Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cmurf | Hacker News Reader

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The one thing I do not agree with is the tax deductions for homeschooling. I don't agree with vouchers either. Starving public schools is not the way to fix them, or make them go away. The way to fix them or make them go away is a combination of voting and running for school boards.

The reason why U.S. taxes are so complicated is because every special interest group wants their one line item deduction. And when they can't get a full deduction, they'll accept convoluted computations for partial deductions with a cap, so now it's a worksheet to do the computation for the actual deduction. Multiply that by every goddamn special interest and you get a 15 form submission every year.

Income tax should be a single form for everyone. Progressive rate. No deductions for anything. No home mortgage deduction - your mortgage interest is not a superior benefit to all of society than someone else's marked up rent. It's a special interest hand out.

The only fair way is if it's the same for everyone.

How about this for a universal tax plan?

  YOUR_TAX = MARGINAL_RATE * MAX( 0, ( YOUR_INCOME - MEDIAN_INCOME ))

By 2014 data, if we round median household income to $55000/year, 63327000 households owe no tax. If the MARGINAL_RATE is set to 40%, then households earning $55k-$60k have about a 1.5% tax rate. $60k-$65k pay about 4.5%. $195k-$200k pays about 28.8%. Households earning over $250k pay between 31.2% and 40%.

That's a progressive, but not onerous tax scheme. From $9436 billion in total household income, it taxes $1742 billion. Actual receipts from the 1040 tax in 2014 totaled about $1395 billion.

There are only 3 variables: the income that you partially control, the median computed by the easiest statistical analysis you can do, and the fraction between 0.0 and 0.99 set by public policy.

Why is it morally acceptable for the government to take money from you under the threat of force for a service that would dissolve into insolvency immediately if the public had any other economic option by your own admission?

The government letting you keep more of your own money is not a handout.

I agree with you about the single tax rate though.

It is morally acceptable because it applies to everyone, and every citizen here gets to vote or run for office to try and change the system, and everyone agrees for reasons of having a civil society to accept the ensuing compromise.

And yes, getting a deduction or credit on your taxes for homeschooling or private schooling is a handout. It's the same as a person with no children asking for this same benefit. What you're actually advocating for is not public education at all. You're advocating for a direct democracy, everything is al la carte. To do that even remotely properly means: a. compulsory voting (a number of countries do this including Australia and Brazil) b. a minimum of 2043 line items to "vote" on by dollar amount where $0 is as valid as $[totaltax] or anywhere in between, meaning people can choose to starve schools, roads, the military, corporate welfare, public welfare; and that 2043 value comes from the number of pages for the federal budget.

I think it becomes a very different world if we're voting for issues with a dollar amount attached than voting for representatives. And I don't necessarily think it'd be better, just that it'd be very different.

I'm not actually advocating for anything in particular, except perhaps school choice / vouchers. You do raise some good points here.

I also want to say I really appreciate how HN is still a place we can debate political policy civilly. I don't know any other places online where so many differing viewpoints are represented in robust and civil debate.

Public schools in the US aren't (primarily) funded by income taxes. They're primarily funded by local property taxes.

But any deduction or credit for education happens on income tax forms; there's no mechanism to get deductions or credits on property taxes any other way.

People with enough deductions get to file Schedule A and explicitly itemize property taxes. Typically owning a house gets you enough itemized deductions to justifying filing Schedule A so while a renter indirectly pays property taxes too, they don't get an explicit deduction for property taxes and thus also wouldn't get to deduct additional costs of homeschooling incurred.

That's just another broken system. That creates incentives to move to "good school districts" which is, obviously, not a very good reason to move e.g. further from work, or further from where you would otherwise like to be.

if money solved the public school system problem, chicago would be cranking out nobel laureates left and right (rather than sinking under the economic burden of insane pensions and accompanying property and sales taxes --- AND mass exodus of high earners).

I did not say or imply increasing spending makes public schools better. I said taking money away from them does not make them better. Go look at Kansas and Texas and other states where they are starving public schools, and are they cranking out nobel laureates left and right either? No.

The top reason why public schools suck in the U.S. is because of politicization of education. That's why there's more bureaucracy in public schools today than 30 years ago. That's why there are more derivations of school boot titles, where school boards are literally line item vetoing history books to emphasize/deemphasize actual historical facts, and with science. Regional schools are not all on the same page with the same standard, or even the same agreement of how the world is or should work. People move to specific neighborhoods to go to specific schools, and that results in far less diversity today with more small schools than fewer big ones.

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