When I moved to America, I was surprised by the amount of fees. Fees to pick up garbage, visit a doctor, and drive on most highways.
The country I lived in had higher taxes, but almost no fees.
Americans seem dumb when it comes to taxes and fees.
It’s the illusion of freedom that Americans are obsessed with. The idea is that we are free to choose our insurance provider, doctor, utility provider, etc.
The reality is we are stuck with the insurance plan our employer provides or that we get on the healthcare marketplace and we go to the doctor that our insurance company partners with. Utility providers are restricted to whoever provides service at our address.
Add to that, Americans as a whole are extremely selfish. My Uber-conservative parents and in-laws would give us their last dollar but thumb their nose at the idea of helping someone they don’t know.
None of us have the actual numbers, but I would bet a hefty amount that if we just socialized everything that we already pay for, the bill each month would not be much different.
From everything I've seen, the bill would be cheaper.
My Uber-conservative parents and in-laws would give us their last dollar but thumb their nose at the idea of helping someone they don’t know.
You see that a lot with people on the right (it drives a lot of their opinions that put them on that side of things.) Fundamentally it is an inability to meaningfully experience people outside of their bubble as real people like the ones inside of it and rather than work to rationally overcome that limitation they simply treat everyone outside of that bubble like an object. Almost nothing the right does to others is an unreasonable or unacceptable way to treat an object and is usually something they would never do to someone they actually intuitively perceive as a real person.
While we can (and should) hold people responsible for working to rationally overcome those limitations, the reality is that we all have them to a greater or lesser degree and there will always be people who aren't able to do better than they do now.
Not only is it unfair to them to maintain an environment wherein they are expected to have empathic abilities well beyond what they are able to manage (and to have them, fairly, be treated as though they are cruel and heartless for it, when if they only had to deal with situations within their grasp they'd actually be very kind and caring people) but pragmatically we just cannot expect to overcome the issues caused by that without making changes. Sociatally we cannot keep setting people up for failure and then being mad at them for the issues that failure causes.
NB it's also important to acknowledge that none of us are able to perfectly experience strangers as exactly the same thing as people we know and love and that while people can suck more or less at this, all of us are being asked to be better at it than we reasonably can be.
Americans have a cultural dislike of taxes (for a wide array of reasons, including selection bias on who actually moved to America).
Thus, Americans (painting with a broad brush) tend to favor policies that charge people who do/consume a thing, rather than the tax base as a whole.
I find this immensely frustrating, but it is unfortunately true.
Also, many Americans dislike taxes because they don't want "their" money being spent on people with whom they feel no affinity. It's always going to be a problem in large countries with diverse populations.
And if it seems like I'm beating around the bush and phrasing this comment in charitable terms, it's because I am. Deliberately.
There are some communities in the USA that consistently vote down funding any sort of public fire department through taxes. Obviously they still need a fire department, so their "solution" is "private fire companies" with a subscription model.
These private firefighters will show up to any fire and they'll save lives ... but after they pull you out they'll let your house burn to the ground if you didn't buy a fire protection plan from them.
I agree. People like this are like "please charge me subscription fees for everything I do." These are the people that will pay car manufacturers to "unlock" heated seats, etc.
What zero regulation on utilities and property tax does to a mfer.
I'm from California and in the income tax bracket that would definitely pay fewer taxes in Texas, but I'm happy to pay more because I feel like we get a lot for our taxes here. There's still waste, but we have so many social safety nets in comparison to other states it is well worth it. Not to mention the government has been running a budget surplus which is given directly back to Californians rather than pocketed by the government.
So I’m hearing you don’t want your tax money spent on giving people tanks to arrest children for having abortions? Then where do your taxes go?
Texas had a budget surplus too. They decided to give it to people who own real estate.
Only landowners should be allowed to vote, right?
"Im happy to pay more" lol stay there, we are happy you are paying more as well
It's less "paying more" and more about reallocating funds. If taxes pay for Healthcare, they don't have to pay for Healthcare so they would be happy to pay more taxes, for example. If the roads are maintained they end up paying less for vehicle maintenance. If public transportation becomes more available they pay less in car maintenance and gas (and possibly able to get rid of their car entirely, a HUGE difference financially, which would come from a likely unnoticeable increase in taxes).
