7 ms·

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

• 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.
      • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
        The city slickers don't want to cut checks to a bunch of hicks and the rednecks don't want to give their money to the city slickers and neither wants the other telling them what to do but our tax system ensures that they can't stay out of each other's business.
        • addicted 9y ago
          Except the “city slickers” have been cutting checks to the “hicks and rednecks” for decades, and furthermore, the “hicks and rednecks” vote against this and rail on the “city slickers”for doing so, while simultaneously falsely believing they cut chekcks to the “city slickers” and also complaining about any time their checks from the “city slickers”are reduced (try campaigning in Iowa on a platform of reducing farm subsidies).
          • dsfyu404ed 9y ago
            And the counterpoint to that is that the city slickers do whatever they want when it comes to running the state. NY-SAFE is a good recent example of the city doing one thing despite the objection (as opposed to apathy) of everywhere else.
      • scarmig 9y ago
        I was responding to a comment that stated that rural folks believe that they subsidize the cities by pointing out that belief was contrary to the reality (at least in the States; I don't know much about Canada's rural vs urban divisions, but I'd guess the dynamics there are similar). As far as what I prefer: I have no issue subsidizing rural areas, within reason. I support everyone having access to basic infrastructure, healthcare, and education, regardless of where they live. Beyond that, there's no particular reason for government to provide incentives to live in one or the other; let the market sort that out.
  • 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.