26 ms·

Japan's Hometown Tax (2018)

267 points by Michelangelo11 3y ago

version_five 3y ago
Not sure I understand all the subtlety but as a Canadian (where we have about 3 big cities and the rest has no voice) I'd love to be able to divert my tax away from the city I live in and to my home town. If course we don't really pay income tax directly to the city, so it would be complicated and probably just make more bureaucracy.
- pc86 3y ago
  I say this as someone who grew up in a small rural area and now lives in a slightly-less-small suburban/rural mix (but not in Canada). All this does is overfund rural areas and underfund urban areas which are likely already underfunded - although my only experience is the US so maybe Canada is a little better about this. Rural areas do not "have no voice" - they have exactly the representative power of their population, the same as urban centers. I'm not sure what makes people in or from rural areas thinks that once people live close together their voice should count for less. How is it "right" or "fair" to move to an urban center, take advantage of urban amenities and services, take advantage of that higher salary, and siphon some of that tax money away to rural areas because of nostalgia?
  - ejstronge 3y ago
    Curiously, rural regions of the US have a fair amount of power due to how electoral seats are distributed. I'm not sure if this is also true in Canada, so it is possible that the GP's situation differs from your own experiences.
    - pc86 3y ago
      You're 100% right, the more rural your state the more power your state holds in Presidential elections, and indirectly in the Senate, but not much beyond that. I don't think there's a corollary in Canada but I could certainly be wrong.
    - CalRobert 3y ago
      This is about suburbs, not rural areas, but Canadian politics provides an interesting history in suburbanites wresting power from city dwellers. Among other concrete impacts it means more parking, shifting funds away from public transport (which is less useful to suburbanites), etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgamation_of_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgamation_of_Toronto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkO-DttA9ew&t=35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkO-DttA9ew&t=35s
    - mlinhares 3y ago
      They're also heavily subsidized to make them "work", a considerable piece of rural America would already be gone if there wasn't a large amount of government funds being diverted to keep it alive and we will spend even more as it becomes less and less desirable to live there.
      - subroutine 3y ago
        As soon as WFH became an option people flocked away from cities. NYC lost 200k people over two years; SF lost 60k. I would say there is a large population of city folk who desire to move to more rural areas.
        dfxm12 3y ago
        If you listen to the news, they're all moving to other cities, like Austin, TX, not to rural areas.
        ghaff 3y ago
        Yes. Other/smaller cities, college towns, etc. I'm sure some have taken the opportunity to move somewhere that looks more like rural--but I have to believe the lifestyle shift would be a bridge too far for most.
        mlinhares 3y ago
        They're moving to suburbs near big cities or cheap big cities in less populated states, not rural areas.
        ghaff 3y ago
        >suburbs near big cities It's not really true of the Bay Area--and it's at least complicated around Manhattan. But a lot of cities like Boston an hour or an hour and a bit drive in reverse commute, much less weekend, traffic can bring you to a lot cheaper housing. There are expensive suburbs too. However, it's pretty easy to find suburban or exurban towns that are accessible to Boston for an evening event that have relatively modest home prices. Not Midwest cheap but reasonable. (Of course there are very expensive towns as well.)
    - bryanlarsen 3y ago
      Nominally, it's also true in Canada. Due to lower populated rural ridings, one rural vote can be worth up to 4X an urban vote. But in current conditions, votes in rural Western Canadian ridings are basically worthless. They're ultra-safe Conservative seats, so they can be and are ignored. But it wasn't very long ago that they were highly competitive ridings split between two right wing parties. Because Canada doesn't quite have the same 2 party system as the US does, the situation isn't as static.
    - ghaff 3y ago
      That’s true of states that are as a whole relatively rural (think Wyoming) but not, say, upstate NY.
    - Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
      I'm guessing New York farmers don't have as much power as their Montana cousins. Rural and low population _states_ have a fair amount of power due to having a fixed number of senators per state, but rural areas in an otherwise non-rural state may find themselves outvoted and thus mostly irrelevant. The opposite situation, city slickers outvoted by country bumpkins, is of course possible in rural states.
      - runako 3y ago
        This obviously varies by state, but tends to not be accurate at the state level either due to the way state legislatures are elected. For example, in my state the majority of residents live in the largest metro area. But the smaller towns & rural areas are able to more or less permanently control the legislature (because legislators have geographic districts). As a result, our laws are frequently written in ways that are openly hostile to our major city, while favoring more rural areas.
  - jdasdf 3y ago
    >Rural areas do not "have no voice" - they have exactly the representative power of their population, the same as urban centers. I'm not sure what makes people in or from rural areas thinks that once people live close together their voice should count for less. How is it "right" or "fair" to move to an urban center, take advantage of urban amenities and services, take advantage of that higher salary, and siphon some of that tax money away to rural areas because of nostalgia? 2 wolves and sheep deciding on what's for dinner huh? Have you considered that the key problem here is the lack of direct control that people have over their own lives, causing these sort of situations where you have groups of people who permanently have zero effective agency over their futures? I agree, giving people more voting powers just because they live in a certain place isn't the right way to fix this. But the fact that there is a problem is undeniable, and the fact that this inequality in voting helps ameliorate this problem is true as well. The right answer here is to remove power from the state and elected officials, and return it to where it belongs, those being asked to pay for it either directly, or by being affected by it. There is nothing as democratic as everyone choosing for themselves. In the same way we should not have a vote to decide what's for dinner, and the winner means we all eat the same thing, we should not have votes on local and personal matters. Democracy isn't voting, it's agency over what rules you.
    - pc86 3y ago
      Lots to unpack here, and as I said I don't know much about Canada and next to nothing about Japan so this is strictly about the US. > 2 wolves and sheep deciding on what's for dinner huh? Tired analogy that doesn't actually make any point. > groups of people who permanently have zero effective agency over their futures This applies to approximately 0% of people in the US. Yes there is a small proportion of people who are so poor they can never move away from where they're born. Most of these people happen to live in urban areas, not rural. > the fact that there is a problem is undeniable For it being undeniable you haven't actually said what the problem is - only a strawman that rural Americans have no agency over their futures which is utter nonsense. > return [power] to where it belongs, those being asked to pay for it either directly, or by being affected by it If democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner wouldn't you want more power in the state and elected officials, so they could protect the sheep? The problem is everybody acts like they're the sheep being taken advantage of by big bad government when it's almost never actually the case.
