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Japan's Hometown Tax

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Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#171

Post by barrow-rider »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #68
blattimwind wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tax redistribution inside nations or in nation unions (like the EU) is pretty much an investment. It generally generates more money than spent on it. E.g. Germany is the largest net contributor to the EU, but guess what would happen if Germany decided to stop putting out those few billions a year. Yeah, not so good for the economy (not just of Germany, pretty much everyone). Turns out, those few billions spurred trad…

> It's literally "one stick, alone, weak — many sticks, together, stronk". I can't wait for tax redistribution to be renamed "fascism". :D

For the uninitiated: Italian Fascism was so named as a reference to classical Roman Fasces, which was a bundle of sticks or rods wrapped around an axe that symbolized authority.

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#172

Post by paxy »

dorfsmay wrote: post #151

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.

The problem usually is that homeowners in the suburbs vote to keep their own property taxes extremely low, and then blame corporations when there isn't enough money to run things.

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#173

Post by ai_ia »

pgz wrote: post #2

I always found this system very interesting, since the citizen can decide how some of their tax money is spent (besides voting). 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.

On a side note, is there any system that exists where citizen can decide to a greater autonomy how there tax money is spent?

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#175

Post by karmelapple »

dorfsmay wrote: post #148
asmithmd1 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For US income taxes the only amount of your taxes that you can direct is $3 for the presidential election fund. Why not expand this and let you pick from a dozen or so categories?

So people educated with public funds but without kids will allocate 0$ to education, then complain that youths these days just hang in the street doing no good, and allocate more of their tax towards policing?

We could set minimum amounts to go to schools so that even if every single person in the country allocated $0 of their discretionary fund to public education, the public education system would still have the funds needed.

And the default, if someone doesn't choose any categories, would go to some proportion that Congress would decide. However, allowing even a "small" portion - which could still be billions of dollars - to be allocated directly by taxpayers would gather some very interesting data.

It would be very interesting to see which agencies would attract the most money, and what strategies they'd use to attract people to give their discretionary tax dollars to them.

Would people give more to the CDC, NIH, NASA, the Dept of Housing, Dept of Transportation, Dept of Homeland Security, ... ? We could start to get a direct temperature of what is ailing people the most and what they want their money to fund.

Government agencies could even "advertise," or at least try to get positive news articles that really highlight what they're accomplishing, to spread the word about the good they're doing. It could engage people more in exactly how their money is being spent, and care further about government, because they have at least a small hand in directly funding different departments.

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#176

Post by googlryas »

delinka wrote: post #102
coldtea wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the subtle racism towards southern italians...

Are Souther Italians their own race?

Not technically but if you had 1000 naked northern and southern Italians in a room you could probably achieve an 85+% success rate in segmenting them into their respective class. Northern Italians generally look much more like Germans or Swiss - on average taller, lighter skin, lighter eye color, whereas southern Italians are much swarthier and slightly shorter, coming from many years of arab, greek, and north african control.

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#177

Post by _0nac »

I see a lot of moaning about inefficiency here, but here's a point of comparison. During the Bubble years in the late eighties, when many rural areas were feeling left out, there was a scheme to give basically every municipality in Japan a large lump sum of money ($10m?), no strings attached, except that it had to be used for building something new.

This, as you might guess, was an incredible waste of money. Many podunk towns built flashy "multi-purpose halls" (多目的ホール) perfect for all those symphony orchestras just dying to perform in the middle of nowhere. More memorably, the town of Utazu, Kagawa purchased a solid gold toilet...!

http://english.cri.cn/6909/2010/09/09/1901s593626.htm

https://www.emporis.com/buildings/191596/gold-tower-utazu-ja...

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#178

Post by mikeash »

dsfyu404ed wrote: post #159
mikeash wrote: post #139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 unco…

I think you’re underestimating just how useful those weak protections still are. The increase in freedoms over the past ~50 years has been gigantic, and a huge part of that came from federal intervention. The state I live in would almost certainly still have segregation and still outlaw my marriage, for example. Consider all the crazy shit that certain states have started doing since the Supreme Court struck down the preapproval provisions of the Voting Rights Act.

It’s far from perfect. States still try to violate civil rights and it still takes a long time to fix that, if ever. The feds sometimes push more restrictions against the wishes of states that want more freedom, like with marijuana. But overall, based on history, I think that giving the states more freedom would be a huge step backwards.

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#179

Post by sudosteph »

tvanantwerp wrote: post #31
rayiner wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Equalizing the funding doesn't help much if you're still stuck going to school based on where you live. If all the rich kids go to one school and all the poor kids go to another, it's entirely predictable that you'll have vastly different outcomes. I once conversed with a friend in college who had grown up upper-middle class and attended very nice public schooling. She told me that poor schools would be better if the…

This is why I'm still a proponent of busing, but doing it based on general socioeconomic diversity rather than just race. I know there are a lot of inefficiencies with bussing and in some communities (Boston) the backlash was awful, but the long-term effects in many communities did show it actually worked in many ways (Charlotte NC - see this article showing how much worse it got after bussing stopped: http://prospect.org/article/battle-royal-over-segregation-qu...)

The problem with having "good" and "bad" school districts within a metro area is that you aren't just creating inequal and un-diverse educational facilities, you're contributing to the stratification of the neighborhoods themselves. It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy that people who can't afford to live in a nice school district will end up moving to a poorer one with fewer high-quality education options.

Re: Japan's Hometown Tax

#180

Post by TheCoelacanth »

eiaoa wrote: post #169
dragonwriter wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It really depends on how you conceptualize it: there isn't much of an issue if you think of the Senate as a body that represents states as sovereign political entities not population. That doesn't remove the problen, it just clarifies that it is a fundamental design problem and not a problem with an implementation details. > If the Senate is to be reorganized to be proportional to population That's a bad solution.…

> Small states are slightly overrepresented in the House, radically overrepresented in the Senate and in judging electoral votes, and overrepresented at a level between those two in the Electoral College. It's only over-representation if representation must only be proportional to population. > There's no real compromise or two-sided balance there. There is a compromise and a two-sided balance: in the House, big stat…

> It's only over-representation if representation must only be proportional to population.

Right, it's only over-representation if you believe that all men are created equal.

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