[pgz]

I always found this system very interesting, since the citizen can decide how some of their tax money is spent (besides voting).

On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy, mostly to be squandered by corruption, clientelism, and organized crime.

[SmellyGeekBoy]

> On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy, mostly to be squandered by corruption, clientelism, and organized crime.

Heh, funny that richer parts of the EU say this about Italy itself.

[simonebrunozzi]

(disclaimer: I'm Italian)

Unfortunately that's blatantly false. Italy paid contributions to the EU in vast excess of contributions that were taken by Italians. Didn't find historical figures, but this is the most recent [0], and by memory I know that the same unbalance has been going on for a long time:

- Total EU spending in Italy: € 11.592 billion - Total Italian contribution to the EU budget: € 13.940 billion"

If your goal was instead to make a funny joke, you succeeded at being offensive to me (as an Italian).

In all seriousness, your comment feels to me as equivalent to a guy writing about how women waste money more than they earn (I would be the woman in this case).

[0]: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/countries/member-c...

[oh_sigh]

Italy generally pays ~3-4 billion euros more into the EU budget than it receives from the EU. Ireland is much more of a mooch than Italy

https://english.eu.dk/en/faq/net-contribution

[daveoflynn]

Ireland is, as of 2016, a net contributor to the EU; this year the country is expecting to contribute 2.7bn€

Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/ireland-s-contri...

[jessriedel]

That chart is a very welcome contribution to this discussion... but man is it terribly designed at both the web-design level and the data-presentation level.

[malbertife]

Italy is a net contributor to the EU.

[pcmaffey]

As they say, everywhere has its "south".

[edm0nd]

As someone from Louisiana, :C

[pcmaffey]

;) https://www.google.com/maps/@24.5482831,-93.6932521,6.02z

[edm0nd]

That's sorta spooky Peter ;)

[jawilson2]

The Mer-people in the Gulf are welfare queens

[aussiegeek]

Once you get south enough, it flips. Queensland for example.

[tomhoward]

That's not really true, at least in terms of GST distribution (which is the most significant/relevant measure of tax distributions to Australian states). Tasmania and South Australia are much more heavily subsidised than Qld, which is now close to parity (probably due to the mining activity there).

Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-05/gst-redistribution-de...

[rtomanek]

Not sure what you find funny about it?

And I don't think they do. Some people, sure. Every population has a bunch of people who would say things like that. Because they can, because they enjoy it, it likely makes them feel better, or so they think.

And there are people who enjoy listening to them and repeating what they say.

[spenczar5]

I think the humor is in the irony, of an northern Italian saying "sheesh, I can't believe my money goes to the south, where it gets wasted!" and then a northern European saying exactly the same thing.

It's not about whether it's true, or accurate, it's just "funny" because irony can be funny.

[HarryHirsch]

That's just because their unwashed masses are only familiar with economic migrants from Southern Italy. If you paid any of them a holiday to Turin or Milan they wouldn't know what befell them, they couldn't even identify the country!

[coldtea]

Thanks for the subtle racism towards southern italians...

[skrebbel]

There is no racism in that comment, GP is making an observation that is, to my experience, factually correct. Many (Northern) European countries have a number of economic migrant minorities (eg Turks, Moroccans, etc) and Italians (chiefly Italians whose (grand)parents came from southern Italy) are a relatively big one in some areas.

Just like the "unwashed masses" have a bad impression of eg Turkey based on racism/classism towards their local Turkish-$NATIONALITY minority, they have the idea that Italy has to be a poor backward place based on racism/classism towards the local Italian-$NATIONALY minority.

[delinka]

Are Souther Italians their own race?

[coldtea]

Somewhat, since they include ancient Greek and old-time islamic ancestry (as far as I know). According to Wikipedia: "There is a noticeable genetic difference between Sardinians, Northern Italians and Southern Italians. People from the North seem to be close to the French population, while those from the South overlap with Balkan and other southern European populations".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy

But that's beside the point. I invoked the modern use of the term "racism" that includes different ways of segregating a population and not just genetics. "Southerners are lazy, corrupt" etc. Call it cultural racism if you wish.

[Camillo]

> since they include ancient Greek and old-time islamic ancestry (as far as I know)

AFAIK most of the genetic variation in Italy dates back from ancient times. Everyone thinks "of course, it was the Islamic invasions in Sicily and the Germanic invasions in the North", but the genetic impact of those was surprisingly small. The variation was there before.

The Greek colonization of southern Italy is the one historical migration that _did_ have significant impact, according to the article.