  - icodestuff 3y ago
    More, even, since ridings don’t all have to have the same population, unlike Congressional districts.
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    Major urban cores of Canada are not underfunded Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver do not need more of a political voice. They do not need more love and attention they have too much focus already.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "voice". I think in common use, you would mean power in government. This scheme was put into play because rest of Japan, in fact, has a louder voice than Tokyo: Tokyo and the regions could have resolved their differences through the democratic process, in which the regions outvote Tokyo and could have altered Japan’s national tax and economic policies to their advantage. Tokyo obviously doesn’t want this, and instead agreed to an opt-in system which allays some of the regions’ concerns. Doing some back of the napkin math wrt representatives in the House of Commons and senators, in Canada, the situation probably wouldn't be much different for Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. In a lot of ways, this where the US is. NY (the city) foots the bill for not only most of NY (the state), but also its tax money funds projects and services in other states as well. Living in a US state's biggest city myself, it is a drag to see the rest of the state constantly block legislation that will help us grow, while on the flip side they are gladly taking our taxes, as we pay by far the most into the state's coffers. What I mean to say is, due to the way we pay local, state/province and federal taxes, the big cities are already a net positive in terms of tax revenue for the rest of the province/country.
  - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
    This is a relatively common use of the word "voice", I don't think GP "means" anything else. A politician running for election might promise to give a voice to some part of their constituency that so far had been ignored (no political power). In general "the power of the people" ~= "the voice of the people".
    - dfxm12 3y ago
      I thought so, too, but it didn't make much sense given the context of the article and what they were saying :)
      - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
        Yes it does, in my opinion. Seems very clear. Canadians outside their three big metro areas feel like their government represents those metro areas and not the rest of Canada. They feel like they "don't have a voice compared to the big 3".
- thsksbd 3y ago
  It'd certainly be more elegant and transparent than the equalization payments with largely similar results (Maritime's getting help from their diaspora).
- onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
  Aren't you essentially doing that already? The Federal government spends disproportionately outside of cities.
- renewiltord 3y ago
  In the US, this is pretty simple actually. If you set up a charity whose sole purpose is beautifying some region (that will pass IRS's tests), you can donate to it and reduce your taxable income. I imagine Canada has a similar structure.
petesergeant 3y ago
I find it curious that more countries don't do what America does, and tax you wherever you live. While this policy would absolutely screw me over as someone who lives in a very low tax country, I'm not sure what the argument _against_ it for a country like the UK is.
- mark_up 3y ago
  How about... one shouldn't have to pay taxes to a country in which they don't reside and whose services they don't use.
  - ambicapter 3y ago
    What if you have a passport from that country? You're still technically "using their services" (their diplomatic presence and apparatus) wherever you go, no?
    - rendall 3y ago
      Fun fact! There are only two countries in the world that require expatriates to pay income tax back to their home countries: Eritrea and the United States of America!
      - themaninthedark 3y ago
        And Canada: https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad/taxation https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad/taxation >Canadians who live or work abroad or who travel a lot may still have to pay Canadian and provincial or territorial income taxes. >expatriates : An expatriate, or expat, is an individual living and/or working in a country other than their country of citizenship, often temporarily and for work reasons. There are other countries as well, Americans just like to complain about it.
        rendall 3y ago
        > There are other countries as well, Americans just like to complain about it. If you are not an American who lives abroad then, with respect, you don't know what you're talking about. May you never have the experience of a bank in your country of residence refusing to do business with you because they fear the reporting burden incurred by serving clients of your nationality. Perhaps the Canadian Revenue Agency wishes it could compel banks in foreign lands to report the financial activities of the citizens under its purview, but the IRS actually can, and does.
hippich 3y ago
A local Texas guy told me once that he donates quite a bit to the local church, explaining that he would prefer his money do good locally instead of being diverted to the war machine that sucked in his son.
- duxup 3y ago
  It’s not like a church builds roads in his home town… What does that statement really mean?
  - mulmen 3y ago
    It means charitable donations are tax deductible. Local governments don’t always provide the community services of churches either.
  - huimang 3y ago
    It means exactly what he said: he wants it to do good locally. There are other ways money can be used locally for good than building roads.
    - catgary 3y ago
      [flagged]
      - barelysapient 3y ago
        Not all churches engage in this behavior. You appear to hold some pretty strong and uncharitable assumptions.
        callalex 3y ago
        [flagged]
        barelysapient 3y ago
robertlagrant 3y ago
This was great! One question, on this: > And there, that’s Japan’s most novel redistribution program in a nutshell. How is this "redistribution"?
- madarcho 3y ago
  Redistribution of taxes, from areas of high densities to lower density prefectures.
  - robertlagrant 3y ago
    Thanks - but isn't this more like "reallocation"? I thought redistribution was more about taking money from some people and giving it to (or spending it on) other people, of which taxation is one method.
    - moate 3y ago
      You take money that would have ostensibly gone to the citizens of Tokyo and instead provide it to the citizens of town of your choice. Reallocation and redistribution are synonymous here, one is just used in more headlines (probably because more people use "distribute" more regularly than "allocate"). Nothing different should be inferred by either word choice IMO.
      - themaninthedark 3y ago
        I think that there is a bit of distinction. Reallocate says that you are changing where the money is going Redistribute says that you are collecting money then parceling it out.
- pc86 3y ago
  Just because it's a person choosing to do this instead of a bureaucrat doesn't mean it's not redistribution. To use the example in the article, you're taking 40% of your taxes which would go to Tokyo and instead sending them to Gifu.
- 3y ago
Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
As a military brat who doesn't really have a hometown, or even a clear regional identity, I like that this system lets you choose a town to donate to without forcing it to be connected to your birthplace or life history. It'd be nice to be able to earmark it to particular government functions, maybe even charities in the area, etc.
