while vacant lots in the immediate vicinity of the house are assessed at around three thousand dollars in land value. This is a disgraceful screwup, benefitting out of town land speculators at the expense of working class homeowners. (The assessments are done by an agency of the State of Maryland; also, the Maryland Legislature would have to pass enabling legislation for the city of Baltimore to go two-rate, although I believe that other jurisdictions in Maryland already have that option.)