[enedil]

It's not modern use of racism. If you think so, all you do is you're praising ignorance.

[narag]

I thought that the current consensus was that races don't really exist.

"Modern" racism can be more subtle than that, more about xenophobia or just classism.

[ensignro2340]

> I thought that the current consensus was that races don't really exist.

Races do not exist biologically[0][1], but they do 'exist' as a social construct[2][3][4]. And I second your second sentence :)

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrKrGkgeww4&index=4&list=PLy...

[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism

[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we...

[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/without-prejudice/20...

[barry-cotter]

Depends whether you’re talking about the consensus among critical race theorists or population geneticists.

The latter have no problem with dividing different people into groups based on ancestry based on what continent their ancestor came from though the word race is passé.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancestry-informative_marker

[googlryas]

Not technically but if you had 1000 naked northern and southern Italians in a room you could probably achieve an 85+% success rate in segmenting them into their respective class. Northern Italians generally look much more like Germans or Swiss - on average taller, lighter skin, lighter eye color, whereas southern Italians are much swarthier and slightly shorter, coming from many years of arab, greek, and north african control.

[southphillyman]

Perhaps this explains why Italian Americans don't really look like the Italians I see on Italian television shows? Seems most of them migrated from southern Italy/Sicily.

[StavrosK]

Ugh, misplaced pedantry, the worst kind of pedantry.

[dsfyu404ed]

Not really a race per se. Northern Italy views southern Italy the same way SV views Alabama.

edit: We done fixed some grammar.

[na85]

Per se

[HarryHirsch]

"Them" refers to the "unwashed masses", not the emigrants from Southern Italy. I'm convinced that in Southern Italy everyone is aware of Turin and Milan, but there are places in Germany where everyone thinks all Italy is like Carlo Levi's Gagliano. Thet's because their Italians were all from Gagliano and similar places.

[narag]

...around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions...

And then the cause of the problem is presented as if it were the solution.

[asmithmd1]

For US income taxes the only amount of your taxes that you can direct is $3 for the presidential election fund. Why not expand this and let you pick from a dozen or so categories?

[dorfsmay]

So people educated with public funds but without kids will allocate 0$ to education, then complain that youths these days just hang in the street doing no good, and allocate more of their tax towards policing?

[karmelapple]

We could set minimum amounts to go to schools so that even if every single person in the country allocated $0 of their discretionary fund to public education, the public education system would still have the funds needed.

And the default, if someone doesn't choose any categories, would go to some proportion that Congress would decide. However, allowing even a "small" portion - which could still be billions of dollars - to be allocated directly by taxpayers would gather some very interesting data.

It would be very interesting to see which agencies would attract the most money, and what strategies they'd use to attract people to give their discretionary tax dollars to them.

Would people give more to the CDC, NIH, NASA, the Dept of Housing, Dept of Transportation, Dept of Homeland Security, ... ? We could start to get a direct temperature of what is ailing people the most and what they want their money to fund.

Government agencies could even "advertise," or at least try to get positive news articles that really highlight what they're accomplishing, to spread the word about the good they're doing. It could engage people more in exactly how their money is being spent, and care further about government, because they have at least a small hand in directly funding different departments.

[monetus]

Quakers have been trying to implement a form of this on religious grounds.

At a used bookstore, I found a book(1) about Marian Franz that illuminated the history behind their attempts.

Weirdly enough, there was a personal dedication in the front by David Gross(2), one her colleagues and someone who wrote extensively about the 'War Tax Resistance'.

I'm not religious, so it kinda made me sad, but that book sent me down a rabbit hole. Could you live on 20k a year to avoid income tax and contributing to a war effort? Its impressive.

(1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553714-a-persistent-voi...

(2) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/can-qui...

[_bfhp]

I found the Atlantic story really interesting. Thanks for sharing

[ubernostrum]

We could set minimum amounts to go to schools

I lived for quite a while in Kansas, where the state constitution makes adequate funding of schools mandatory. The result is a never-ending series of lawsuits in which the legislature claims to have provided adequate funding, and a court finds that they haven't and orders them to increase or redistribute the funding (sometimes it's found that they under-funded the schools overall, sometimes it's found that they distributed the funding in ways which result in some districts not having adequate support).

This and a few other back-and-forth fights led to the former governor and his party-aligned state legislature attempting to change the selection process for judges, and attaching a rider to that law which would completely defund the state court system if the courts ruled they didn't have the authority to change the selection process, and hinted that if they still ruled against him he'd attempt to recall the entire state supreme court and replace them with partisans who'd support him.

