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Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

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Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#281

Post by acomjean »

tracker1 wrote: post #233
tclancy wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>entitled to change a municpal culture simply because you got older I get what you probably meant, but this is a really strong statement. Our town is struggling with spiraling property taxes and it is forcing long-term residents out. I really feel for older people who've had decades of a social circle, have people to help them with things they can no longer do, etc. You can't move somewhere else and replicate that.

Yeah... I hate property taxes as a concept. That you can lose your property due to simply living another year is kind of messed up. At least, it should be locked to value at purchase adding only inflation. My house (according to the city/county) is worth 3x what I bought it at 5 years ago... If it goes up this much again, taxes will likely reach close to the mortgage payment. It's simply not right. I'd be happy to mo…

The state I live in capped property tax increases (Massachusetts)

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_Massachusetts_Propositi...

It’s as very expensive state but the taxes are limited. And every time a community needs a school or some infrastructure it becomes an old (fixed income) vs young battle.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#282

Post by comte7092 »

bluGill wrote: post #106
comte7092 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in the era of remote work, businesses are attracted to places with strong (as in a well developed & highly skilled workforce) labor markets. Workers who have high career capital are mobile and can generally choose where they want to live. Nothing about this is unserious just because it doesn’t fit your worldview.

That depends. Factory work is often attracted to a dieing town in the middle of nowhere they can scoup up cheap labor that is just skilled enough. You can only get your factory so large doing this though, but there are towns of 5-10k people that fit the bill just fine for manufacturing cheap in the US.

Yes indeed, however that isn’t really an economic development model most would want to hold up as an ideal.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#283

Post by SllX »

jacobr1 wrote: post #274
SllX wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Correct, but municipal corporations are generally[1] legal monopolies on the land within their jurisdiction. San Francisco has no legal jurisdiction over what Daly City or San Mateo County does, let alone Atherton and vice versa. [1] Your State may vary.

Right, and how is that working out for regional transit in the Bay Area? Probably better than most other places in the US ... but as far from functional for most residents in the area. The standard seems to be creating some kind of cross-county or cross-municipal agency with either delegated to independent funding mechanisms. Different states explicitly support or allow this to varying degrees.

I could write a thousand books on problems I have with regional transit in the Bay Area, but that’s irrelevant to how it actually works from a policy perspective.

Each and every City in California is its own legal monopoly on land use, all of them, how it’s working out for them isn’t pertinent to whether or not that’s how it works. Don’t mistake my position for advocacy, it’s a relaying of facts. By and large, this is more or less how it works across the States, but that can vary since the States can basically do anything as far as how they organize local government so long as it falls within some kind of democratic principles and norms.

So effecting regional transit policy basically has three paths in the Bay Area: setup a special cross-county district government like BART, or get buy-in between the relevant jurisdictions you want to run a train through. If that’s a dozen cities and three counties, you’re going to need to talk to all of them. The third path is for the State to implement something directly, but in practice that’s subject to local politics as well, and the State Government per its own laws does not actually have carte blanche to do as it likes with the land over the wishes of local government.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#284

Post by notch898a »

Symbiote wrote: post #270
dougmwne wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I think you’ve got it. Poor competitors lose the competition. Sounds like you are better off somewhere else, especially if you want public transit.

It sounds like they have no option other than public transport until the 3 month wait for the DMV appointment is done.

Fun fact, in Arizona you can legally operate a motorized gas powered bicycle without license / registration. It's all the rage with alcoholics and people that didn't think out having a valid driver's license before they moved to a new state (because if they did, they wouldn't need an appointment and the new one could be issued on the spot 24/7). It's actually one of the few places you can walk into a (private contractor) and get a state license at 3am on a Sunday.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#285

Post by nhchris »

nobody9999 wrote: post #239
nhchris wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Systems" as in those countries' social and economical systems. I don't know exactly what about those systems kills birthrates, but they are doubtless to blame, as other countries, and even those same countries some time in the past, had higher birthrates. Those systems caused that change.

