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Voters line up to vote at Pembroke Lakes Elementary in Pembroke Pines on November 6, 2012.
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Voters line up to vote at Pembroke Lakes Elementary in Pembroke Pines on November 6, 2012.
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PUBLISHED:

Where did you get your figure for an average-priced home in Pembroke Pines?

It surely is not $202,450. According to the web, it is around $500,000.

And spending $9 million to renovate the city’s golf course? (What about the $10 million we spent on the last renovation? I think we’re still paying for it.)

Artificial turf lasts anywhere from eight to 10 years. We’ll still be repaying the bond when the city will need new turf. I played sports on real grass all my life — what’s wrong with grass?

As for the need for a new police station — yes, I agree on that.

Michael Steinberg, Pembroke Pines

(Editor’s note: The figure came . It says $202,450 was the medium taxable value of all homes on July 1, 2024. That is not the same as fair market value, which is usually much higher).

How to lower the debt

Most everyone would agree the national debt is too high. Yet the wealthy top 1% of Americans have benefited from a robust stock market and have large unrealized gains that they don’t pay taxes on, unless they sell. They won’t sell because they’ll pay more than 20% capital gains taxes on any gains, after already paying tax on their earnings before investing in the market.

They can leave the stock gains to their heirs, who can sell the appreciated stocks without paying taxes on the gains. That will happen over the next decade with our current tax policy.

As a result, the government gets no money. The owners of the stock don’t get the benefits of cashing in on the stocks and improving their lifestyle and the economy isn’t infused with monies derived from stock sales.

If a new tax bracket were created for capital gains that reduced the tax rate to 10% for stocks held for more than 10 years, with a lifetime limit of $5 million per family, a large amount of wealth would be transferred from “paper gains” to real gains for investors, the government and the economy.

If average members of the top 1% of each sold $5 million of their long-held stock portfolios because of this incentive, the national debt would be $4 trillion less, from $1 trillion tax revenue from $10 trillion in stock sales and $3 trillion in ordinary income taxes from $30 trillion into the economy from the multiplier effect.

Walter Collins, Fort Lauderdale

Praise for the appraiser

I want to compliment Broward Property Appraiser Marty Kiar, a forward-looking public servant, who has made his office a model for the nation with regard to safeguarding homes against fraud.

I met him at the Fort Lauderdale Home Show several years ago, where he was promoting the good works in his office.

He’s now applying the cost-of-living benefit that homesteaded property owners receive, thanks to recent passage of a constitutional amendment.

We are lucky to have him in Broward County.

Nick Oliveri, Plantation

The more things change

I enjoy my Sunday newspaper every week.  Last Sunday, I had to keep checking the date, as article after article made me think I was reading news from 1965 — not 2025.

We need to prohibit rappers from a beach concert in Fort Lauderdale to make them safe; women do not need to have babies, instead of careers; keep religion out of public schools, and so on.

Maybe you can just take all these kinds of stories and put them together in one section so that the rest of the paper is more pleasant.

Randi Glick, Deerfield Beach __________________________________________________________________

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