[_bfhp]

Looking into this it looks like the Koch brothers just... installed this guy with millions in PAC money? Sounds like a campaign finance reform issue?

[uiri]

I thought that public schools and policing were funded in the US by local and state taxes not by the Federal government (which is what the Presidential election fund refers to).

[dorfsmay]

I'm not in the U.S. so didn't realised this, but my point was that I'm afraid that most people will want to allocate tax to their pet issue without considering the greater good.

In my mind part of the job of elected politicians is to ensure that tax money is spent where their platform said it would.

[kevin_thibedeau]

Then people would be gravely offended by who was and wasn't on the list of choices.

[Brockenstein]

Well they're already greatly offended by taxes and the idea that civilization requires money to run...

I think outside of being offended, you'd just have a hard to getting any agreements on what would qualify.

[asah]

I'd love to see a large scale survey where people allocate their taxes, and see what the allocation actually comes to!

The HN crowd might over-allocate $1000s per person to NSF, NIH and NASA and short Social Security while 100+M people contribute $0 to science, but depend on SS to survive. We might end up with the same budget but people feeling more in control.

We'd also see large scale advertising which is actually a good thing: ads are pretty cheap/efficient, make people feel better about their government and society, and employ an army of creative people. I imagine you wouldn't see branches of government running negative ads against each other - it would be more like the feel-good military recruiting ads today.

Sorry if this sounds utopian, I've had a rough week (in addition to everybody's rough week) and need something to feel good about.

[jfim]

That would end up in a popularity contest between agencies, which I doubt is desirable, especially considering some of those disliked agencies [1] are actually useful (like the FDA and the department of education).

And hang in there, the weekend is almost there. :-)

[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/whic...

[jasonbarrah]

I agree, I'm afraid we'd end up with the government spending equivalent of a poorly planned college potluck. Everyone brings chips and paper plates and there is no actual food.

[killerdhmo]

There is a game if you want to try it for yourself. I agree I would be curious to aggregate https://www.federalbudgetchallenge.org/

[asah]

awesome! I took it, did pretty well: $2.61T spending decreases $3.94T increased revenue $2.85T deficit (i.e. tackle via economic growth aka increased revenue due to increased GDP)

interesting to see how impactful a public health plan is ($158B) and raising the limit on social security income ($633B) and 2% VAT ($885B).

[mempko]

I think because, at the federal level, taxes don't dictate how much one part of the pie gets vs the other. Budgets determine that. The federal government doesn't use taxes to pay for different parts of that pie. Taxes are a way to control inflation and influence behavior, that's it.

[aidenn0]

You an direct a massive amount of your taxes to any charity you want, so long as you are not hit by AMT: donations are tax-deductible.

[moonka]

That just means you don't have to pay tax on the amount you donate, it's not a 1:1 reduction in taxes.

[ai_ia]

On a side note, is there any system that exists where citizen can decide to a greater autonomy how there tax money is spent?

[gph]

Libertarianism. I hear they are testing it out in Oregon.

/s

[mmirate]

Replace "Oregon" by "New Hampshire", and you can say the words with pride instead of sarcasm.

[int_19h]

Still going to be sarcasm, sorry. How many of those who pledged to move have actually moved?

[mmirate]

Sorry, I don't have those numbers on-hand.

What I do have on-hand is that NH has a higher median income than any other nation in the world (incl Luxembourg), despite being a net-payer of federal taxes.

(Source: https://mises.org/wire/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...)

[danso]

It's true that NH has traditionally been in the top-tier of states when it comes to median household income. In the 2016 ACS, it appears to have reached the top:

https://www.pressherald.com/2017/09/13/the-state-with-highes...

But its lead is not an overwhelming one. Connecticut's 2016 median hh income was just ~$350 less. According to the the previous ACS in 2015, NH was number 8. And 6 of the top 7 were traditionally blue states.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...

- 1. Maryland

- 2. DC

- 3. Hawaii

- 4. Alaska

- 5. New Jersey

- 6. Connecticut

- 7. Massachusetts

[int_19h]

I seriously doubt it has anything to do with the FSP.

Of course, the median income metric is not the end-all be-all, either. For example, it ignores all the state-provided benefits that those high taxes pay for.

[21]

> On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy

Everybody says that, Catalonia that it pays more to Spain that it receives back, California and New York to the rest of US...

But it's the only way to have nation states, otherwise we'd have to go back to city states (which some people like Taleb actually advice).

[blattimwind]

Tax redistribution inside nations or in nation unions (like the EU) is pretty much an investment. It generally generates more money than spent on it.

