8 ms·

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 th

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.
- CalRobert 3y ago
  Curious what you'd view as the requirements? We moved to a city (albeit not a large one) specifically so our kids would be able to bike to school and see friends more easily. These are also things that help power an economic centre.
vincentkriek 3y ago
I think a country can not exist with just big cities, or at least it should not be forced to. Small towns will always be more expensive than cities to maintain, this should not mean that small towns should then get less facilities. It's the equality vs equity discussion based in geography
- irrational 3y ago
  Why can a country not exist with just big cities?
  - johannes1234321 3y ago
    Countries can exist with only big cities, but then they are dependant on other countries. In small cities you among other things have more agriculture and different forms of industry are also commonly pushed out of big cities.
  - 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
    Because you really don't want heavily polluting industries (oil refineries, chemical plants, steel mills, etc) close to a big city.
    - justin66 3y ago
      Name a big city that doesn't have heavily polluting industries nearby.
      - irrational 3y ago
        Portland, Oregon?
        justin66 3y ago
        I don't know why you'd pose that as a question, but not having been to Portland I did the obvious thing and spent a minute in google maps. You're welcome. It turns out Portland has a steel mill not just nearby, but within its city limits. At the risk of stating the obvious, the point of my question wasn't to literally determine whether any big cities exist without heavy industry nearby, although that would be sort of interesting if it were the case. The point is that any such city is going to be an exception to the utterly ludicrous statement of the OP, "Because you really don't want heavily polluting industries (oil refineries, chemical plants, steel mills, etc) close to a big city." Big cities have always had this. The people there do not "want" them there any more or less than people in a small town would "want" them there.
sampo 3y ago
> Taxes should go to your current city/state to run the services there. Generally, families in rural areas have more children than families in big cities. There should be some kind of monetary compensation (money transfer from cities to rural areas) for the rural areas than produce more people, who then move to cities and contribute to their economy. This Japanese system sounds good.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  Why should there be a transfer? Education is already paid for nationally in Japan. Parents pay their taxes while there. The towns are not owed anything. Even if things are a little more murky in other parts of the world, I would be more in favor of nationalizing education than giving wealth to dying towns.
Meekro 3y ago
Japan's government seems so functional compared to what I'm used to in the US, that I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their governments are building all sorts of things every year while we can't seem to build a railroad track between LA and San Francisco in 20 years. Whatever they're doing over there is clearly working, and we in the US should be focusing on the plank of wood in our own eye and not the speck of sawdust in theirs. I'll admit that this "hometown tax" system has a certain amount of silliness, but wealth redistribution schemes often do. We're torn between "the weak should perish" and "some help wouldn't be so bad" and twist ourselves into pretzels trying to reconcile between these ideas. Plans like this hometown tax are the result of that, and some of our wealth redistribution efforts in the US probably seem no less strange to outsiders.
- rtpg 3y ago
  if it makes you feel better, major construction projects in Japan can also take years and years and years. The difference being that you don't have federalism throwing a wrench in projects halfway through. It's hard to look at America and not draw the conclusion that federalism is a major mistake. So many problems downstream from fickle localities.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > It's hard to look at America and not draw the conclusion that federalism is a major mistake. So many problems downstream from fickle localities. The "fickle localities" that share sovereignty with the federal government is a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Totalitarian places can ignore localities and push huge national projects. China now has the world's longest high-speed rail system; but the same country lost 40-80 million people not even a century ago due to huge national projects that didn't pan out so well, under Mao. The US has one of the highest median incomes in the world; among the top 5, by any measure. It's hard to understand why anyone would look at the system of governance in the US and call it a major mistake.
    - shortrounddev2 3y ago
      The difference between the US and China is not a central government which is empowered to make projects and a federalist system which gives undue influence to small interests. The difference is that the US is a democracy and China is a communist dictatorship. Tens of millions didn't die in china because a huge national projects; they died because they were ruled by a totalitarian dictator who had no regard whatsoever for the value of human life, and who was empowered purely by the threat (or the guarantee) of violence and not by the consent of the governed. There is an ocean of difference between western democracies and communist dictatorships, and it's not how we allocate authority to public works projects
downrightmike 3y ago
The US Federal Gov't basically bail out all US cities for infrastructure because the cities never have the money to fix infrastructure because they'd have to double the taxes collected at the least to meet the need of replacing infrastructure when it needs it, usually 30 years.
