Looking forward to my tax relief in New Jersey What a joke. A 1% increase in sales tax is now the great hope to lower my property tax in New Jersey. This is Jon Corzine’s master plan, it is hard to believe that he was the Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs from 1994 to 1999. Lets just do some simple math, to lower taxes an average of $1000.00 a year per NJ resident (sounds like a number that would get me excited) working with a .01 (1% tax increase) increase per dollar in sales tax the state would have to generate an average of $100,000.00 in revenue on sales taxable items. Is it me or does this seem ludicrous? Let assume the state does a phenomenal job investing (note this oxymoronic statement, when was the last time the local, state or federal government did a phenomenal job investing?) and this is a multi-year plan I would still rather have my 1% back.

It is also my understanding that only a portion of the 1% is going toward property tax breaks, some portion will be going towards the already depleted state workers pension fund (another fine example of the state government investing geniuses at work).

Some tax facts about the state of New Jersey before we get to my conclusion.

New Jersey is one of the 37 states that collect property taxes at both the state and local levels. As in most states, local governments collect far more. New Jersey’s localities collected $18,225,594,000 in property taxes in fiscal year 2004, which is the latest year the Census Bureau published state-by-state property tax collections. At the state level, New Jersey collected $3,660,000 in property taxes during FY 2004, making its combined state/local property taxes $18,229,254,000. At $2,099, New Jersey’s combined per capita collections were the highest in the nation.

Estimated at 10.8% of income, New Jersey?s state/local tax burden percentage ranks 17th highest nationally, above the national average of 10.6%. New Jersey tax payers pay $5,234 per-capita in state and local taxes.

New Jersey?s personal income tax system consists of six brackets and a top rate of 8.97% kicking in at an income level of $500,000. Among states levying personal income taxes, New Jersey?s top rate ranks 6th highest nationally. New Jersey’s 2004 individual income tax collections were $852 per person,

New Jersey levies a 6% general sales or use tax on consumers, which is above the national median of 5%. State and local governments combined collect approximately $721 per capita in general sales taxes, ranking 31st highest nationally. New Jersey?s gasoline tax stands at 14.5 cents per gallon and ranks 4th lowest nationally. New Jersey’s cigarette tax stands at $2.40 per pack of twenty and ranks 2nd highest nationally. The sales tax was adopted in 1966, the gasoline tax in 1927 and the cigarette tax in 1948.

So at $721 per capita that put the per capita revenue at $12,016.66. Assuming the entire 1% tax increase was going to lower property taxes this would yield a potential reduction of $120.16 which I guess if you apply that to the average state/local property taxes of $2,099.00 would be a 5.7% reduction.

I won’t hold my breath from my property tax decrease. But maybe I should stop avoiding the guy walking around my neighborhood reassessing the homes, maybe I have it all wrong and he looking to lower my taxes. Sure he is! I would like to see a little more detail on this plan, right now I am less than excited.

-RJB

One of the fastest growing technology market segments is High Performance Computing (HPC), thus it should come as no surprise that Microsoft has tossed their hat into the ring. This long time Unix / Linux advocate has a hard time believing the Microbloated operating system now repackaged as Windows Compute Cluster Server 2003 or Windows Server 2003, HPC Edition depending on who you are talking to has been so streamlined that it will offer a competitive alternative to Linux in the HPC space.

The product is meant to compete in environment where customers are running scalable, parallel computing workloads in vertical market segments, such as engineering, life sciences and finance. Today this market is dominated by Linux. While some customer may look to Microsoft for turnkey HPC solutions it there are may unanswered questions.

Today many large HPC environments are leveraging clustered file-systems like Lustre (http://www.lustre.org/) or RedHat GFS formerly Sistina GFS (http://www.lustre.org/) which provide native fibre channel access to storage from the compute cluster. Some customers are using commercial offerings from companies like IBRIX (http://www.ibrix.com/) or Panasas (http://www.panasas.com/) who leverage NFS or proprietary clients to provide compute cluster to storage connectivity. These commercial vendors all build their code on Linux and target the HPC space, they are unable to drive CIFS performance to where it needs to be to satisfy the HPC market. Will Microsoft support these third party clients? Will Microsoft develop their own HPC storage server? Does Microsoft not realize that storage I/O is a critical component of a HPC environment?

I guess the question I have is…. Is the HPC market interested in point-and-click ease of use or raw speed? Maybe it’s me but when I walk into a shop filled with computational physicists I assume they enjoy a good challenge and that raw speed and performance are probably more important than a nice GUI.

One would have thought Microsoft would have learned that Linux can compete in niche spaces, but then again they continually loose the web server wars but they keep on trying. According to Netcraft’s June 2006 Web server survey the Apache, and thus Linux web server market share was 61.25 percent. The web server market place is another area where customers are interested in compute power and cost and ease-of-use and GUI seem to take a back seat. It will be interesting to see how this turns out.

Very interested in your thoughts on this one.

-RJB