21 ms·

I agree with you that such a strategy is not optimal but it is not quite how you describe it to be. In the mind of the farmer: * $150,000 tractor: something t

• gonzoflip 9y ago
  I think one of the issues is the farmers are conflating their incorporated farm's assets with their own.
• DannyB2 9y ago
  I wonder how they see taxes as thrown away? Yes, government is inefficient. And corrupt. But you do need roads. And bridges. And law enforcement. And even military protection, even if it seems far away and remote from your farm.
  • clay_to_n 9y ago
    But those things were all there back when this hypothetical farmer wasn't making any money. Tragedy of the commons, perhaps.
  • Cuuugi 9y ago
    One common feeling (i am from a farming community in Canada) is that tax revenue tends to get siphoned to urban areas. Politicians focus on bigger voting blocks, while rural communities (in their mind) pay for those promises.
    • scarmig 9y ago
      I'm sure that is a common feeling. And it probably varies from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. But in the USA, just as coastal areas subsidize inland areas, typically urban areas within a state subsidize the rural areas. Definitely true of California counties, and I'd be very surprised if this wasn't true of any particular state.
      • nitrogen 9y ago
        This gets brought up a lot on Hacker News as if it's a bad thing. One, I doubt it's as universally true as people think (I'd wager that in Utah, say, an equal chunk of taxes comes from suburban as urban areas), and two, people who can't afford the cities need places to live and those who can need places to vacation and buy food.
        • JBlue42 9y ago
          I don't see them presenting it in a negative, just a fact, and one not understood in rural areas. If you believe in wealth distribution, then richer coastal or urban areas should help out their brethren in the rural areas and spread the money around. It's when those rural brethren then attack the better off coastal / urban folks as stealing their money that things become problematic.
          • grasshopperpurp 9y ago
            Don't forget that red (more rural) states also receive political welfare in the form of the electoral college, so their misguided views carry more weight.
            • JBlue42 9y ago
              Good point. And then complain about being the neglected or down-trodden ones.
        • patmcc 9y ago
          I don't think subsidizing rural living a bad thing, but I do think rural people thinking "I don't get anything from the government, why should I pay taxes" is a bad thing.
        • kazagistar 9y ago
          Its not a bad thing. But it is quite annoying that the places who benefit the most from taxes keep trying to abolish them out of a lack of understanding, and also get an oversized influence in terms of voting value to do so.
    • sbarre 9y ago
      What's the feeling about the other side of that, which is industry-specific subsidies? While not on the same level as the US, Canada still provides significant farm subsidies, which comes from.. tax revenue!
    • noxToken 9y ago
      Depends on the locale, but sometimes just talking to the city works. If you're in a rural area of a smaller town, the mayor or council may not have reason to go to the rural areas. That can seem like they're getting purposefully neglected. The reality is that they may not know of the giant pothole on County Road 18 or the rampant littering in certain areas. It may not always work, but informing the local government of issues might get you what you want. After all, you are the constituent that gets those people into office. Let them help you.
    • jacobolus 9y ago
      Rural areas usually get more per capita. It's just that density makes services of all sorts easier and more efficient to provide.
  • tdeck 9y ago
    Not to mention $20 billion a year in farm subsidies.
    • cat199 9y ago
      only if you accept them. many farmers dont. also: these are not distributed evenly (see also agribusiness)
  • doomcaster1 9y ago
    Many rural areas in the US are heavily neglected; There are roads that haven't seen any upkeep in a decade and have police response times that are over an hour long. A lot of farmers feel that they pay into the system but get only a minuscule fraction back.
    • jacobolus 9y ago
      Rural areas in the US are heavily subsidized by urban areas (which is not inherently bad, but the perception that money flows the other way is a big political problem), especially when it comes to social services such as healthcare, disability payments, welfare, etc., but also if you just look at basic infrastructure like roads, sometimes disguised as regulatory requirements that private infrastructure providers maintain some baseline service everywhere. The issue is that providing high levels of service to sparsely populated places is very expensive. Of course many states are also doing a poor job of basic infrastructure maintenance statewide, but that's a different problem.