If the money goes to weapons or corporate benefits or legal costs fighting to defend unconstitutional laws in court for political theater (or, as a Florida resident, paying taxes to have migrants in Texas shipped to New York, which helps literally nobody except the person paid to move them), that doesn't chip anything away from what taxpayers already pay for, so it's just additional cost.
I'm an American who has been living in Turkey for many years.
In Turkey, the political leaders in both sides of the aisle tell you not to pay income tax or property tax or payroll tax or any of the normal things Americans complain about. What is the result? An iPhone costs more than $3k. A ford focus that costs about $20k new in the US is over $50k in Turkey. EVERY package you receive is opened by the post office and inspected to see how much they can tax you. If you leave Turkey and want to bring the things you bought with you, you are taxed an exit fee.. You can potentially be charged three or four times for the same item.
Whenever I hear Americans bitching about taxes it drives me insane. They have no idea what they're asking for. The government needs money to function and they are going to get it one way or another..
Not only does the government needs money, services centralized in the hands of the government end up costing less because they have a monopoly and they don't run them for a profit! Over here road insurance is private only for the vehicle, our insurance as today users (you know, the stuff that costs a fortune to insure because breaking both legs costs more to the system than whatever car you're driving) costs peanuts in comparison to places where it's the private sector that controls it (if I lived across the border from where I am my registration + insurance cost would be double what it is now).
Trains aren't important because they make a lot of money. Trains are important because they make the land around them worth a lot of money. Businesses near train stations get more customers. People pay more for houses near train stations. Cities with strong transit systems have a higher GDP.
Despite this, England privatised its rail system and expects the rail companies to make a profit. Instead, English people are poorer and the government has less money.
services centralized in the hands of the government end up costing less because they have a monopoly
Where I live privately owned utility companies provide much cheaper services than govt. Also govt is very bad at providing them consistently (if people outside of big city lose electricity for example, they have to go and block nearest highway, otherwise govt just ignores their complaints)
I guess monopoly might be beneficial for some period of time but ultimately it's bad, both in private and public sector.
I understand that the government needs money to function, I just want them to stop taking 30%+ of my income in order to buy billion dollar boats that shoot million dollar bullets.
I'm okay with the 30% so long as they stop using it to buy more and more expensive toys to murder brown children with. We're not getting what we pay for as a society, but the idea that we can make that right by privatizing everything is ridiculous and just continuously doesn't work.
Sidenote: part of the reason those things cost SO much more is because they're also no longer domestic products. They're now imports, such as Americans paying more for Mercedes Benz than you would in Germany.
One of my favorite examples of this is Starbucks. The already psychotic 6 dollar drink in the US is 9 dollars in Thailand 😳
What you said about Turkey is mostly true. Your causality is wrong. The reason Turkey is absurdly expensive and full of taxes is extreme amount of corruption caused by radical islamist government going full nepotism. Our head of economy was literally the groom of Erdogan for so many years.
Disclaimer: I am a Turkish dude who haplens to be an economics PhD student.
Almost like their regressive taxation is working exactly as planned
Been trying to point this shit out to people for at least a decade. Texas property taxes are insane. Every road they build or redo is full toll or has "express" toll lanes. My water bill has over $100 a month that are taxes no one talks about tacked onto it, which seem to go up every few months.
Everyone used to point out the low cost of living as why you wanted to live in Texas, but that hasn't been true for a while. Been to New York, California and Colorado multiple times in recent years. Everything cost about the same. These are places the right wingers used to scream about how much more expensive they are. Decent neighborhoods around Austin or DFW cost just as much for housing as most "expensive" cities now and exise taxes are insane here. Anyone not making like a quarter mill+ a year is paying a way higher tax percentage in Texas than most states with income taxes.
Wowie! Who ever could have guessed that mass electing boot lickers and toadies of corporations and the super rich could ever result in the 99% being fucked over at every turn? I sure hope they have a good reason to not elect people with the working class's interests at heart and not just because some lobbyists said liberal bad!
Haha fucking liberals, am I right, gang? What's that mister mega donor? Right away sir. GARGLMRAUGHLMLHGHGHLH
And plenty of people will continue to vote against their own interests, and the rest of us will be blamed for not compelling them to do literally anything that would actually help themselves out.
And plenty of people will continue to vote against their own interests,
When you take white supremacy into account, many of those people are voting FOR one of their primary self interests.
One could and should argue that irrational racism is never in anyone's actual self interest, even if they've convinced themselves it feels good.