- NeoTar 3y ago
  > It'd be nice to be able to earmark it to particular government functions, maybe even charities in the area, etc. "[Your Town] has finest municipal art galleries in the state whilst streets are filled with pot-holes" Allowing people to allocate money to government functions is generally a bad idea except if very tightly limited. Things which are 'nice' will get over-funded, and things which people find unpleasant* will not getting the funding needed. I think the problem would be ten times worse if it is people who don't actual live in an area get to choose how funds are allocated.
  - teeray 3y ago
    > things which people find unpleasant* will not getting the funding needed. Septic systems are a great example of this on a home scale. So many people treat them as a mysterious vortex in the ground where all sewage magically vanishes. They don’t bother to pump the tank every few years because it costs a couple hundred dollars. Then they’re shocked when their leech field is completely failed and needs to be replaced to the tune of $30k.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      I can't wait for (nicer) incinerating toilets to cost less than $5k. Going to put a real damper in septic tank builds in areas that allow simple graywater systems.
  - johnnyanmac 3y ago
    To be fair, the current realistic alternative still has potholes. Maybe we should entertain a tightly limited allocation. Sure, let the people from outside of town donate to whatever (it's free money at best and no gain at worst), but local citizens can only allocate a portion to specific public goods.
zeroCalories 3y ago
It's a stupid system. Taxes should go to your current city/state to run the services there. If you're not able to sustain programs on your shrinking tax base then you should start reimagining the existence of your city. If you need temporary assistance you should finance it with debt, or ask the national government for help. This is a silly and inefficient system that pours funds into parts of the country that should be left to die. If you want to revitalize places, you should be investing into industries that can bring youth and life to places, not leach it from others.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- omeid2 3y ago
  The optimal place to grow a child and operate an economic centre has different requirements.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    That's not what's happening here. Large metro areas in Japan have fine schools and are fine places to raise a child. They are not like the U.S with sketchy low income urban schools. What's happening is that generational residents are leaving their towns for economic centres, and the population is shrinking, and more importantly, aging.
    - kalleboo 3y ago
      edit: I have to clarity that the de-populating regional parts of Japan are mostly not what a U.S. or even EU person would see as "rural". These are cities of 300,000+ population with working public transit etc. They OUGHT to be able to support themselves, yet people are still centralizing to Tokyo. I even have a friend in Osaka (pop 3 million) who is considering Tokyo. I have lived in Tokyo and now I live in a very "regional" area of Japan and have two kids. While the school_s are actually better in Tokyo, I'm still far happier raising my kids here where there are abundant parks, beaches and nature, and would never want to move to Tokyo. I would be really sad if the rest of the country disappeared and everyone had to live in the concrete jungle. But I work remotely which is the only reason I can live here. The wages for my job are literally 10x in Tokyo than what they are here. That's why people move there. And that's why the schools are better in Tokyo - salaries for daycare workers and teachers here are too low so everyone leaves. At the same time as the salaries are higher in Tokyo - the cost of raising a family there is also far higher. It's very cheap to be solo or a working couple living in Tokyo. The most affordable large city in the world. Far cheaper than SF. But if you have more than 2 kids (beyond replacement rate), now you need a big car, a big condo, etc etc and it's completely unaffordable. Whereas here in the "inaka" I know people with 3-4 kids on a low salary that are doing "ok". Being able to even out the salaries in the country with remote work or even satellite offices using remote work technology would help lots.
intrasight 3y ago
This needs clarification. If you can gift it anywhere, can you gift it back to Tokyo (for example)? I would think that the kickback that the place you actually live (services, access to events, etc) would be more valuable to the taxpayer than would be services in a city where you don't live.
- matheusmoreira 3y ago
  Good point. Is Tokyo not participating in the bidding war for people's good will? Perhaps it's not allowed to?
  - Hamuko 3y ago
    Considering it was an olive branch towards the rest of the country in order to avoid this being set into the national law, it'd probably look pretty bad if Tokyo started to try and outbid the rest of the country.
- sampo 3y ago
  > If you can gift it anywhere, can you gift it back to Tokyo (for example)? If you live in Tokyo, your residence tax goes to Tokyo by default. You don't need to do anything, you don't need to specifically gift it to Tokyo.
- rtpg 3y ago
  You can't gift it to where you live (or rather, where you will send your residence tax).
- dfxm12 3y ago
  The article explains it is an opt-in program; if you live in Tokyo and don't opt-in to gifting your taxes elsewhere, you're paying all your taxes to Tokyo.
- clove 3y ago
  Can you gift it to Tokyo if you live outside Tokyo?
neilwilson 3y ago
There's a better fix for this. Stop measuring success by how far away you have to live from your mum to get a job. Once we have a Job Guarantee, not only does that mean interest base rates remain at zero permanently (ensuring permanently low mortgages), but it also means you can live where you want in the country. Business then has to go where the people are if it wants any labour - which of course it largely can in a majority service based economy. Stars shine not because of gravity, but because of the outward pressure that stops them collapsing in on themselves. Countries need to adopt similar policies if they wish to shine and not collapse.
- KPGv2 3y ago
  >it largely can in a majority service based economy Is your plan here to consolidate all capital in the hands of a few corporations? Because most businesses cannot just move somewhere else because their owners cannot just move somewhere else.
- Eumenes 3y ago
  > Once we have a Job Guarantee What's a job guarantee? Anyone who wants a job can get one.
- jncfhnb 3y ago
  I would love to read more on this.
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  You have a very naive view on this topic. You can't give eveveryone a Job Guarantee™, because the only natural job guarantee is that your efforts benefit someone else. If your work is not productive someone else pays the cost, you wind up in a zero sum situation. Also, I fail to see how such a system would mean interest rates remain at zero permanently, or how it ensures permanently low mortgages for interest rates to remain at zero permanently. Perhaps you can elaborate on the mechanism you envision when you talk about this. You can't outlegalese network effects, all you can do is shift cost around. This is why these sorts of schemes always have unforseen negative consequences, because people naively think they've found a silver bullet. You probably have not.
Balgair 3y ago