      • JBlue42 9y ago
        Yes, a lot of this can be mismanagement at a state level. If you don't like what you're getting on a state or federal level, vote, campaign, cause a ruckus, etc.
      • walshemj 9y ago
        Which is why you get the Lega Nord in Italy and the Catalan nationalists who object to subsidising the poorer southern parts of there counties.
    • CydeWeys 9y ago
      This has everything to do with the fundamental physical fact that it's hard to provide services at very low population densities. I live in a city that has low single digit emergency response times. In order to get that out in rural farmland you would need to collocate a police and fire station with every single dwelling. Not gonna happen.
      • 9y ago
  • yock 9y ago
    Aside from military protection, that is a list of things largely irrelevant to people who live in rural areas. It's money to be confiscated from them and used to prop up societies to which they have little to no connection.
    • CydeWeys 9y ago
      Those societies are their customers. It's where they're making all their money. Only off-the-grid homesteaders can make any credible claim to having no connection to society at large, but if they get sick, they better be honest with themselves and just die at home instead of going to get healthcare from a system they elected not to contribute to.
      • yock 9y ago
        Why should they be taxed for the benefit of their customers? Aren't their customers paying them?
        • CydeWeys 9y ago
          Modern society works by having everyone contribute for the greater good. One of the principal mechanisms by which this occurs is taxation and spending on government services. You go really far down the civilizational chain if you remove these mechanisms. Almost all the way down to primitivism.
          • yock 9y ago
            > Modern society works by having everyone contribute for the greater good. Whose definition of "good" are we using? Clearly not mine, as my definition of "good" demands consent.
            • CydeWeys 9y ago
              Stop using the Internet for starters, then. Billions of dollars of tax money went into developing it.
  • coldtea 9y ago
    >And even military protection, even if it seems far away and remote from your farm. Not in the US, which is mostly the offender, and no country will ever attempt to attack it (domestically), even if US kept just 1/10 the military resources it has, unless provoked purposefully for months on end into doing so (e.g. Pearl Harbor).
  • aeturnum 9y ago
    If nothing else, it's probably that the benefit you get from the government does not depend on your tax burden. So the money they pay to the government has "zero" utility to them. Spending that money somewhere else, even if the utility is very low, would seem better.
  • rdtsc 9y ago
    I think they just simply think "how can I minimize what I pay in taxes". They might think of police, roads, etc but that's after they finish thinking about themselves and their own accounting. So it means pretty much they never think of it.
  • moduspol 9y ago
    Did you see the thread here literally yesterday about taxes becoming higher for upper-middle class earners in blue states? Why didn't they get asked why they don't want roads? I feel like this comes up any time someone does something to avoid paying taxes, as if that necessarily means they want no government at all. They (the farmers) will see no appreciable difference whether they pay the tax or buy the tractor, so they choose the tractor. That doesn't mean they don't want roads.
    • addicted 9y ago
      Because upper middle class earners in blue states, and blue states in general, already pay out more in taxes than they get back. Rural areas don’t.
      • moduspol 9y ago
        Parent point: Why do farmers see taxes paid as providing no value to them? Don't they want roads? My point: Nobody wants to pay taxes they don't have to, and farmers are no different from upper-middle class blue state residents in that regard. It doesn't mean they literally don't want roads. That blue state residents already pay more in taxes than they get back is irrelevant. Nobody wants to pay more in taxes, and that doesn't mean nobody wants roads.
        • aisofteng 9y ago
          >Nobody wants to pay more in taxes Bullshit. I'm happy to pay more in taxes if it means that the society I'm a part of improves as a consequence. Whether money from a tax increase is well spent is another question, however.
  • kgwgk 9y ago
    In the same way that people buys online (or in the neighbouring state) and “forgets” to pay sales tax. It’s better to keep the money.
