Philadelphia's proposed $20 million/year of gentrification property tax relief fails to target the most deserving low-income residents and may even increase the regressiveness of the local tax system.

You can see my early version of Justice Map.

This is for demonstrating what the layers look like, getting feedback on those, and not anything close to what it will look like when it is finished.

It is a set of open map layers based on the 2010 Census and 2011 American Community Survey for race and income. I put census tracts up online, but I plan to add counties (for both) and block groups and blocks (for race) in the near future.

Mayor Nutter wants to privatize Philadelphia Gas Works - the city's gas utility. Probably not because he cares about public/private ownership, but he is out for the quick buck for civic revenue.

Now there are some fairly obvious reasons to oppose this as it is an attack on labor, the public sector, and may lead to significant increases in gas prices.

However what most progressive people aren't considering is that the city shouldn't be in the business of providing gas. We shouldn't be profiting from environmental destruction - we should be transitioning to a gas-free future.

Here is a brainstorm of ambitious ideas for saving the Philadelphia public schools. As this is a brainstorm some of the ideas are very stupid (see the toxic dumps), and many of them wouldn't stand up in our unjust courts -- but the goal is to provoke better ideas.

1. Protest in Lower Merion Township or another school district that spends 80-100% more per student than Philadelphia.

2. Nutter and city council should publicly support a drive to unionize the charter schools.

3. Refuse every request by charter schools for zoning variances.

I'm working on a project to create open map layers for the United States for race and income at a high resolution. I want to create a system that encourages people who have limited to zero GIS (Geographical Information Systems) experience to create maps for their community!

So I've been messing around with TileMill, PostGIS, and the Census data. TileMill is an amazing program that makes it easy to make a map. They've got nice styling, great support, and you can publish it online for free (if you have limited traffic).

This is a map of household income in the US by census tract. There are 70,000 census tracts in the US.

Legend: red is below average income, and blue is above. I divided the data into ten quartiles.

I think it is fairly inevitable that the United States and most other industrialized countries will implement carbon taxes within the next ten to twenty years.

A carbon tax can make wind, solar, geothermal, and energy efficiency even more competitive than they are now. It could transform our economy and, if done properly, stop climate change. It would reward today's green pioneers with money which would encourage them and impress their friends.

While a carbon tax is better than a cap and trade system, it has numerous short-comings.

I strongly recommend following the #OccupyGezi Turkish protest movement on live stream (live video). Here are three sources:

Tim Pool
Global Revolution
Revolt Instanbul
Russia Today - great feed of Taksim Square

Policy Map is an interesting website. They have some maps that are widgets - so you can copy and paste the html into your website. For instance this is a map of unemployment in the US by county:

The Crosstown Coalition of Taxpayers has released a report finding that the Actual Valuation is a flawed initiative.

As a result of the efforts of the Coalition and the Controller's Office the city council has decided to audit the AVI for accuracy.

The findings of the Coalition's report are mostly similar to that of the Controller's office - which isn't surprising as they used the same data.

There are currently two very different views regarding what is going on with the Philadelphia property tax reform Actual Value Initiative (AVI). At stake is the largest tax reform in recent Philadelphia history and hundreds of millions of dollars.

The Office of Property Assessment and local real-estate expert Kevin Gillen argue that the new assessments are more accurate and more progressive than the old ones.

The Controller's Office argues that new assessments are less accurate and less progressive than the old ones.