On the other hand I have always lived in Northern Italy, and around half of my taxes go to the poorer regions of Italy, mostly to be squandered by corruption, clientelism, and organized crime.
Heh, funny that richer parts of the EU say this about Italy itself.
"Modern" racism can be more subtle than that, more about xenophobia or just classism.
Races do not exist biologically[0][1], but they do 'exist' as a social construct[2][3][4]. And I second your second sentence :)
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZrKrGkgeww4&index=4&list=PLy...
[1] https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/race-is-a-social-...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_constructionism
[3] https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/05/what-we...
[4] https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/without-prejudice/20...
The latter have no problem with dividing different people into groups based on ancestry based on what continent their ancestor came from though the word race is passé.
edit: We done fixed some grammar.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Genetic_history_of_Italy
But that's beside the point. I invoked the modern use of the term "racism" that includes different ways of segregating a population and not just genetics. "Southerners are lazy, corrupt" etc. Call it cultural racism if you wish.
AFAIK most of the genetic variation in Italy dates back from ancient times. Everyone thinks "of course, it was the Islamic invasions in Sicily and the Germanic invasions in the North", but the genetic impact of those was surprisingly small. The variation was there before.
The Greek colonization of southern Italy is the one historical migration that _did_ have significant impact, according to the article.
Race is not about genetics. It's a cultural construct, which is predominantly based on historical and ethnological differences (with the inevitable, but not critical mix of genetics that comes with the latter), and has little to do with actual "races".
People from Italy and the Balkans for example where perceived as "non white" when immigrating to the US, while being caucasian. They just weren't anglosaxon, germanic, or nordic, as the dominant WASP Americans of the time. There are is lots of historical and cultural studies on this [1].
WASP Americans badmouthing Greeks or Italians were racist, even if talking about people the same race.
And it's a similar cases between Northern and Southern Italians (there are cultural, historical and ethnological differences between the two areas). The racism of north vs south comes from that -- and it even fed into actual far right / neo-fascist parties, like the Lega Nord ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lega_Nord ).
Whether Southern italians are indeed "less productive" is beside the point too. Blacks in the US are also poorer and less 'productive', more likely to be convicted felons (statistically), etc, but people still consider someone badmouthing blacks to have racist motives.
[1] The immigrants from the southern part of Italy and Sicily were not considered wholly white by Anglo-Saxon standards, a notion which was reinforced by the US Immigration Department classification of northern and southern Italians as two distinct caucasian ethnic groups. In reaction to the large-scale immigration from southern and eastern Europe, Congress passed legislation (Emergency Quota Act of 1921 and Immigration Act of 1924) restricting immigration from those regions, but not from Northern European countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism#Anti-Italianis...
Yes, since they were the poorest provinces, and thus the ones that produced most immigrants.
A "fun" read: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-Italianism#Anti-Italianis...
Just like the "unwashed masses" have a bad impression of eg Turkey based on racism/classism towards their local Turkish-$NATIONALITY minority, they have the idea that Italy has to be a poor backward place based on racism/classism towards the local Italian-$NATIONALY minority.
And I don't think they do. Some people, sure. Every population has a bunch of people who would say things like that. Because they can, because they enjoy it, it likely makes them feel better, or so they think.
And there are people who enjoy listening to them and repeating what they say.
It's not about whether it's true, or accurate, it's just "funny" because irony can be funny.
Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/economy/ireland-s-contri...
Source: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-05/gst-redistribution-de...
Unfortunately that's blatantly false. Italy paid contributions to the EU in vast excess of contributions that were taken by Italians. Didn't find historical figures, but this is the most recent [0], and by memory I know that the same unbalance has been going on for a long time:
- Total EU spending in Italy: € 11.592 billion - Total Italian contribution to the EU budget: € 13.940 billion"
If your goal was instead to make a funny joke, you succeeded at being offensive to me (as an Italian).
In all seriousness, your comment feels to me as equivalent to a guy writing about how women waste money more than they earn (I would be the woman in this case).
[0]: https://europa.eu/european-union/about-eu/countries/member-c...
And then the cause of the problem is presented as if it were the solution.
