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Comment by ryanobjc | Hacker News Reader

So, what you're saying is that, apart from buying goods and services from rural areas, that the rest of the countryside should somehow assist, with tax money, the rural citizens?

Strange that you'd say that, from a population historical of voting for anti-tax candidates. Perhaps not you personally.

In other words, you'd like to socialize the downsides of living in remote areas of the country?

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Not so. The state takes our taxes and runs the schools. The rural areas get little funding for their schools, even for the same size school (the same tax base approximately).

No, its city folks voting all the money to their schools. Its democracy, but its not pretty.

Schools are funded largely by local property taxes in most parts of the US, which is why rural areas have less funding for schools. Schools of equivalent sizes rural vs urban absolutely do not have the same property tax revenue.

Not sure where you live, but in the states I've lived, it's the county or municipality that uses property taxes and runs the K-12 schools. Public universities are are subsidized by the state, but those are available equally to all of the state's residents.

Iowa. They do it differently. The state took over decades ago.

In general across the country, less and less public school funding actually comes from local taxes. The state has gotten involved in most states in order to correct discrepancies in school funding between rich and poor districts (with California being one of the most involved states).

Some states still have notable funding issues between districts, though. This gives a pretty good description of the issue: https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...

I thought taxes for education stayed within the school district locally.

This is a myth. Rural areas get more tax money back than they pay out. Rural communities are already subsidized by cities, but their low tax base and inefficiency means they still can't provide the same level of services. That's not to mention that cities can provide services with less environmental impact.

> even for the same size school (the same tax base approximately) This is probably a bad assumption. Rural folks pay significantly lower per capita taxes, on average.

Here are a few relevant sources, but this information is all over the place: https://twitter.com/paulkrugman/status/817088161906102273 http://www.startribune.com/metro-vs-outstate-which-counties-... https://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/03/opinion/sunday/why-blue-s...

Comment banned in my imagination for violation of imaginary ban on the phrase "So you're saying..." and its variants, which are almost always the opening tag of a sentence that misrepresents something.

"Strange that you'd say that..."

They didn't.

EDIT: Deleted sarcasm. Also adding: I say all this even though I actually lean the same way in my suspicion that rural dwellers probably absorb proportionally more public spending in some categories, while voting against "big government" etc.

>So, what you're saying is that, apart from buying goods and services from rural areas, that the rest of the countryside should somehow assist, with tax money, the rural citizens?

Yes.

>Strange that you'd say that, from a population historical of voting for anti-tax candidates.

They're stuck in a two-party system where one side looks down their nose at rural voters and their values and the other sides looks just down their nose at rural voters.

>In other words, you'd like to socialize the downsides of living in remote areas of the country?

The wording here makes it seem like what's happening in rural areas is just a consequence of nature but it's not, it's tied in with all sorts of policy decisions we've made over decades, making new policy decisions to fix that seems reasonable to me. Here's a really great article on the issue: https://washingtonmonthly.com/magazine/novdec-2015/bloom-and...

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