Man, this would be so good for the US to implement. The exact tax details and how money is exactly moved around are, of course, the devil in the details. But, forget all those very important but very arduous details for a minute, and just imagine that system up and working. You pick some small town out there on the Gift website. You like, I dunno, Country Hams. There's a small place outside of Harrisburg, PA that specializes in that gift. They send you a medium sized ham around the holidays. It's not a mass market ham, as that's against the rules. It's real home grown and processed country ham. They put in some advert for the country ham festival in October or some month (I don't know anything about the ham world, sorry!). Its free tickets to get in. You think, hey, why not? Go out there, spend some hotel/AirBnB money, eat at the diners, buy gas, etc. Great little fall escape. You do this every year for a while. The town gets a reputation, they're the Country Ham town now. Boom, a little cottage industry, government mandated to exist and help out the people there. The town gets to choose the cottage industry, of course. But they can leap frog it, make something of it, get things going again. Government is just coming in and priming the pump. I don't know. There's something so damn wholesome about this idea that I just love it. Helping out each other, getting things moving again, diversifying the market, keeping things alive.
- sdrothrock 3y ago
  > Boom, a little cottage industry This is the devil that lives in the details. You have an industry of people who are trying to get these charitable donations, and the towns that can't afford that industry or don't have anything particularly commercializable to sell get left in the dust. For every town that becomes Country Ham Town, you have hundreds of small towns who are "random postcard town" who only get a few bucks a year. It's tough to say if they even make money vs losing money on that.
  - Decabytes 3y ago
    I wonder if this could get handled at the county level. The money could be dispersed equitably by the county seat, and people could choose from a number of gifts provided by the towns in the county
flanbiscuit 3y ago
previous discussions: posted 2018, 249 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 posted 2022, 105 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 Not here to complain about a repost, just mentioning in case someone is looking to dive further and see what people said before.
- dang 3y ago
  Thanks! Macroexpanded: Japan's Hometown Tax (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 - April 2022 (105 comments) Japan's Hometown Tax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 - Oct 2018 (249 comments) (And yes, agreed - such links are solely for those with extended curiosity. Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).
SamuelAdams 3y ago
From the article: > Educating children is incredibly expensive. The regions are quite annoyed that they pay to educate their children but that Tokyo reaps all the benefits. This state of affairs has continued for decades. We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs. Back in the 1980's, taxpayers footed most college tuition using state appropriations, so college was "cheap" for students back then. Now (2023), (at least in my state, Michigan), state appropriations typically cover 20-40% of a college student's tuition. There is concern with this though, because of what is called "brain drain". Citizens spend all these taxpayer dollars educating youth at colleges, then the graduates from U of M, etc all move out of state to California, Boston, Seattle, etc for big tech jobs. Then the state of Michigan doesn't see any more tax dollars from those students. Which begs the question, why pay tax dollars for higher education if those who benefit from that education do not contribute back?
- wirthjason 3y ago
  Thank you for saying Michigan is your state. Context matters a lot. It’s annoying when people generically use “in my state” or “in my country”.
- HDThoreaun 3y ago
  I went to michigan and tons tons tons of people ended up at the auto companies. Sure many left the state, but there's no doubt that the state had many more educated high earners because of the university.
- jadbox 3y ago
  I think this is what makes the article so interesting of this hometown tax idea, as I would have liked to have participated if it was here. Fwiw, I moved away from UofM to California for career building last decade, but I moved back this year as I do love Michigan, the highly volatile weather and all.
- guardiangod 3y ago
  >We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs. And the world yell the same thing to USA. Canada, Italy, and England etc. all subsides their world-class universities with public funding. Where do the students go after graduation? US.
MarketingJason 3y ago
Two initiatives I've thought about: 1. Schools receiving state tax dollars must adhere to percentage-based breakdowns of general tuition use. Basically, only x% of general tuition can be spent on administration costs, sports facilities, etc. 2. Percentage of tuition covered by tax dollars is set by local demand for that degree path and adjusted periodically.
poulsbohemian 3y ago
Had beers with a community college president last week... he shared that there's a problem brewing where Arizona State (and perhaps others...) are going to high schools offering a program where for low tuition rates, kids can pick up some college credits. Sounds great on the surface, but the problems are that a) it means fewer of those students attending programs at the local community colleges, IE: taxpayer dollars going out of state, and b) apparently the credits offered are really only transferable to - you guessed it - Arizona State. It's all part of a disagreement between the school districts and the community colleges over where the kids are spending their time, and thus getting their share of state dollars.
paxys 3y ago
What the author calls a "beautiful" system to me seems to be bordering on fraud and undermining what the law was originally intended to do. Basically random small towns hire consulting companies who run advertising campaigns asking people nationwide to send them their 40% "hometown donation" and get 20% of it back as a "gift", thus conveniently evading half their taxes? Who exactly is benefiting here?
- pauldenton 3y ago
  It's cultural. Japan has a cultural of reciprocal gift giving that underpins this entire exchange. Basically it's a decentralizing force It prevents a doom loop where everyone moves to Tokyo because that's where all the resources are because everyone moves to Tokyo as the rest of the country hollows out
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  It sounds less like fraud and more like gamification of incentives. Fraud requires someone to be defrauded. The rules of a game are laid bare, thus looks to me to be an emergent cultural quirk that benefits everybody.
- suction 3y ago
  [dead]
TacticalCoder 3y ago
> Educating children is incredibly expensive. So people who've been homeschooled can opt out of that tax right? I mean: that's only logical.
UtopiaPunk 3y ago
Well, I don't know if this is a good system or if a similar system could be applied well in my country, but the article certainly made me smile.
fomine3 3y ago
The core concept of Hometown tax is okay, redistribute money to non-rich areas. How it currently work sucks. People chose where to donate by how much gift those local govt return for tax payers. Quite inefficient and nonsense criteria.
supernova87a 3y ago
On the practice of returning 30% of a gift back to the sender as yet another polite reciprocal gift -- Having been to Japan now and having seen the amount of gift wrapping and boxes and packaging of little food items and treats, I wonder if this simple social rule actually drives quite a notable amount of consumer spending and economic activity in the country!
- friend_and_foe 3y ago
  It's a positive feedback loop for sure, but a diminishing one: you're not expected to reciprocate 100%, and you're not expected to reciprocate 30% of your 30% reciprocation you received. Americans have a gift reciprocation culture as well, particularly around birthdays and Christmas.

