4 ms·
It's only perverse and pointlessly burning money if you exclusively look at it from an economics perspective, but most countries have some sort of highly politi
by avar 8y ago
It's only perverse and pointlessly burning money if you exclusively look at it from an economics perspective, but most countries have some sort of highly politicized redistribution mechanism, so it's also a sociological and political question.
I.e. you can look at it like an accountant and consider it a 3¢ loss for every $1, or you could consider that perhaps a system like this increases societal goodwill towards redistributing money to poorer parts of Japan.
If it wasn't for that goodwill would you have $1 to work with in the first place? Or would political opposition to the redistribution already have cut that down to 90¢?
- gwern 8y agoI struggle to see what beneficial social effects there are from most people cynically ticking a box on a website to get half back as a gift card they immediately sell for 97% face value. The original intent of the tax program in compensating rural areas, yes; what it has morphed into, no.
- thaumasiotes 8y agoWell... > Widespread gaming or no, the system pretty much works according to the internal aims. Cities get a list of their internal diaspora, and do make considerably more effort to stay in touch with them than they did previously. (This includes lovely holiday cards and sometimes even I-can’t-believe-they’re-not-alumni-magazines.) You really do get plums from childhood in your mail from your hometown (if you don’t optimize for cash equivalents). Cities with declining local tax bases really do get enough money to do material projects with. Tokyo takes a hit to revenue but can afford it.
- int_19h 8y agoThe claim isn't that it doesn't work, but that the overhead is substantial, and those same goals could be reached with far less. I think it's self-evident from the description of the scheme - you could come up with a much more straightforward tax-and-redistribute scheme with less overhead.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- thaumasiotes 8y agoBut the overhead, as noted in the OP, is about 3% of the money transfer. That's low. You could say that hometown marketing and alumni magazines are "overhead", but you can't say that at the same time you're listing them as a beneficial effect of the program.
- int_19h 8y agoThat's the overhead of cashing the gift cards only. And those other things are not overhead if and only if the person actually derives value from "hometown services". If all they do is send money there to get a gift card back and cash it, then all the bureaucracy in that town that handles gift cards is also overhead.