- screye 3y ago
  US cities are broken. Majority taxes are collected by residential zip code, and every person who works in the city, lives in the suburbs. The suburbs get wealthier off the economic productivity of the city. Only in the US would cities like Beverly hills-CA, Brookline-MA, Piedmont-CA exist. If you want the city to accommodate your suburban commute, (parking requirements, wider roads) and your safety (the homeless are bussed to the downtown core), then you need to pay taxes into the city. If you avail of cheap labor from the city's poor, then you need to be paying taxes into the city.
  - gottorf 3y ago
    > Only in the US would cities like Beverly hills-CA, Brookline-MA, Piedmont-CA exist. I supposed places like Neilly-sur-Seine outside of Paris don't exist? I fail to see how rich, lower-density suburbs that well-to-do people prefer to live in while working in downtown centers is a uniquely American trait.
    - Scoundreller 3y ago
      Notoriously, Neuilly-sur-Seine does pay a penalty for its underbuilding (actually, complete non-building) of social housing. https://www.france24.com/en/20101220-french-cities-rather-pay-fine-invest-social-housing-municipal-urban-planning-fondation-abbe-pierre-homeless https://www.france24.com/en/20101220-french-cities-rather-pa...
    - screye 3y ago
      > Neilly-sur-Seine https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8863259,2.2692631,3a,75y,38.83h,106.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sfP55S2edJX4IIuWRoKH6OQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8863259,2.2692631,3a,75y,38.... This does not look like low density suburb to me. The town only gets a commuter rail, and driving into Paris is a total nightmare. Suburbs are no the issue. Destroying cities to accommodate suburbs is. The suburbs I mention are walking distance to the city's downtown, take advantage of positives of dense urban development near them, while doing everything in their power from letting density touch their own neighborhood. It is selfishness at its worst. Paris has a population of 2 million, is a neat circle and clearly deprioritizes the needs of anyone outside the peripheral boulevard. You are making my point for me. Historically, suburbs were low density because an outer donut has more area than an inner circle. In the absence of land development regulation, density reflects the demand per sq/ft. If Americans were so sure of low density suburbs being a natural outcome, then they wouldn't wield every dirty weapon to ban land development in the aforementioned suburbs. In most American cities, the city does not control its own road or transportation budgets. This means that suburbs get to affect the lawmaking in the city, but cities do not get to do vice versa. I am not even going to address brain-dead laws like Prop 13 or rent-control that further destroy a city's ability to govern itself.
olddustytrail 3y ago
Your comment is ignorant and myopic. The area I come from has switched from being hugely important to completely worthless multiple times over the past few centuries. Even then, being profitable is not the same as being useful to society.
- zeroCalories 3y ago
  So we should be subsidizing every small town in the hopes that maybe some day they begin contributing back to society? Can I go into the mountains and demand a sewage line and hospital be built next to me?
  - pauldenton 3y ago
    We could penalize big cities for the negative externalities they cause on surrounding cities.
    - zeroCalories 3y ago
      Seems fair. What externalities?
  - fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
    No, you can make bad faith arguments and get ignored though.
    - zeroCalories 3y ago
      I really want to ignore small towns, so maybe we can compromise!
      - anigbrowl 3y ago
        Did you grow up in one and not enjoy it? You seem extremely passionate about this issue. I can kind of relate, but although I left a small town in favor of city life, I don't think it's necessarily the ideal, or that the richness and complexity of cities makes smaller scales redundant.
Aerroon 3y ago
We're living in the age of Urbanization Plus, where people aren't just moving from rural areas to cities, they're also moving from smaller cities to bigger cities in large numbers. It wouldn't surprise me if we were all trending towards South Korea your situations where half the population lives in the capital (except in the US - there will be a few cities everyone moves to, but probably not DC). The problem is jobs. People want to move where the jobs are. Now that farming isn't a big job creator and many factories have moved away then it's all about commerce. That requires a large concentration of people. Cities will often not have enough to offer to make a company move to their city instead of some other city. Especially nowadays when people get really upset over a city offering a good deal to some business (eg Amazon and New York a few years ago).
- dragonwriter 3y ago
  > It wouldn't surprise me if we were all trending towards South Korea your situations where half the population lives in the capital (except in the US - there will be a few cities everyone moves to, but probably not DC). Though the political capital was moved to the South, economically the effective capital of the US remained (and remains) NYC.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Same with South Korea. The capital was technically moved to Sejong in the 2010s, but almost every Ministry that matters is still up north in Seoul.
  - sib 3y ago
    While NYC is great, and our biggest city, etc., one difference from other countries is that New York State (the whole thing), only represents 8.1% of US GDP. Even if you add all of New Jersey and Connecticut, you get about 12.3% of total GDP. As states, both California & Texas have greater share of GDP than NY. So US GDP is much less concentrated than in some other countries.
    - dragonwriter 3y ago