Not sure I understand all the subtlety but as a Canadian (where we have about 3 big cities and the rest has no voice) I'd love to be able to divert my tax away from the city I live in and to my home town. If course we don't really pay income tax directly to the city, so it would be complicated and probably just make more bureaucracy.

pc86 3y ago
I say this as someone who grew up in a small rural area and now lives in a slightly-less-small suburban/rural mix (but not in Canada). All this does is overfund rural areas and underfund urban areas which are likely already underfunded - although my only experience is the US so maybe Canada is a little better about this. Rural areas do not "have no voice" - they have exactly the representative power of their population, the same as urban centers. I'm not sure what makes people in or from rural areas thinks that once people live close together their voice should count for less. How is it "right" or "fair" to move to an urban center, take advantage of urban amenities and services, take advantage of that higher salary, and siphon some of that tax money away to rural areas because of nostalgia?
- ejstronge 3y ago
  Curiously, rural regions of the US have a fair amount of power due to how electoral seats are distributed. I'm not sure if this is also true in Canada, so it is possible that the GP's situation differs from your own experiences.
  - pc86 3y ago
    You're 100% right, the more rural your state the more power your state holds in Presidential elections, and indirectly in the Senate, but not much beyond that. I don't think there's a corollary in Canada but I could certainly be wrong.
  - CalRobert 3y ago
    This is about suburbs, not rural areas, but Canadian politics provides an interesting history in suburbanites wresting power from city dwellers. Among other concrete impacts it means more parking, shifting funds away from public transport (which is less useful to suburbanites), etc. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgamation_of_Toronto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amalgamation_of_Toronto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkO-DttA9ew&t=35s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KkO-DttA9ew&t=35s
  - mlinhares 3y ago
    They're also heavily subsidized to make them "work", a considerable piece of rural America would already be gone if there wasn't a large amount of government funds being diverted to keep it alive and we will spend even more as it becomes less and less desirable to live there.
    - subroutine 3y ago
      As soon as WFH became an option people flocked away from cities. NYC lost 200k people over two years; SF lost 60k. I would say there is a large population of city folk who desire to move to more rural areas.
      - dfxm12 3y ago
        If you listen to the news, they're all moving to other cities, like Austin, TX, not to rural areas.
        ghaff 3y ago
        Yes. Other/smaller cities, college towns, etc. I'm sure some have taken the opportunity to move somewhere that looks more like rural--but I have to believe the lifestyle shift would be a bridge too far for most.
        mlinhares 3y ago
        They're moving to suburbs near big cities or cheap big cities in less populated states, not rural areas.
        ghaff 3y ago
        >suburbs near big cities It's not really true of the Bay Area--and it's at least complicated around Manhattan. But a lot of cities like Boston an hour or an hour and a bit drive in reverse commute, much less weekend, traffic can bring you to a lot cheaper housing. There are expensive suburbs too. However, it's pretty easy to find suburban or exurban towns that are accessible to Boston for an evening event that have relatively modest home prices. Not Midwest cheap but reasonable. (Of course there are very expensive towns as well.)
  - bryanlarsen 3y ago
    Nominally, it's also true in Canada. Due to lower populated rural ridings, one rural vote can be worth up to 4X an urban vote. But in current conditions, votes in rural Western Canadian ridings are basically worthless. They're ultra-safe Conservative seats, so they can be and are ignored. But it wasn't very long ago that they were highly competitive ridings split between two right wing parties. Because Canada doesn't quite have the same 2 party system as the US does, the situation isn't as static.
  - ghaff 3y ago
    That’s true of states that are as a whole relatively rural (think Wyoming) but not, say, upstate NY.
  - Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago
    I'm guessing New York farmers don't have as much power as their Montana cousins. Rural and low population _states_ have a fair amount of power due to having a fixed number of senators per state, but rural areas in an otherwise non-rural state may find themselves outvoted and thus mostly irrelevant. The opposite situation, city slickers outvoted by country bumpkins, is of course possible in rural states.
    - runako 3y ago
      This obviously varies by state, but tends to not be accurate at the state level either due to the way state legislatures are elected. For example, in my state the majority of residents live in the largest metro area. But the smaller towns & rural areas are able to more or less permanently control the legislature (because legislators have geographic districts). As a result, our laws are frequently written in ways that are openly hostile to our major city, while favoring more rural areas.
- jdasdf 3y ago
  >Rural areas do not "have no voice" - they have exactly the representative power of their population, the same as urban centers. I'm not sure what makes people in or from rural areas thinks that once people live close together their voice should count for less. How is it "right" or "fair" to move to an urban center, take advantage of urban amenities and services, take advantage of that higher salary, and siphon some of that tax money away to rural areas because of nostalgia? 2 wolves and sheep deciding on what's for dinner huh? Have you considered that the key problem here is the lack of direct control that people have over their own lives, causing these sort of situations where you have groups of people who permanently have zero effective agency over their futures? I agree, giving people more voting powers just because they live in a certain place isn't the right way to fix this. But the fact that there is a problem is undeniable, and the fact that this inequality in voting helps ameliorate this problem is true as well. The right answer here is to remove power from the state and elected officials, and return it to where it belongs, those being asked to pay for it either directly, or by being affected by it. There is nothing as democratic as everyone choosing for themselves. In the same way we should not have a vote to decide what's for dinner, and the winner means we all eat the same thing, we should not have votes on local and personal matters. Democracy isn't voting, it's agency over what rules you.
  - pc86 3y ago
    Lots to unpack here, and as I said I don't know much about Canada and next to nothing about Japan so this is strictly about the US. > 2 wolves and sheep deciding on what's for dinner huh? Tired analogy that doesn't actually make any point. > groups of people who permanently have zero effective agency over their futures This applies to approximately 0% of people in the US. Yes there is a small proportion of people who are so poor they can never move away from where they're born. Most of these people happen to live in urban areas, not rural. > the fact that there is a problem is undeniable For it being undeniable you haven't actually said what the problem is - only a strawman that rural Americans have no agency over their futures which is utter nonsense. > return [power] to where it belongs, those being asked to pay for it either directly, or by being affected by it If democracy is 2 wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner wouldn't you want more power in the state and elected officials, so they could protect the sheep? The problem is everybody acts like they're the sheep being taken advantage of by big bad government when it's almost never actually the case.
- icodestuff 3y ago
  More, even, since ridings don’t all have to have the same population, unlike Congressional districts.
- pauldenton 3y ago
  Major urban cores of Canada are not underfunded Toronto, Montreal and Vancouver do not need more of a political voice. They do not need more love and attention they have too much focus already.
dfxm12 3y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "voice". I think in common use, you would mean power in government. This scheme was put into play because rest of Japan, in fact, has a louder voice than Tokyo: Tokyo and the regions could have resolved their differences through the democratic process, in which the regions outvote Tokyo and could have altered Japan’s national tax and economic policies to their advantage. Tokyo obviously doesn’t want this, and instead agreed to an opt-in system which allays some of the regions’ concerns. Doing some back of the napkin math wrt representatives in the House of Commons and senators, in Canada, the situation probably wouldn't be much different for Vancouver, Montreal and Toronto. In a lot of ways, this where the US is. NY (the city) foots the bill for not only most of NY (the state), but also its tax money funds projects and services in other states as well. Living in a US state's biggest city myself, it is a drag to see the rest of the state constantly block legislation that will help us grow, while on the flip side they are gladly taking our taxes, as we pay by far the most into the state's coffers. What I mean to say is, due to the way we pay local, state/province and federal taxes, the big cities are already a net positive in terms of tax revenue for the rest of the province/country.
- DiggyJohnson 3y ago
  This is a relatively common use of the word "voice", I don't think GP "means" anything else. A politician running for election might promise to give a voice to some part of their constituency that so far had been ignored (no political power). In general "the power of the people" ~= "the voice of the people".
  - dfxm12 3y ago
    I thought so, too, but it didn't make much sense given the context of the article and what they were saying :)
    - DiggyJohnson 3y ago
      Yes it does, in my opinion. Seems very clear. Canadians outside their three big metro areas feel like their government represents those metro areas and not the rest of Canada. They feel like they "don't have a voice compared to the big 3".
thsksbd 3y ago
It'd certainly be more elegant and transparent than the equalization payments with largely similar results (Maritime's getting help from their diaspora).
onlyrealcuzzo 3y ago
Aren't you essentially doing that already? The Federal government spends disproportionately outside of cities.
renewiltord 3y ago
In the US, this is pretty simple actually. If you set up a charity whose sole purpose is beautifying some region (that will pass IRS's tests), you can donate to it and reduce your taxable income. I imagine Canada has a similar structure.