That seems like saying doing crack is in the crackhead's self interest because the want to, but we all know the detriments substantially outweigh the momentarily benefit.
One of my main hobbies that I do with a group of 30ish guys most weekends, is filled with guys who just refuse to understand this. They're all blue collar and refuse to realize they're voting against their own interests.
I have no problem with paying taxes. I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered instead of to corporate pockets. Universal healthcare, better schooling and teacher wages, public transportation, a power grid that doesn't go out when it's needed most, actual road maintenance instead of just cones blocking off most of the lanes with no workers.
Edit: Also have the super wealthy pay their share as well.
I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered
The really fun part of this is that if we all banded together and negotiated as one nation of almost 400 million people almost everything would be cheaper than if we all negotiate separately. Everything could be better and cheaper, but the "freedom" of the US is the freedom of every antelope to negotiate on its own with the local pride of lions. It's the freedom to get forced into bad deals with the threat of homelessness, it's the freedom to starve, it's the freedom to work and scrimp and save your whole life and then have all that wiped out by medical bills after an accident that's someone else's fault.
Mother of fuck if all the local governments teamed up on infrastructure it would be the worse nightmare I could imagine. I would quit in a second.
The only way at all public infrastructure moves forward (I do a lot of work in that sector) is in smaller governments that don't have the leverage to sabotage their own projects. I wish I was lying. The bigger the local government the more of a cost disease obsolete crap they get. I don't drink the water in Toronto for a reason. I know the shysters who built their stuff.
Smaller governments are willing to update their specs, they are open to ideas that make their equipment last longer, they have an incentive to having working systems instead of backcharges.
Also fun fact I have openly threaten one of those government contract cockroaches to tattle on him to every anti-government media source I could find unless he fixed the specs of a system.
Ironically, your country could raise taxes a whole lot for the rich, making them somewhat uncomfortable. The next step for them would be: put all of the wealth in another financial paradise. There's plenty of those.
But let's say every country coordinates to control cash flows, that would be quite pretty ngl
I'm not denying we do live in a special corrupt time, but government is inherently inefficient due to its scope and wage pressure from private industry 1
Changes in real world wage movements across sectors account for about a third of the rise in the cost of U.S. government services between 1959 and 1989, while relatively slower productivity in the public sector acccounts for the remaining two-thirds. Even though it is slower, however, the productivity record still is positive even in the labor intensive government sector. Consequently Baumol argues that the public's likely future objection to necessary increases in the share of expenditures over the next 50 years will betray a fiscal illusion unless policymakers take pains to dissolve it.
It’s a goddamn shame that Texas is such a political shithole of a state. The land is beautiful, (most) of the people are awesome, the food’s great. But it’s literal hell to try to exist there.
I'm going there this Christmas, and perhaps celebrating NYE in Austin. Looking forward to the food, sights, and the people
Ribbit
I pay $700/month to live in my own house
Cost of living (housing, food, energy/gas) is higher too though. I wonder what the PPP of California and Texas are. Well I don't have to wronder anymore, according to 2019 numbers California has a higher PPP than Texas: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_adjusted_per_capita_personal_income
Edit: Nvm, it's the PCPI. But I guess that's what I'm really looking for. Per capita personal income * purchasing power of the dollar in that state.
welp. looks like a convenient article to stop turning Texas blue
As by design. What a joke of a country.
The problem with California is that while they have a massive Democratic majority, they have absolutely no intent of acting like the social welfare alternative Democrats are nationally claiming to be.
Democrats have full power in California, yet it's a place full of poverty and homelessness, where poor people are screwed over hard, where housing initiatives are literally destroyed, and "undesirables" are soft-quarantined in Skid Row.
California is a place where the rich benefit and the poor suffer. Democrats chose to make that happen, and they choose to perpetuate it. Progressive efforts in California amount to nothing but lip-service, it's a blue-painted right-wing state. The only conservative things it rejects is religion.
Your problem is that the parties have shifted so far right, most of the democratic support in California would actually be centrist republicans.
California is overwhelmingly not super liberal, though there are notable exceptions.
There is no easy fix for poverty and homelessness in CA. It should legitimately be a national level issue given that the homeless populations here are near to small size city.
CA has grown all it could in the last 6 decades and now is contracting. I moved here 20 years ago and the grown is absolutely staggering.