E.g. Germany is the largest net contributor to the EU, but guess what would happen if Germany decided to stop putting out those few billions a year. Yeah, not so good for the economy (not just of Germany, pretty much everyone). Turns out, those few billions spurred trade much greater than that. It's literally "one stick, alone, weak — many sticks, together, stronk". Just that the bundle is stronger than its constituents.

(I've heard the UK is working earnestly on an experiment confirming this.)

[thaumasiotes]

> It's literally "one stick, alone, weak — many sticks, together, stronk".

I can't wait for tax redistribution to be renamed "fascism". :D

[barrow-rider]

For the uninitiated: Italian Fascism was so named as a reference to classical Roman Fasces, which was a bundle of sticks or rods wrapped around an axe that symbolized authority.

[jlawson]

It symbolized solidarity, not so much authority. The small sticks work together and act as one.

[int_19h]

Fasces very much symbolized authority initially. It is no coincidence that the rods in fasces were birch. And, of course, there's that ax in the middle...

[jasonbarrah]

There is nothing wrong with some sticks working together to get better deals on medical supplies or defend from other sticks in time of need.

The issue is that you are forcing the stick to give up its national identity, borders, fishing rights, and laws in order to be part of the bundle.

[vvillena]

The different national identities within Europe are not going anywhere. Broken English is already the common language of Europe, but the regional language and culture every part has won't disappear. A little traveling is enough to confirm this for oneself.

As for all the rest, they can't disappear soon enough. None of those things work in favor of the general people. And while we keep cultural and national identities, we could also do away with nationalist politics. They are irrational and nowadays it just feels like Religion Wars 2.0.

[blattimwind]

The EU is dedicated to preserving national culturalisms (if that's the word), they passed so much legislation related to that, that this is fairly self-evident.

[gaius]

"one stick, alone, weak — many sticks, together, stronk". Just that the bundle is stronger than its constituents.

Isn't there a word for a bundle of sticks bound together?

[gshubert17]

fasces: (in ancient Rome) a bundle of rods with a projecting ax blade, carried by a lictor as a symbol of a magistrate's power. In the 20th century used as an emblem of authority in Fascist Italy.

[labster]

> It's literally "one stick, alone, weak — many sticks, together, stronk".

So that's why they say those people are living in the sticks.

[dsfyu404ed]

California and New York are the size of countries. Why couldn't they function on their own as countries? I think a lot of states would be better served if they operated more autonomously and the federal government managed less of their business. I get that in certain cases that's not the optimal situation for resource allocation but freedom has a price.

[pantonia]

They are the size of countries like Italy. Read above, they too are annoyed at the freeloaders they have to support. Why should the Bay Area have to subsidize Bakersfield?? Make them city-states and Manhattan will resent the Bronx (not that they don't now).

[dmurray]

They could function as independent countries, for better or worse. But it generally looks like states don't want more autonomy: over 240 years the US federal government has taken on more and more power at the expense of the states, facing minimal resistance apart from a single bloody civil war where the heroes are universally agreed to be the side fighting for more powers for the federal government.

[dragonwriter]

> civil war where the heroes are universally agreed to be the side fighting for more powers for the federal government.

The Union wasn't fighting for more powers for the federal government, just for the integrity of the existing federal government and it's powers.

The war resulted in some expansion of federal power, but that wasn't what motivated the Union.

[dmurray]

Sure, that's a reasonable way to look at it, and the only way consistent with having the victors write the history books. In the same way that the Commerce Clause always allowed the federal government to regulate growing wheat for personal consumption, the Constitution already allowed the federal government to forbid slavery - it just took a civil war or a supreme court hearing to make sure everyone agreed on that. Under that view, the 13th Amendment was legally redundant, but was passed just to leave absolutely no room for doubt.

[dragonwriter]

> the Constitution already allowed the federal government to forbid slavery

The Union wasn't (particularly the slave states in the Union weren't) fighting to abolish slavery, the Union wasn't fighting to preserve the Union, a goal to which the popular (in most of the North) cause of abolition had been deliberately subordinated in the elections prior to the war.

OTOH, by seceding, the rebel states also lost their leverage on preserving slavery within the Union, so the whole rebellion backfired. Abolition probably would have happened eventually without the war, but it wouldn't have been right away.

[ericd]

That's the point of Federalism - local autonomy where it makes sense, coordinated direction from above where it makes sense.

Small countries don't have much leverage on their own on the world stage. CA and NY are almost certainly better off as part of the greater whole.