petesergeant 3y ago

I find it curious that more countries don't do what America does, and tax you wherever you live. While this policy would absolutely screw me over as someone who lives in a very low tax country, I'm not sure what the argument _against_ it for a country like the UK is.

mark_up 3y ago
How about... one shouldn't have to pay taxes to a country in which they don't reside and whose services they don't use.
- ambicapter 3y ago
  What if you have a passport from that country? You're still technically "using their services" (their diplomatic presence and apparatus) wherever you go, no?
  - rendall 3y ago
    Fun fact! There are only two countries in the world that require expatriates to pay income tax back to their home countries: Eritrea and the United States of America!
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      And Canada: https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad/taxation https://travel.gc.ca/travelling/living-abroad/taxation >Canadians who live or work abroad or who travel a lot may still have to pay Canadian and provincial or territorial income taxes. >expatriates : An expatriate, or expat, is an individual living and/or working in a country other than their country of citizenship, often temporarily and for work reasons. There are other countries as well, Americans just like to complain about it.
      - rendall 3y ago
        > There are other countries as well, Americans just like to complain about it. If you are not an American who lives abroad then, with respect, you don't know what you're talking about. May you never have the experience of a bank in your country of residence refusing to do business with you because they fear the reporting burden incurred by serving clients of your nationality. Perhaps the Canadian Revenue Agency wishes it could compel banks in foreign lands to report the financial activities of the citizens under its purview, but the IRS actually can, and does.

hippich 3y ago

A local Texas guy told me once that he donates quite a bit to the local church, explaining that he would prefer his money do good locally instead of being diverted to the war machine that sucked in his son.

duxup 3y ago
It’s not like a church builds roads in his home town… What does that statement really mean?
- mulmen 3y ago
  It means charitable donations are tax deductible. Local governments don’t always provide the community services of churches either.
- huimang 3y ago
  It means exactly what he said: he wants it to do good locally. There are other ways money can be used locally for good than building roads.
  - catgary 3y ago
    [flagged]
    - barelysapient 3y ago
      Not all churches engage in this behavior. You appear to hold some pretty strong and uncharitable assumptions.
      - callalex 3y ago
        [flagged]
        barelysapient 3y ago

robertlagrant 3y ago

This was great! One question, on this: > And there, that’s Japan’s most novel redistribution program in a nutshell. How is this "redistribution"?

madarcho 3y ago
Redistribution of taxes, from areas of high densities to lower density prefectures.
- robertlagrant 3y ago
  Thanks - but isn't this more like "reallocation"? I thought redistribution was more about taking money from some people and giving it to (or spending it on) other people, of which taxation is one method.
  - moate 3y ago
    You take money that would have ostensibly gone to the citizens of Tokyo and instead provide it to the citizens of town of your choice. Reallocation and redistribution are synonymous here, one is just used in more headlines (probably because more people use "distribute" more regularly than "allocate"). Nothing different should be inferred by either word choice IMO.
    - themaninthedark 3y ago
      I think that there is a bit of distinction. Reallocate says that you are changing where the money is going Redistribute says that you are collecting money then parceling it out.
pc86 3y ago
Just because it's a person choosing to do this instead of a bureaucrat doesn't mean it's not redistribution. To use the example in the article, you're taking 40% of your taxes which would go to Tokyo and instead sending them to Gifu.
3y ago

Zach_the_Lizard 3y ago

As a military brat who doesn't really have a hometown, or even a clear regional identity, I like that this system lets you choose a town to donate to without forcing it to be connected to your birthplace or life history. It'd be nice to be able to earmark it to particular government functions, maybe even charities in the area, etc.