>"Systems" as in those countries' social and economical systems. I don't know exactly what about those systems kills birthrates, but they are doubtless to blame, as other countries, and even those same countries some time in the past, had higher birthrates. Those systems caused that change. I'd say that falling birthrates have much more to do with modern medicine (antibiotics and effective contraception anyone?) and…

Whether it's policy, technology, or medicine (I don't quite understand why medicine would reduce the metric we care about, number of surviving children) doesn't matter. There may be a solution a nation could take, but immigration enables it (or rather, its economy) to persist, without addressing the falling birth rates, at the price of slowly giving way to a new, immigrant population.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#286

Post by lolinder »

jacobr1 wrote: post #278
lolinder wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not making the second assumption at all, I explicitly disclaimed any opinion on the merits of particular stances on immigration in countries that are not my own: > I'm not writing this to take a stand on immigration in Europe or anywhere else, but it's important for us in the US to not project our own sensibilities into a completely different context. As for the first assumption, I'll grant you I was making that.…

> I think the existence of a nation state is less up for debate than the existence of a nation. That seems muddled. A nation-state is a state whose population are dominantly formed out of a single "nation." Generally the nation implies some kind ethnic or ancestral ties (and granted the definition can be fuzzy) - but if concept of a nation is in doubt ... then so in the concept of a nation state. They are necessarily…

To an extent you're right, but I think it's actually the existence of the nation state that proves the existence of the nation. A nation without a state is a fuzzier concept because there's no clearly delineated boundaries (neither ethnic nor geographical), but a nation with a state can prove its existence more readily.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#287

Post by 908B64B197 »

ashwagary wrote: post #265
908B64B197 wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most shortages seem to be due to economic sanctions and trade embargoes. Not really. Cuba is free to trade with any country that's not the USA (and is even free to trade with the USA except for certain entities or commodities). Decades of corruption, incompetence, brain drain and failed government made the local economy unable to compete.

>Not really. A country of 11m people loses an estimated $3+ billion per year from various UN condemned restrictions. Are you saying that causes no shortages? That's not a trivial sum of money (~$300 per capita).

~$300 per capita would be nothing in Switzerland ($92,434) or in America ($75,180). But it's a lot in Cuba ($9,500) simply because the government did mess up the economy so bad.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#288

Post by bumby »

tyoma wrote: post #277
bumby wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t that social upside be captured through means that don’t force people from their homes? It seems like the use of property tax as a major local finding mechanism has a lot of negative effects, from poor school performance to inflated housing costs.

Its called a tax lien. Basically, if you can’t pay your property taxes, you still get to stay in your home, but the unpaid taxes must be paid (with interest) before the home can sold or otherwise transferred (with some rare exceptions for like death of a spouse, etc.)

I was referring to something different.

Property taxes are the way local municipalities raise funds. Tax liens are just the same property tax. I’m suggesting there can be other funding mechanisms, from VAT to income or even automation taxes that raise that money without the same tradeoffs.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#289

Post by bumby »

ghaff wrote: post #249
bumby wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Couldn’t that social upside be captured through means that don’t force people from their homes? It seems like the use of property tax as a major local finding mechanism has a lot of negative effects, from poor school performance to inflated housing costs.

There's very little correlation between per student costs and performance. It's very common for urban schools to have very poor outcomes with very high costs per student compared to suburban towns with much lower costs and much better performance. The state where I live also equalizes educational funding to some degree with state funding.

Is your suggestion property taxes could go to zero without an impact on schools?

Regardless, it’s besides the point. The point is there are different potential mechanisms for raising money that don’t have the same second and third order effects of property taxes.

Re: Governments should compete for residents, not businesses

#290

Post by nobody9999 »

nhchris wrote: post #285
nobody9999 wrote: post #239

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>"Systems" as in those countries' social and economical systems. I don't know exactly what about those systems kills birthrates, but they are doubtless to blame, as other countries, and even those same countries some time in the past, had higher birthrates. Those systems caused that change. I'd say that falling birthrates have much more to do with modern medicine (antibiotics and effective contraception anyone?) and…

Whether it's policy, technology, or medicine (I don't quite understand why medicine would reduce the metric we care about, number of surviving children) doesn't matter. There may be a solution a nation could take, but immigration enables it (or rather, its economy) to persist, without addressing the falling birth rates, at the price of slowly giving way to a new, immigrant population.

>at the price of slowly giving way to a new, immigrant population.

What's wrong with immigrants? My father was an immigrant. My mother's parents were immigrants. Babies are "immigrants" from someone's womb.

I'd note that all humans are immigrants to every place except Africa.

Further, I'd ask why you care where the person (or their parents) who installs the side view mirror on your car at the factory comes from? What practical difference does that make in your life?

Well, except for being able to get decent Pho[0], quality bagels[1], pizza[2], pasta[3] and all manner of other stuff that immigrants brought/bring to this country. Making our culture richer and more interesting.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pho

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bagel

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pizza

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pasta#History

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