[mikeash]

I don’t think this would necessarily result in more freedom. Remember that when the question of states versus the federal government was definitively answered a century and a half ago, the side in favor of more autonomy for individual states was pushing for that so that they could continue to own people as property.

[Silfen]

At the risk of opening the world's largest pressurized can of worms... sort of. There is an argument to be made that The South cared about state's rights only in the instrumental sense that it allowed them to protect slavery. They were also in favor of stronger federal government when it protected slavery, e.g. fugitive slave laws.

[mikeash]

My point is that states’ rights and freedom aren’t really related. Often the federal government forces freedom on the states against their will. Slavery is a really obvious example.

[int_19h]

> Often the federal government forces freedom on the states against their will.

Often it's the other way around - for example, in the pre-Civil War era, a big point of contention (that was specifically cited later by those states that tried to secede) was that the federal government enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced the free states to, basically, participate in enforcement of slavery on behalf of the slave states.

[jessaustin]

Few states would institute slavery or really anything else remotely so monstrous if they were released from the Union tomorrow.

[Silfen]

Yeah, and I agree. My comment was more of a tangent that struck a nerve :)

[DrJokepu]

Economic inequalities exist on every level. In a sovereign city state, the wealthier neighborhoods would subsidize the less wealthy neighborhoods.

[jessaustin]

It's inevitable given the political structure. Since votes are distributed by area and population rather than by wealth, wealthier political divisions will necessarily bribe poorer ones into political compromises that are closer to the wealthier divisions' preferences than they would have been without bribery. The only way to prevent that would be for the overall polity to have much lower taxes and thus much less money to divert to interdivisional bribery. (In many polities, this would be very much against the preferences of the wealthier divisions, so this "solution" is never seriously contemplated.)

Of course, TFA describes a different way to come to substantially the same result. Tokyo still makes the important decisions.

[simias]

"Bribe" is way too loaded, you could also call it social justice and redistribution, a way to give poorer areas better chances to improve their life. Saying that redistribution is bribery is about the same level of discourse as saying that taxes are theft and prison kidnapping.

[jessaustin]

Those who pay attention to our "justice" system might go along with part of that... Besides lots of these transfers have nothing to do with "social justice"; they're military spending or Drug War stupidity or similar. The point is, if Kansas were run the way that actual Kansans would democratically choose to run it, it would be even more awful than it already is. (It would also be better, in some ways, but we don't need to argue about that.) Those sweet federal dollars convince them to make different political decisions than they would have made otherwise.

[gknoy]

> Saying that redistribution is bribery is about the same level of discourse as saying that taxes are theft and prison kidnapping

I have friends who say literally that (taxes are theft). How does one argue against that? I have a hard time finding a way that it's technically wrong. I mean, taxation is literally the state taking your money (whether you want it or not, voted against it or not, etc).

I can't help but feel that there's some difference, but I can't find what it is. Do you have suggestions on readings that would inform me better on the issue?

[jlawson]

Thieves usually don't give you something in return. It's more like "a deal you can't refuse". You get something back, but it's probably not just what you wanted. But it's something.

Taxation is much more like "protection money" than theft.

[overdrivetg]

Wait - are you claiming that New Jersey is somehow bribing New Mexico for policy concessions?

https://www.moneytips.com/is-your-state-a-net-payer-or-a-net...

[innocentfelon]

Seems plausible. 1000mi of mostly rural interstate highways (how NJ gets its goods from points west), plus nuclear weapons development, testing, and disposal are popular enough with the NM locals, as are anti-poverty programs, but yank the federal funding, and the locals would be far less friendly to NJ telling NM to supply or pay for these things on its own.

[jessaustin]

New Mexico may be a bit of an outlier since they aren't deep red like some other western states? I would certainly say that New Jersey is bribing e.g. Montana, North Dakota, etc. If the residents of those states had their way, the Department of Interior would be run differently, entitlements would be lower, Israel wouldn't get so much support, etc.

[kevin_thibedeau]

> entitlements would be lower

That's just the political rhetoric. Red-staters love their entitlements just so long as they go to the "right" people.

[jessaustin]

The red states are not a monolith. You might get a majority of support for some entitlements in Georgia or West Virginia. You won't get that in Wyoming or the Dakotas. Maybe those aren't the entitlements you're talking about, though. This "right people" entitlement: which one is that? Which entitlement goes to white males but not minority females? If you mean some boondoggle for rich people, I already mentioned the military and Drug War spending upthread. Besmirching all entitlements by association with that crap would be dishonest.