NeoTar 3y ago
> It'd be nice to be able to earmark it to particular government functions, maybe even charities in the area, etc. "[Your Town] has finest municipal art galleries in the state whilst streets are filled with pot-holes" Allowing people to allocate money to government functions is generally a bad idea except if very tightly limited. Things which are 'nice' will get over-funded, and things which people find unpleasant* will not getting the funding needed. I think the problem would be ten times worse if it is people who don't actual live in an area get to choose how funds are allocated.
- teeray 3y ago
  > things which people find unpleasant* will not getting the funding needed. Septic systems are a great example of this on a home scale. So many people treat them as a mysterious vortex in the ground where all sewage magically vanishes. They don’t bother to pump the tank every few years because it costs a couple hundred dollars. Then they’re shocked when their leech field is completely failed and needs to be replaced to the tune of $30k.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    I can't wait for (nicer) incinerating toilets to cost less than $5k. Going to put a real damper in septic tank builds in areas that allow simple graywater systems.
- johnnyanmac 3y ago
  To be fair, the current realistic alternative still has potholes. Maybe we should entertain a tightly limited allocation. Sure, let the people from outside of town donate to whatever (it's free money at best and no gain at worst), but local citizens can only allocate a portion to specific public goods.

zeroCalories 3y ago

It's a stupid system. Taxes should go to your current city/state to run the services there. If you're not able to sustain programs on your shrinking tax base then you should start reimagining the existence of your city. If you need temporary assistance you should finance it with debt, or ask the national government for help. This is a silly and inefficient system that pours funds into parts of the country that should be left to die. If you want to revitalize places, you should be investing into industries that can bring youth and life to places, not leach it from others.

deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
omeid2 3y ago
The optimal place to grow a child and operate an economic centre has different requirements.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  That's not what's happening here. Large metro areas in Japan have fine schools and are fine places to raise a child. They are not like the U.S with sketchy low income urban schools. What's happening is that generational residents are leaving their towns for economic centres, and the population is shrinking, and more importantly, aging.
  - kalleboo 3y ago
    edit: I have to clarity that the de-populating regional parts of Japan are mostly not what a U.S. or even EU person would see as "rural". These are cities of 300,000+ population with working public transit etc. They OUGHT to be able to support themselves, yet people are still centralizing to Tokyo. I even have a friend in Osaka (pop 3 million) who is considering Tokyo. I have lived in Tokyo and now I live in a very "regional" area of Japan and have two kids. While the school_s are actually better in Tokyo, I'm still far happier raising my kids here where there are abundant parks, beaches and nature, and would never want to move to Tokyo. I would be really sad if the rest of the country disappeared and everyone had to live in the concrete jungle. But I work remotely which is the only reason I can live here. The wages for my job are literally 10x in Tokyo than what they are here. That's why people move there. And that's why the schools are better in Tokyo - salaries for daycare workers and teachers here are too low so everyone leaves. At the same time as the salaries are higher in Tokyo - the cost of raising a family there is also far higher. It's very cheap to be solo or a working couple living in Tokyo. The most affordable large city in the world. Far cheaper than SF. But if you have more than 2 kids (beyond replacement rate), now you need a big car, a big condo, etc etc and it's completely unaffordable. Whereas here in the "inaka" I know people with 3-4 kids on a low salary that are doing "ok". Being able to even out the salaries in the country with remote work or even satellite offices using remote work technology would help lots.

intrasight 3y ago

This needs clarification. If you can gift it anywhere, can you gift it back to Tokyo (for example)? I would think that the kickback that the place you actually live (services, access to events, etc) would be more valuable to the taxpayer than would be services in a city where you don't live.

matheusmoreira 3y ago
Good point. Is Tokyo not participating in the bidding war for people's good will? Perhaps it's not allowed to?
- Hamuko 3y ago
  Considering it was an olive branch towards the rest of the country in order to avoid this being set into the national law, it'd probably look pretty bad if Tokyo started to try and outbid the rest of the country.
sampo 3y ago
> If you can gift it anywhere, can you gift it back to Tokyo (for example)? If you live in Tokyo, your residence tax goes to Tokyo by default. You don't need to do anything, you don't need to specifically gift it to Tokyo.
rtpg 3y ago
You can't gift it to where you live (or rather, where you will send your residence tax).
dfxm12 3y ago
The article explains it is an opt-in program; if you live in Tokyo and don't opt-in to gifting your taxes elsewhere, you're paying all your taxes to Tokyo.
clove 3y ago
Can you gift it to Tokyo if you live outside Tokyo?

neilwilson 3y ago

There's a better fix for this. Stop measuring success by how far away you have to live from your mum to get a job. Once we have a Job Guarantee, not only does that mean interest base rates remain at zero permanently (ensuring permanently low mortgages), but it also means you can live where you want in the country. Business then has to go where the people are if it wants any labour - which of course it largely can in a majority service based economy. Stars shine not because of gravity, but because of the outward pressure that stops them collapsing in on themselves. Countries need to adopt similar policies if they wish to shine and not collapse.

KPGv2 3y ago
>it largely can in a majority service based economy Is your plan here to consolidate all capital in the hands of a few corporations? Because most businesses cannot just move somewhere else because their owners cannot just move somewhere else.
Eumenes 3y ago
> Once we have a Job Guarantee What's a job guarantee? Anyone who wants a job can get one.
jncfhnb 3y ago
I would love to read more on this.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
You have a very naive view on this topic. You can't give eveveryone a Job Guarantee™, because the only natural job guarantee is that your efforts benefit someone else. If your work is not productive someone else pays the cost, you wind up in a zero sum situation. Also, I fail to see how such a system would mean interest rates remain at zero permanently, or how it ensures permanently low mortgages for interest rates to remain at zero permanently. Perhaps you can elaborate on the mechanism you envision when you talk about this. You can't outlegalese network effects, all you can do is shift cost around. This is why these sorts of schemes always have unforseen negative consequences, because people naively think they've found a silver bullet. You probably have not.

