Word: base
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...taxes, beyond the reach of more and more families. In the 1990s the state adopted a "homestead" measure which, when homeowners become eligible for it, caps their assessed property-value increases at 3% a year (part-time residents don't qualify). But when houses are sold, a far higher base assessment usually applies, creating absurd situations in which neighbors with similar properties pay wildly disparate taxes. And during the boom, in expensive markets like South Florida, homeowners who had yet to qualify for the cap often saw their property levies double in just a few years - a big reason half...
...what would be reimbursed under a new fee-for-quality structure, the same interest-group politics that have distorted and ultimately paralyzed the current system could dominate the new system; that's why Obama has proposed to depoliticize those decisions through an independent agency similar to the military-base-closing commission. Still, changing the dysfunctional payment system while safeguarding patient rights (and perhaps protecting doctors who practice evidence-based medicine from frivolous malpractice suits) would be easier than expanding coverage to the uninsured, transforming the insurance market and figuring out how to pay for it all during a crippling recession...
...Jackson's fan base in Japan started to grow after the Jackson Five's first tour here in 1973. Sales of "Off the Wall" (1979) reached 500,000, followed by 2.5 million copies sold of "Thriller", which sold an estimated 105 million copies worldwide. The star did a scooter commercial for Suzuki Motors in 1982 - the year "Thriller" came out - in which he says "Love is my message" and winks. (See TIME's 1984 cover on Michael Jackson...
...Three quarters of the HR leaders who responded to the Watson Wyatt survey expect their business to improve by the end of this year. There's some good news on the salary front, too. A new survey from Mercer, a global HR consulting firm, found that average base salary has actually risen over the past year by an average of 3%. Mercer's compensation survey covered about a million workers at some 1,000 firms across various industries. Among HR administrators at firms that have frozen salaries, 69% expect such freezes to end over the next 12 months...
...Sanford, in fact, has always been more effective as a conservative icon than as a conservative governor, a figure popular with the Republican Party's red-meat base but in chronic conflict with South Carolina's GOP-controlled legislature. When TIME ranked him in 2005 as one of the nation's worst state chief executives, it was because his fiscal hard-liner theatrics (carrying piglets under each arm to the door of the state legislature to protest pork-barrel spending) rarely yielded real results. In too many instances, his conservative principles thwarted the economic development of a poor Southern state...