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by OutOfHere 13 days ago
A core issue as I see it is that the police has too much money. Why are people willingly paying so much in taxes? Why don't people move to lower tax cities and counties? Granted, fines also contribute to their income.

There are ways of lowering crime that don't require police militarization, some of which are covered in https://youtu.be/YJTPGu2E4qk.
3 comments
mike_bob 13 days ago
As a country, we spend nearly as much on domestic police (~$250B) as China does on their military each year. And from what I've seen, there is no correlation with increases in police spending and drops in crime rates. It's pretty disturbing if you think about it.
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eclipticplane 13 days ago
It's a mass jobs program with a powerful set of unions behind it.
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jmuguy 11 days ago
A big part of messaging for the republican party, for at least as long as I've been alive, has been that criminals are everywhere and constantly doing more and more heinous crimes. So if you don't give the police more and more money and ridiculous unconstitutional authority and military tech, these criminals will come in your house and do all sorts of crimes to you and your family.

Its funny to watch them still run on this playbook, even at the exclusion of other more obvious issues. For instance the current republican campaign for the senate seat in NC is all about crime, while we can literally watch gas prices and everything else go up day by day.

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mmooss 13 days ago
It's an interesting question: Isn't Texas widely marketed as a 'low tax area'?

It may be a 'low income tax area', with more regressive taxes used to fund the state and an equal or higher total? Texans need to pay for the same things, generally, as people in Massachusetts (though maybe they don't invest as much in schools, health care, etc.).

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cucumber3732842 13 days ago
You vastly under-estimate how expensive social services programs are. The people of Texas can pay less have piles of money for 1984 equipped police cars and highschool football stadiums and other boondoggles by simply not having those programs.

Is it the right thing to do? ehhh....

That said Texas isn't that low tax overall compared to a lot of other states. They have pretty oppressive property taxes.

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