There's an equivalent issue with city with large suburbs: companies in the city core pay a lot of local taxes that stays within the city, but living in the city is too expensive for 80% of the employees who live in the suburbs, which cannot benefit from local taxes paid by the big companies.
Japan's Hometown Tax
151–160 of 260 posts
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just one nitpick: the anti-democratic nature of the Senate (and the Electoral college, while we're at it) is very much seen as a problem by a lot of people living outside the sparsely populated rural states; For those of us living in urban areas, we're simply vastly underrepresented in federal government, and quite a few of us don't like it.
So you want to reduce the representation from the "fly-over states" so that all elections and all federal government decisions are decided by California and New York? That's not going to work very well, and would lead to the secession of about 90% of the states, and then you'd find out that your urban paradises depend absolutely on the rest of the country to exist. The founding fathers set up a pretty good system, an…
Just as a point of fact, the 100 largest cities in the US only represent about 20% of the total population. So no it wouldn’t just be big cities deciding everything.
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy, mostly to be squandered by corruption, clientelism, and organized crime. Heh, funny that richer parts of the EU say this about Italy itself.
Italy is a net contributor to the EU.
Many EU countries are...
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#154Earlier quoted context omitted.
> On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy, mostly to be squandered by corruption, clientelism, and organized crime. Heh, funny that richer parts of the EU say this about Italy itself.
Italy generally pays ~3-4 billion euros more into the EU budget than it receives from the EU. Ireland is much more of a mooch than Italy https://english.eu.dk/en/faq/net-contribution
Ireland is, as of 2016, a net contributor to the EU; this year the country is expecting to contribute 2.7bn€
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/ireland-s-contri...
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#155Earlier quoted context omitted.
Actually, according to the original plan, the House of Representatives should have grown so that each member represents a roughly equal number of constituents (excepting very small population states which still get one). At some point it was capped at 435 (I presume for space reasons) and the disparity of representation has increased since. So it seems that more power has been transferred to rural states than the fou…
The rural states' power in federal government is largely imaginary. In many elections, they have gone overwhelmingly for the losing candidate. If you look at a county by county map of the last election and then realize that the winner of the election actually lost the popular vote even after taking something like 85% of the counties in the US and you can still make the argument that the population centers should have…
That’s because out of the five times that the electoral college winner was not the popular winner, four times it was a Republican who won and the fifth time the Republicans didn’t exist yet (but the winner was the more conservative candidate).
And also, the majority of this country votes democrat in every election since 2000, but because of gerrymandering the house retains a Republican majority. If the house matched the breakdown of national popular votes for house reps, it would be significantly Democrat.
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#156Earlier quoted context omitted.
awesome! I took it, did pretty well: $2.61T spending decreases $3.94T increased revenue $2.85T deficit (i.e. tackle via economic growth aka increased revenue due to increased GDP) interesting to see how impactful a public health plan is ($158B) and raising the limit on social security income ($633B) and 2% VAT ($885B).
Yeah, adding a public option (a.k.a. Medicare for all) actually decreases the budget deficit. So why aren't we doing this? If Social Security is an entitlement program like any other, why is there any max income? Why is it only on "earned" income?
Because that would essentially kill a lot of private healthcare jobs and industries. No administration* or congress wants to be the one to axe, say, Kaiser. It'd be a PR disaster.
* Theoretical Sanders administration aside.
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#157Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#158[deleted]
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
Few states would institute slavery or really anything else remotely so monstrous if they were released from the Union tomorrow.
Of course, but there’s plenty of milder acts that many of them would enact. How many would bring back poll tests (presumably with some suitable grandfather clause), reinstitute segregation, recriminalize homosexuality, recriminalize interracial marriage, etc.?
I think you're over-estimating how much the federal government actively does to protect people's rights.
The federal government doesn't seem concerned that the state I live in requires you to pay about $200 and get the local chief of police to sign off before you can exercise a particular right in any capacity whatsoever.
Civil asset forfeiture is still a thing in many states.
Some state could adopt an obviously unconstitutional hate speech law tomorrow and it would take years before it's struck down and even then there'd be no recourse for those already punished under it. If the state continued to enforce the law then what would happen? After another year or three of hearings and court whatnot they'd get cut off from some funding or something.
The best you can hope for when your state is violating your rights is a supreme court ruling that makes your state go "aw shucks boys, guess we can't do that anymore" and that your state actually does stop doing it. I don't see a weaker federal government changing that status quo.
The danger of putting all your eggs in the federal basket is that when something dumb happens on that level it affects us all (e.g. the net neutrality debacle). At least with the states the stupidity has to happen on it's own in each state.
Re: Japan's Hometown Tax
#160The American system (& Japanese?) where schools are mostly funded by local taxes is a root cause of inequality, poverty and unfairness in the USA. Schools in Europe and Australia are funded by centralized government more evenly so doesn't have this problem and dont need this donate to a region system the article talks about. I think its much fairer.
This is not correct. Half of all K-12 funding comes from state and federal sources, which are disproportionately directed to schools in lower income districts. There was a WaPo article a few years ago showing that, if all funding sources are accounted for, most states show little difference between funding for rich and poor districts, and many show poor districts are better funded.
"half" means half funded by local, which furthers the original point.