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.
CalRobert 3y ago
Curious what you'd view as the requirements? We moved to a city (albeit not a large one) specifically so our kids would be able to bike to school and see friends more easily. These are also things that help power an economic centre.

vincentkriek 3y ago

I think a country can not exist with just big cities, or at least it should not be forced to. Small towns will always be more expensive than cities to maintain, this should not mean that small towns should then get less facilities. It's the equality vs equity discussion based in geography

irrational 3y ago
Why can a country not exist with just big cities?
- johannes1234321 3y ago
  Countries can exist with only big cities, but then they are dependant on other countries. In small cities you among other things have more agriculture and different forms of industry are also commonly pushed out of big cities.
- 5e92cb50239222b 3y ago
  Because you really don't want heavily polluting industries (oil refineries, chemical plants, steel mills, etc) close to a big city.
  - justin66 3y ago
    Name a big city that doesn't have heavily polluting industries nearby.
    - irrational 3y ago
      Portland, Oregon?
      - justin66 3y ago
        I don't know why you'd pose that as a question, but not having been to Portland I did the obvious thing and spent a minute in google maps. You're welcome. It turns out Portland has a steel mill not just nearby, but within its city limits. At the risk of stating the obvious, the point of my question wasn't to literally determine whether any big cities exist without heavy industry nearby, although that would be sort of interesting if it were the case. The point is that any such city is going to be an exception to the utterly ludicrous statement of the OP, "Because you really don't want heavily polluting industries (oil refineries, chemical plants, steel mills, etc) close to a big city." Big cities have always had this. The people there do not "want" them there any more or less than people in a small town would "want" them there.

sampo 3y ago

> Taxes should go to your current city/state to run the services there. Generally, families in rural areas have more children than families in big cities. There should be some kind of monetary compensation (money transfer from cities to rural areas) for the rural areas than produce more people, who then move to cities and contribute to their economy. This Japanese system sounds good.

zeroCalories 3y ago
Why should there be a transfer? Education is already paid for nationally in Japan. Parents pay their taxes while there. The towns are not owed anything. Even if things are a little more murky in other parts of the world, I would be more in favor of nationalizing education than giving wealth to dying towns.

Meekro 3y ago

Japan's government seems so functional compared to what I'm used to in the US, that I'm willing to give them the benefit of the doubt. Their governments are building all sorts of things every year while we can't seem to build a railroad track between LA and San Francisco in 20 years. Whatever they're doing over there is clearly working, and we in the US should be focusing on the plank of wood in our own eye and not the speck of sawdust in theirs. I'll admit that this "hometown tax" system has a certain amount of silliness, but wealth redistribution schemes often do. We're torn between "the weak should perish" and "some help wouldn't be so bad" and twist ourselves into pretzels trying to reconcile between these ideas. Plans like this hometown tax are the result of that, and some of our wealth redistribution efforts in the US probably seem no less strange to outsiders.

rtpg 3y ago
if it makes you feel better, major construction projects in Japan can also take years and years and years. The difference being that you don't have federalism throwing a wrench in projects halfway through. It's hard to look at America and not draw the conclusion that federalism is a major mistake. So many problems downstream from fickle localities.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > It's hard to look at America and not draw the conclusion that federalism is a major mistake. So many problems downstream from fickle localities. The "fickle localities" that share sovereignty with the federal government is a tradeoff between efficiency and resilience. Totalitarian places can ignore localities and push huge national projects. China now has the world's longest high-speed rail system; but the same country lost 40-80 million people not even a century ago due to huge national projects that didn't pan out so well, under Mao. The US has one of the highest median incomes in the world; among the top 5, by any measure. It's hard to understand why anyone would look at the system of governance in the US and call it a major mistake.
  - shortrounddev2 3y ago
    The difference between the US and China is not a central government which is empowered to make projects and a federalist system which gives undue influence to small interests. The difference is that the US is a democracy and China is a communist dictatorship. Tens of millions didn't die in china because a huge national projects; they died because they were ruled by a totalitarian dictator who had no regard whatsoever for the value of human life, and who was empowered purely by the threat (or the guarantee) of violence and not by the consent of the governed. There is an ocean of difference between western democracies and communist dictatorships, and it's not how we allocate authority to public works projects

downrightmike 3y ago

The US Federal Gov't basically bail out all US cities for infrastructure because the cities never have the money to fix infrastructure because they'd have to double the taxes collected at the least to meet the need of replacing infrastructure when it needs it, usually 30 years.