The biggest problem CA has with housing is that it's housing and zoning policies cater to people who (or whose grandparents) moved to Cali in the 50s and 60s. "Neighborhood character" is defended by even nominally left-wing demagogues in California.
You fix housing costs by creating more places to live. Californians rejected this to such an extent that Newsom had to take a nuke, statewide, to local zoning ordinances.
As an LA resident this is only like half true.
How long have you lived in California?
I'm sick of hearing these sweeping generalizations from people who have never lived here. We have amazing social welfare programs when compared with the rest of the US. We have state grants for college, tuition waivers, scholarships and programs for different populations including the most disdvantaged. We have Medi-Cal, which improved so much since the Obama admin that it covers ten times more than my parents' private insurance did when I was a kid. This includes addiction treatment and mental health. (This is actually a federal requirement so not sure why CA should be any different). Methadone, suboxone (again, federal, as Biden just increased access to suboxone doctors), rehab, ER, ambulance, derm, psychiatry, inpatient psych, birth control, reproductive care, etc. However, the city/county you live in needs to have that healthcare infrastructure before Medi-Cal can pay for it, and geographically, much of this state is pretty conservative. To your "point" about progressivism being "lip service," our metro areas have large enough populations to counter that. I mean, idk if you ever paid attention in high school civics, but geography and population density are two different things. The San Juaquin valley is pretty red, but it consists of...Fresno. The advantages we have here are astronomical compared to Medicaid in other states, especially red states. Not to mention housing, food programs, K-12 and pre-K education, reproductive rights. The way we handled covid was far better than most of the country, but Pelosi got her hair done when she shouldn't have so I guess it doesn't count. Oh, and homeless people exist, so I guess all the rest of it is invalid too. Which is exactly why education is so important. Decent higher education teaches you to think for yourself and identify what's true and what's not, instead of buying into rhetoric. They call it "media literacy" and it's taught in our state subsidized colleges. Good luck with all those book bans though.
But no one can convince someone of reality when they'd rather believe clickbait. This is America - no state is going to have social welfare that is anywhere near as extensive as it should be, and no state in the union is "progressive." California is only doing the absolute bare minimum of what a decent direct democracy should be doing for it's people, and even that is just so fucking radical that the rest of the country seems to think we're Sodom and Gomorrah (while simultaneously arguing about how we're not liberal enough. Hmmm.) So it's just disingenuous to argue that it's "not progressive enough" when that's just...not even a thing in the US. But if whining about someplace they've never been, that has such a high GDP that it probably subsidizes their own state, is so much fun for people then who am I to try to stop their bitching. If you want to have perfection be the enemy of progress, then I guess that's on you.
I've visited. Your state is a shithole with some walled gardens and towers of gold. Your streets smell of piss and worse, there are tents everywhere people can get one up without the cops immediately coming over to throw them out. And that's how you intend to keep it, because you have no interest in housing the unworthy.
What you have are a lot of programs with a lot of names that are supposed to sound like they do something. You have a lot of things to mention.
What you don't have are results, or an interest in getting results.
I live in Norway. I know what a democracy with solid welfare should look like, even when it's never perfect.
I also know why you're not getting the results you should:
You don't believe you should make it THAT easy to just not be homeless. You simply don't believe in just paying to build the buildings and handing out the keys. It's not the way you want to solve it.
So, when all is said and done, and another decade has passed; You stilll won't have solved it and you likely still won't want to solve it.
California is only doing the absolute bare minimum...
You said it yourself.
This is your daily reminder that no politicians have your best interest at heart. You can say one party is better than the other but they're both bought and owned and you didn't get to put in a bid.
No both sides on this. The right has made serious and consequential moves to eliminate rule of law. It will not return once removed.
Show data. California is one of the worst states to live in
Texas is the worst state to live in. California isn't even in the bottom 10, those spots are exclusively reserved for red states. The worst places in the country to live and work are run by the GOP.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/07/14/these-are-americas-10-worst-states-to-live-and-work-in.html
Show data.
Already posted data
How long have you lived here?
3-4 years, Im nit staying any longer, rent is crazy expensive and homeless are all over. My car has been jacked 2 times already
Taxes are way too high anywhere anymore. I used to live in Chicago but those taxes are criminal
Yeah, I miss the good old days, like, if we could just go back to the tax rates of the 1950s, that would be great.