• nsxwolf 9y ago
  I know people who do the same thing with charitable donations. They donate to an organization because they "need the tax deduction". Despite that they'd have more money in their pocket if they just didn't make the donation in the first place.
  • dionidium 9y ago
    When most people bring up tax deductions in casual settings it's pretty obvious pretty quickly that they don't really know what a tax deduction is. And the odds quickly approach 1 if they use the phrase "write-off."
    • nsxwolf 9y ago
      It seems to be the common understanding among many that a "write off" of a business expense like a laptop or something means you get that thing for free. I wonder if this is the result of most people taking the standard deduction instead of itemizing at tax time.
      • pc86 9y ago
        I think it's the result of them probably getting paid a salary out of their business, and the laptop being purchased in December or January makes no difference to their actual take home pay (assuming they're not distributing 100% of profit). But that being said, a 15-30% discount because you used a different credit card to buy it is a pretty good incentive.
      • dionidium 9y ago
        Yes. I know lots of folks living in cheap Midwestern housing who think they're getting a great deal on the mortgage interest rate deduction, but who almost certainly have deductions at or below the standard amount. I'd venture that a lot of people are typing all this info into their tax software, which summarily throws it all away without them really understanding that that's what's happening. Regular folks just do not get this stuff and it's silly that we have such a complicated system.
  • 9y ago
• avs733 9y ago
  The problem with that is that its only a $150,000 tractor until you drive it off the lot. I would be if the day after you bought it you are lucky if it is a $120,000 tractor. Averseness to government is taxation is so engrained in some country it is almost genetic...and it leads to utterly bad thinking by individuals.
  • rndmize 9y ago
    I suspect this isn't only averseness to taxation. Loss aversion is a well known human behavior, and when you have to write out a huge check to the government at the end of the year instead of having it taken out of your paycheck automatically, I could def see this kicking in pretty strongly.
  • pm90 9y ago
    Maybe we are not doing a good enough job of promoting civic duty, including payment of taxes? After all those taxes are used mostly for Medicare, Medicaid and the Military, all of which seem like worthy causes to pay for right? Not including State and Local taxes used for more immediate local functions, of course.
    • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
      >all of which seem like worthy causes to pay for right Just because something is worth doing does not mean you can throw money at it with no regard to efficiency.
    • cat199 9y ago
      > Maybe we are not doing a good enough job of promoting civic duty, including payment of taxes? If you're a strict old-school limited govt jeffersonian type, as many farmers are, fighting income taxes and avoiding paying into federally mandated systems is your civic duty.. not saying I agree with either side - but pointing out that notions of 'civic duty' are not so cut-and-dried
    • DennisP 9y ago
      Personally I'm fine with Medicare and Medicaid but what I'm not so convinced is worthy is an endless series of overseas wars, 4000 U.S. bases, 800 more bases in 80 countries, $1.4 trillion for F-35s of controversial effectiveness, another trillion for nuclear weapon modernization, and several more trillion that's unaccounted for because the Pentagon has never been audited. http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-is-defense-waste-taboo-in-the-tax-debate/ http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/why-is-defen... https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-probably-has-more-foreign-military-bases-than-any-other-people-nation-or-empire-in-history/ https://www.thenation.com/article/the-united-states-probably... https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentagon-never-audited-astonishing-military-spending https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/20/pentag...
• mikestew 9y ago
  money that I will never see again See also: depreciation on a $150K tractor I didn’t need.
  • CydeWeys 9y ago
    Depreciation on a $150K tractor you don't need amounts to -$150K, for what it's worth ;) It's just some amount of that every year (with the biggest hit being in the same year, same for buying a new car).
    • mikestew 9y ago
      Dude, you’re deconstructing a clever rejoinder on the topic of paying taxes. Ease up, I know how depreciation works. :-)
      • CydeWeys 9y ago
        I literally put a smiley in my reply to indicate tone, and yet you still somehow miscontrued it. Take your own advice :D
    • imtringued 9y ago
      You can still sell it.