This might go in the category of I don’t want to give it attention that it doesn’t deserve, but an article titled Controlling the Environmental Costs of Obesity sounds, from the abstract, like it’s a self-parody incorporating of all the pigovian tax ideas floating around out there these days.  Read the abstract and see if you don’t agree.

I said recently that I might have to write another newsletter about homeowners’ association foreclosures, that is, what associations can do when obligations owed to them by homeowners go  unpaid.  After reading what was written in the newspaper item that I linked, I decided now would be a good time to revisit the subject.  You can read about it in my Real Estate Law Update by going to deconcinimcdonald.com and clicking on the publications link.  
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​The FAQs that the IRS posts on its web site are a trap.  If you file a tax return that relies on what the IRS’ FAQs say, the IRS can decide after the fact that it was wrong and therefore you filed an incorrect tax return.  
I’m not making this up.  
The Taxpayer Advocate thinks that situation is not fair.  We’ll see if the IRS, or Congress, does anything about it.
Via TaxProf Blog.

If you don’t follow the news on driverless cars like I do, you may not have heard about, or you may have forgotten about, a fatal auto accident in Florida last year involving a Tesla vehicle that was supposedly on “auto pilot.”  A report on that accident has been released that essentially says that the vehicle wasn’t on “auto-pilot” and was in fact being grossly misused by its driver.  The Antiplanner lays out the details, and along the way gives a good overview of what the different levels of autonomous cars can do.  

Some genius writing in a major newspaper thinks that congressional efforts to cut down on the abuse of the earned income tax credit (EITC) will harm poor recipients and reduce tax collections.  I’m not going to dignify it with a direct link, but I will link to the blog post about it that I saw.  
Something has to be done to cut down on the rampant filing of fraudulent tax returns using stolen identities in order to claim the EITC.  If you have a better idea than what has been proposed so far, let’s hear it.

It turns out that Arctic Cactus won’t be moving that saguaro to Seattle.  Instead they will be moving it to the Arizona-Sonora Desert Museum.  
That’s ok.  I’m sure they’ll do the job right no matter the destination.  

I might have to write another newsletter about homeowners’ association foreclosures.  A story that was posted yesterday on AZCentral.com indicates that homeowners losing their homes due to foreclosures by associations is a big problem, but I’m skeptical.  I haven’t been aware of a large number of foreclosures for failure to pay association assessments, but there are a lot more planned communities in the Phoenix area than there are in the Tucson area, so maybe it’s more of a problem there.  And while I do think that the late charges tacked on by associations when assessment payments are in arrears are often excessive, I don’t think that the lawyers who are handling the foreclosures are routinely charging exorbitant fees, contrary to what the linked article suggests.  
The article doesn’t mention that the law on what associations can charge, and under what circumstances they can foreclose for nonpayment of assessments, has been changed substantially to the benefit of homeowners in the last several years.  In other words, associations can’t just charge whatever they feel like, and foreclose the moment a homeowner falls behind in paying assessments.  Associations generally don’t want to take someone’s house, just like banks generally would rather have you make your mortgage payments than they would take your house.

Or if you just need one moved across Tucson, Arctic Cactus can do it, as a story in today’s Daily Star suggests.  Unfortunately the only place in that story where you’ll actually see any reference to the company doing the moving is in the photo of the truck hauling the cactus.  The name of Arctic Cactus is on the door of the truck.  
I offer no comment on the idea of taking a saguaro to Seattle.  Arctic Cactus is just doing a job they were hired to do.  I’m sure it wasn’t their idea.  

I wrote last week about the statement by New York City Mayor DeBlasio that he “would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be.”  The Antiplanner makes the argument, as he usually does, that the more meddling with the free market government does, the less affordable housing becomes.

I didn’t find the recent comments by Mayor DeBlasio of New York City myself, and I’m not going to go as far in interpreting them as the commentators whose posts alerted me to their existence.  I’m just going to say that they reflect an approach to land use planning that may have its adherents, but I believe is pretty far out of the mainstream.  
The comments I’m talking about are in a New York Magazine interview, in his response to a question about income inequality.  He’s essentially saying that the rights of a property owner to use his or her property as he or she sees fit should be completely subordinate to land use decisions by the city government.  In his own words, he says he “would like to have the city government be able to determine which building goes where, how high it will be, who gets to live in it, what the rent will be.”  
He does acknowledge that the approach he favors is inconsistent with our system of private property rights.