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I live in southern Idaho and we have similar problems with poverty in rural areas due to declining timber, grazing and mining industries. Those problems are du

I live in southern Idaho and we have similar problems with poverty in rural areas due to declining timber, grazing and mining industries. Those problems are due to a hundred years of unsustainable mismanagement and were anticipated by environmentalists decades before they played out. There is a strong anti-tax sentiment here, especially in northern and southeastern Idaho, but I don't share it. The truth is that the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to the military, corporate welfare (tax breaks) and debt service. At the state level, the biggest costs are due to loss of taxes as incentives for corporations to relocate to certain cities, the loss of main street small business taxes that closed when Walmart/Amazon took over, and subsidies to factory farm conglomerates like Simplot (where your french fries come from). So a $6 tax to keep libraries open is a pittance. To me it represents a last desperate dismissal by the people of a government that has utterly failed them. Sadly all of the above causes stem from good ol' boys in Republican clothing, who made backroom deals to enrich themselves and their cronies while working folks got taken. But we keep voting for them so the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon. The saddest part of all is that due to the electoral college and overrepresentation of low-population states like mine in the US Senate, our short-term populist thinking has spread to the national stage. People don't generally change political parties, and unlike us fringe intellectuals frequenting HN, are hesitant to examine their own ignorance and learn from the past. For me there is little alternative but to spread the truth about what happened in us flyover states and wait for the youth to vote for a better future.

noobermin 8y ago
I know this people say that people in red states vote against their interests, but I think it misses some aspects. Red states tend to have onerous voter disenfranchisement which tends to target people of color but also poor whites as well who are also likely to not have IDs. Moreover, poor people have to work, and aren't as willing to lose time in the day and get fired in order to vote. It's similar to the discussion about 2016. Forever the media narrative has been poor whites voted for Trump, but the exit polls show that his voter base skewed towards higher pay than did Clinton's, and that doesn't even count the myriad of people who never vote because they don't see the exercise as having a positive benefit for them. May be the media and politicians in red states hypes taxes etc., but polls show a majority of people in the US support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations[0]. So, I've never really believed people in red states really that anti-tax in the majority. The ones who I've come across who are tend to be wealthy. [0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx
settrans 8y ago
What does this mean? > The truth is that the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to [...] corporate welfare (tax breaks)" That sounds like me saying that the majority of your salary comes from me not stealing it from you.
- zackmorris 8y ago
  You're correct that I mistyped "the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to the military, corporate welfare (tax breaks) and debt service". What I meant to say there is that the greatest mismanagement of our tax dollars happens with those things, so we would save more money through reforms there than by shutting down public works like libraries which are relatively inexpensive per capita. The taxation-is-theft phenomenon is relatively new. During my first government class sometime in the early 90s socialism, progressivism, populism and libertarianism were low single digit percentage demographics in US politics. At that time, it was still considered patriotic to fund the UN/NATO, public schools, farmers, medical research, levies to build bridges etc etc etc. We fought tooth and nail to prevent sales tax from going from 5 to 6%, but only fringe groups talked about reducing social security withholding. Somehow that's all changed, correlated with the decline of US infrastructure and the rise of trade deficits and the national debt. Personally I think that was all orchestrated starting from the Reagan era, because if those monies don't go back to the public then some rich guy gets them. We've swung from democratic institutions to republican institutions and either extreme has its dangers. I'd recommend the guns vs butter argument if you want an interesting Wikipedia crawl. The USSR fell due to overspending on the military and authoritarian agencies instead of investing in its people and economic productivity. The same thing could easily happen to us if we succumb to late stage capitalism when it eats itself through policies like austerity that have no mathematical basis (that are dogma).
  - dragonwriter 8y ago
    > During my first government class sometime in the early 90s socialism, progressivism, populism and libertarianism were low single digit demographics in US politics. No, they weren't all, though “progressivism” as a label wasn't current (what it now refers to was mostly referred to as “liberalism” in the 1990s). But it's true that the early 1990s was the height of the neoliberal consensus when there was a historically narrow range of ideas within mainstream political thought on core issues outside of the partisan division on culture war issues. But that was an exception, not the norm.

noobermin 8y ago

I know this people say that people in red states vote against their interests, but I think it misses some aspects. Red states tend to have onerous voter disenfranchisement which tends to target people of color but also poor whites as well who are also likely to not have IDs. Moreover, poor people have to work, and aren't as willing to lose time in the day and get fired in order to vote. It's similar to the discussion about 2016. Forever the media narrative has been poor whites voted for Trump, but the exit polls show that his voter base skewed towards higher pay than did Clinton's, and that doesn't even count the myriad of people who never vote because they don't see the exercise as having a positive benefit for them. May be the media and politicians in red states hypes taxes etc., but polls show a majority of people in the US support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations[0]. So, I've never really believed people in red states really that anti-tax in the majority. The ones who I've come across who are tend to be wealthy. [0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx

settrans 8y ago

What does this mean? > The truth is that the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to [...] corporate welfare (tax breaks)" That sounds like me saying that the majority of your salary comes from me not stealing it from you.

zackmorris 8y ago
You're correct that I mistyped "the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to the military, corporate welfare (tax breaks) and debt service". What I meant to say there is that the greatest mismanagement of our tax dollars happens with those things, so we would save more money through reforms there than by shutting down public works like libraries which are relatively inexpensive per capita. The taxation-is-theft phenomenon is relatively new. During my first government class sometime in the early 90s socialism, progressivism, populism and libertarianism were low single digit percentage demographics in US politics. At that time, it was still considered patriotic to fund the UN/NATO, public schools, farmers, medical research, levies to build bridges etc etc etc. We fought tooth and nail to prevent sales tax from going from 5 to 6%, but only fringe groups talked about reducing social security withholding. Somehow that's all changed, correlated with the decline of US infrastructure and the rise of trade deficits and the national debt. Personally I think that was all orchestrated starting from the Reagan era, because if those monies don't go back to the public then some rich guy gets them. We've swung from democratic institutions to republican institutions and either extreme has its dangers. I'd recommend the guns vs butter argument if you want an interesting Wikipedia crawl. The USSR fell due to overspending on the military and authoritarian agencies instead of investing in its people and economic productivity. The same thing could easily happen to us if we succumb to late stage capitalism when it eats itself through policies like austerity that have no mathematical basis (that are dogma).
- dragonwriter 8y ago
  > During my first government class sometime in the early 90s socialism, progressivism, populism and libertarianism were low single digit demographics in US politics. No, they weren't all, though “progressivism” as a label wasn't current (what it now refers to was mostly referred to as “liberalism” in the 1990s). But it's true that the early 1990s was the height of the neoliberal consensus when there was a historically narrow range of ideas within mainstream political thought on core issues outside of the partisan division on culture war issues. But that was an exception, not the norm.