screye 3y ago
US cities are broken. Majority taxes are collected by residential zip code, and every person who works in the city, lives in the suburbs. The suburbs get wealthier off the economic productivity of the city. Only in the US would cities like Beverly hills-CA, Brookline-MA, Piedmont-CA exist. If you want the city to accommodate your suburban commute, (parking requirements, wider roads) and your safety (the homeless are bussed to the downtown core), then you need to pay taxes into the city. If you avail of cheap labor from the city's poor, then you need to be paying taxes into the city.
- gottorf 3y ago
  > Only in the US would cities like Beverly hills-CA, Brookline-MA, Piedmont-CA exist. I supposed places like Neilly-sur-Seine outside of Paris don't exist? I fail to see how rich, lower-density suburbs that well-to-do people prefer to live in while working in downtown centers is a uniquely American trait.
  - Scoundreller 3y ago
    Notoriously, Neuilly-sur-Seine does pay a penalty for its underbuilding (actually, complete non-building) of social housing. https://www.france24.com/en/20101220-french-cities-rather-pay-fine-invest-social-housing-municipal-urban-planning-fondation-abbe-pierre-homeless https://www.france24.com/en/20101220-french-cities-rather-pa...
  - screye 3y ago
    > Neilly-sur-Seine https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8863259,2.2692631,3a,75y,38.83h,106.97t/data=!3m6!1e1!3m4!1sfP55S2edJX4IIuWRoKH6OQ!2e0!7i16384!8i8192?entry=ttu https://www.google.com/maps/@48.8863259,2.2692631,3a,75y,38.... This does not look like low density suburb to me. The town only gets a commuter rail, and driving into Paris is a total nightmare. Suburbs are no the issue. Destroying cities to accommodate suburbs is. The suburbs I mention are walking distance to the city's downtown, take advantage of positives of dense urban development near them, while doing everything in their power from letting density touch their own neighborhood. It is selfishness at its worst. Paris has a population of 2 million, is a neat circle and clearly deprioritizes the needs of anyone outside the peripheral boulevard. You are making my point for me. Historically, suburbs were low density because an outer donut has more area than an inner circle. In the absence of land development regulation, density reflects the demand per sq/ft. If Americans were so sure of low density suburbs being a natural outcome, then they wouldn't wield every dirty weapon to ban land development in the aforementioned suburbs. In most American cities, the city does not control its own road or transportation budgets. This means that suburbs get to affect the lawmaking in the city, but cities do not get to do vice versa. I am not even going to address brain-dead laws like Prop 13 or rent-control that further destroy a city's ability to govern itself.

olddustytrail 3y ago

Your comment is ignorant and myopic. The area I come from has switched from being hugely important to completely worthless multiple times over the past few centuries. Even then, being profitable is not the same as being useful to society.

zeroCalories 3y ago
So we should be subsidizing every small town in the hopes that maybe some day they begin contributing back to society? Can I go into the mountains and demand a sewage line and hospital be built next to me?
- pauldenton 3y ago
  We could penalize big cities for the negative externalities they cause on surrounding cities.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    Seems fair. What externalities?
- fkyoureadthedoc 3y ago
  No, you can make bad faith arguments and get ignored though.
  - zeroCalories 3y ago
    I really want to ignore small towns, so maybe we can compromise!
    - anigbrowl 3y ago
      Did you grow up in one and not enjoy it? You seem extremely passionate about this issue. I can kind of relate, but although I left a small town in favor of city life, I don't think it's necessarily the ideal, or that the richness and complexity of cities makes smaller scales redundant.

Aerroon 3y ago

We're living in the age of Urbanization Plus, where people aren't just moving from rural areas to cities, they're also moving from smaller cities to bigger cities in large numbers. It wouldn't surprise me if we were all trending towards South Korea your situations where half the population lives in the capital (except in the US - there will be a few cities everyone moves to, but probably not DC). The problem is jobs. People want to move where the jobs are. Now that farming isn't a big job creator and many factories have moved away then it's all about commerce. That requires a large concentration of people. Cities will often not have enough to offer to make a company move to their city instead of some other city. Especially nowadays when people get really upset over a city offering a good deal to some business (eg Amazon and New York a few years ago).

dragonwriter 3y ago
> It wouldn't surprise me if we were all trending towards South Korea your situations where half the population lives in the capital (except in the US - there will be a few cities everyone moves to, but probably not DC). Though the political capital was moved to the South, economically the effective capital of the US remained (and remains) NYC.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  Same with South Korea. The capital was technically moved to Sejong in the 2010s, but almost every Ministry that matters is still up north in Seoul.
- sib 3y ago
  While NYC is great, and our biggest city, etc., one difference from other countries is that New York State (the whole thing), only represents 8.1% of US GDP. Even if you add all of New Jersey and Connecticut, you get about 12.3% of total GDP. As states, both California & Texas have greater share of GDP than NY. So US GDP is much less concentrated than in some other countries.
  - dragonwriter 3y ago