Balgair 3y ago

Man, this would be so good for the US to implement. The exact tax details and how money is exactly moved around are, of course, the devil in the details. But, forget all those very important but very arduous details for a minute, and just imagine that system up and working. You pick some small town out there on the Gift website. You like, I dunno, Country Hams. There's a small place outside of Harrisburg, PA that specializes in that gift. They send you a medium sized ham around the holidays. It's not a mass market ham, as that's against the rules. It's real home grown and processed country ham. They put in some advert for the country ham festival in October or some month (I don't know anything about the ham world, sorry!). Its free tickets to get in. You think, hey, why not? Go out there, spend some hotel/AirBnB money, eat at the diners, buy gas, etc. Great little fall escape. You do this every year for a while. The town gets a reputation, they're the Country Ham town now. Boom, a little cottage industry, government mandated to exist and help out the people there. The town gets to choose the cottage industry, of course. But they can leap frog it, make something of it, get things going again. Government is just coming in and priming the pump. I don't know. There's something so damn wholesome about this idea that I just love it. Helping out each other, getting things moving again, diversifying the market, keeping things alive.

sdrothrock 3y ago
> Boom, a little cottage industry This is the devil that lives in the details. You have an industry of people who are trying to get these charitable donations, and the towns that can't afford that industry or don't have anything particularly commercializable to sell get left in the dust. For every town that becomes Country Ham Town, you have hundreds of small towns who are "random postcard town" who only get a few bucks a year. It's tough to say if they even make money vs losing money on that.
- Decabytes 3y ago
  I wonder if this could get handled at the county level. The money could be dispersed equitably by the county seat, and people could choose from a number of gifts provided by the towns in the county

flanbiscuit 3y ago

previous discussions: posted 2018, 249 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 posted 2022, 105 comments: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 Not here to complain about a repost, just mentioning in case someone is looking to dive further and see what people said before.

dang 3y ago
Thanks! Macroexpanded: Japan's Hometown Tax (2018) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31152365 - April 2022 (105 comments) Japan's Hometown Tax - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18256660 - Oct 2018 (249 comments) (And yes, agreed - such links are solely for those with extended curiosity. Reposts are fine on HN after a year or so - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html).

SamuelAdams 3y ago

From the article: > Educating children is incredibly expensive. The regions are quite annoyed that they pay to educate their children but that Tokyo reaps all the benefits. This state of affairs has continued for decades. We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs. Back in the 1980's, taxpayers footed most college tuition using state appropriations, so college was "cheap" for students back then. Now (2023), (at least in my state, Michigan), state appropriations typically cover 20-40% of a college student's tuition. There is concern with this though, because of what is called "brain drain". Citizens spend all these taxpayer dollars educating youth at colleges, then the graduates from U of M, etc all move out of state to California, Boston, Seattle, etc for big tech jobs. Then the state of Michigan doesn't see any more tax dollars from those students. Which begs the question, why pay tax dollars for higher education if those who benefit from that education do not contribute back?

wirthjason 3y ago
Thank you for saying Michigan is your state. Context matters a lot. It’s annoying when people generically use “in my state” or “in my country”.
HDThoreaun 3y ago
I went to michigan and tons tons tons of people ended up at the auto companies. Sure many left the state, but there's no doubt that the state had many more educated high earners because of the university.
jadbox 3y ago
I think this is what makes the article so interesting of this hometown tax idea, as I would have liked to have participated if it was here. Fwiw, I moved away from UofM to California for career building last decade, but I moved back this year as I do love Michigan, the highly volatile weather and all.
guardiangod 3y ago
>We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called "State Appropriations", and varies between 30-80% of the student's overall tuition costs. And the world yell the same thing to USA. Canada, Italy, and England etc. all subsides their world-class universities with public funding. Where do the students go after graduation? US.

MarketingJason 3y ago

Two initiatives I've thought about: 1. Schools receiving state tax dollars must adhere to percentage-based breakdowns of general tuition use. Basically, only x% of general tuition can be spent on administration costs, sports facilities, etc. 2. Percentage of tuition covered by tax dollars is set by local demand for that degree path and adjusted periodically.

poulsbohemian 3y ago

Had beers with a community college president last week... he shared that there's a problem brewing where Arizona State (and perhaps others...) are going to high schools offering a program where for low tuition rates, kids can pick up some college credits. Sounds great on the surface, but the problems are that a) it means fewer of those students attending programs at the local community colleges, IE: taxpayer dollars going out of state, and b) apparently the credits offered are really only transferable to - you guessed it - Arizona State. It's all part of a disagreement between the school districts and the community colleges over where the kids are spending their time, and thus getting their share of state dollars.

paxys 3y ago

What the author calls a "beautiful" system to me seems to be bordering on fraud and undermining what the law was originally intended to do. Basically random small towns hire consulting companies who run advertising campaigns asking people nationwide to send them their 40% "hometown donation" and get 20% of it back as a "gift", thus conveniently evading half their taxes? Who exactly is benefiting here?

pauldenton 3y ago
It's cultural. Japan has a cultural of reciprocal gift giving that underpins this entire exchange. Basically it's a decentralizing force It prevents a doom loop where everyone moves to Tokyo because that's where all the resources are because everyone moves to Tokyo as the rest of the country hollows out
friend_and_foe 3y ago
It sounds less like fraud and more like gamification of incentives. Fraud requires someone to be defrauded. The rules of a game are laid bare, thus looks to me to be an emergent cultural quirk that benefits everybody.
suction 3y ago
[dead]

TacticalCoder 3y ago

> Educating children is incredibly expensive. So people who've been homeschooled can opt out of that tax right? I mean: that's only logical.

UtopiaPunk 3y ago

Well, I don't know if this is a good system or if a similar system could be applied well in my country, but the article certainly made me smile.

fomine3 3y ago

The core concept of Hometown tax is okay, redistribute money to non-rich areas. How it currently work sucks. People chose where to donate by how much gift those local govt return for tax payers. Quite inefficient and nonsense criteria.

supernova87a 3y ago

On the practice of returning 30% of a gift back to the sender as yet another polite reciprocal gift -- Having been to Japan now and having seen the amount of gift wrapping and boxes and packaging of little food items and treats, I wonder if this simple social rule actually drives quite a notable amount of consumer spending and economic activity in the country!

friend_and_foe 3y ago
It's a positive feedback loop for sure, but a diminishing one: you're not expected to reciprocate 100%, and you're not expected to reciprocate 30% of your 30% reciprocation you received. Americans have a gift reciprocation culture as well, particularly around birthdays and Christmas.