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Turns out all that happened was the rich benefitted and the poor suffered. Who'da thought?
(media.kbin.social)
this post was submitted on 28 Jul 2023
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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.
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.
The premise is solid though. Charge the people that use the thing more than those that don't. It all breaks down though because the people that use them the most are corporations and receive the largest tax incentives.
Sounds great until you need an ambulance or firefighters to come save your ass.
Healthcare is something that should be socialized period. It's road taxes and gas taxes that should be based on usage in that scenario.
We already have usage taxes on those and I am not sure those make sense either except it is so small (in terms of total budget) that I don't think it is worth an argument.
I looked up my local city budget. Roads are actually a huge percentage of its expenses. Not much less than the entire city police department.
Sorry I was referring to toll roads.
It breaks down because in nearly every instance, it's just regressive taxation on poor people
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.
Wow, I didn't know places did that... that's screwed up!
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.
Yeah no matter how much you weaken that I am not going to believe it until you produce a detailed study proving it. Especially the bit about immigrants.
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and try to change your mind.
However, if you wanted to look into it, the field of study is called behavioral genetics and it's incredibly controversial... But the research suggests that upwards of 50% of our behaviors are inherited genetically.
So the group of people that left Europe in search of the new world, and the group of people that sided with America and against England in the war, etc... Those are the people who reproduced and created American culture. Pioneering, willing to die in search of opportunity, oppositional, etc.
If you think about it it makes perfect sense.
I see. So what gene is the tax avoidance gene and does it have rules of inheritance? What chromosome is it on?
Most of my ancestors arrived here in the 1880s. Pretty sure they knew that there was stuff here.
Well the majority of Americans are not descendants of the ~1 million whites that lived in the US at the time, I think it is a sweeping generalization to condense the entire american revolution as a tax revolt. Especially since there are about a dozen grievances listed in the Declaration of Independence. And frankly I find this all to be Lamarkian pseudoscience bigotry.
If I wanted to use bigotry to justify nonsense with no reference whatsoever to facts I would still believe in God. I get that the People's History of the United States has been blowing the minds of stoned edgy teens for a while now but maybe it's time to put away childish things.
You don't need to even laybit at genetics. The fact is that people tend to inherit the values and attitudes of their parents, who inherited theirs from their parents etc.
I don't think we're (all) dumb, I think we don't have a choice.
Don't take offense to them calling Americans dumb. It's a generalization of our culture. Not you as a person.
Americans are dumb with how we deal with taxes and money and socialization of services.
Well it wouldn't be the issue that it is if we had a system that was designed to at least be somewhat responsive to popular opinion. It's not like anyone can just wave a magic wand and reform our antiquated system. It was very deliberately designed to be very difficult to change and there are powerful interests doing everything they can to make sure it that it doesn't.