I think outside of being offended, you'd just have a hard to getting any agreements on what would qualify.
The HN crowd might over-allocate $1000s per person to NSF, NIH and NASA and short Social Security while 100+M people contribute $0 to science, but depend on SS to survive. We might end up with the same budget but people feeling more in control.
We'd also see large scale advertising which is actually a good thing: ads are pretty cheap/efficient, make people feel better about their government and society, and employ an army of creative people. I imagine you wouldn't see branches of government running negative ads against each other - it would be more like the feel-good military recruiting ads today.
Sorry if this sounds utopian, I've had a rough week (in addition to everybody's rough week) and need something to feel good about.
And hang in there, the weekend is almost there. :-)
[1] https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.washingtonexaminer.com/whic...
interesting to see how impactful a public health plan is ($158B) and raising the limit on social security income ($633B) and 2% VAT ($885B).
If Social Security is an entitlement program like any other, why is there any max income? Why is it only on "earned" income?
* Theoretical Sanders administration aside.
Plus the Better-Dead-Than-Red strain of US Libertarianism. We may be poor, unhealthy, and beholden to wealthy political donors... but at least we ain't no Commie!
And the default, if someone doesn't choose any categories, would go to some proportion that Congress would decide. However, allowing even a "small" portion - which could still be billions of dollars - to be allocated directly by taxpayers would gather some very interesting data.
It would be very interesting to see which agencies would attract the most money, and what strategies they'd use to attract people to give their discretionary tax dollars to them.
Would people give more to the CDC, NIH, NASA, the Dept of Housing, Dept of Transportation, Dept of Homeland Security, ... ? We could start to get a direct temperature of what is ailing people the most and what they want their money to fund.
Government agencies could even "advertise," or at least try to get positive news articles that really highlight what they're accomplishing, to spread the word about the good they're doing. It could engage people more in exactly how their money is being spent, and care further about government, because they have at least a small hand in directly funding different departments.
At a used bookstore, I found a book(1) about Marian Franz that illuminated the history behind their attempts.
Weirdly enough, there was a personal dedication in the front by David Gross(2), one her colleagues and someone who wrote extensively about the 'War Tax Resistance'.
I'm not religious, so it kinda made me sad, but that book sent me down a rabbit hole. Could you live on 20k a year to avoid income tax and contributing to a war effort? Its impressive.
(1) https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6553714-a-persistent-voi...
(2) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2014/11/can-qui...
I lived for quite a while in Kansas, where the state constitution makes adequate funding of schools mandatory. The result is a never-ending series of lawsuits in which the legislature claims to have provided adequate funding, and a court finds that they haven't and orders them to increase or redistribute the funding (sometimes it's found that they under-funded the schools overall, sometimes it's found that they distributed the funding in ways which result in some districts not having adequate support).
This and a few other back-and-forth fights led to the former governor and his party-aligned state legislature attempting to change the selection process for judges, and attaching a rider to that law which would completely defund the state court system if the courts ruled they didn't have the authority to change the selection process, and hinted that if they still ruled against him he'd attempt to recall the entire state supreme court and replace them with partisans who'd support him.
In my mind part of the job of elected politicians is to ensure that tax money is spent where their platform said it would.
/s
What I do have on-hand is that NH has a higher median income than any other nation in the world (incl Luxembourg), despite being a net-payer of federal taxes.
(Source: https://mises.org/wire/if-sweden-and-germany-became-us-state...)
Of course, the median income metric is not the end-all be-all, either. For example, it ignores all the state-provided benefits that those high taxes pay for.
https://www.pressherald.com/2017/09/13/the-state-with-highes...
But its lead is not an overwhelming one. Connecticut's 2016 median hh income was just ~$350 less. According to the the previous ACS in 2015, NH was number 8. And 6 of the top 7 were traditionally blue states.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_and_territ...
- 1. Maryland
- 2. DC
- 3. Hawaii
- 4. Alaska
- 5. New Jersey
- 6. Connecticut
- 7. Massachusetts
Everybody says that, Catalonia that it pays more to Spain that it receives back, California and New York to the rest of US...
But it's the only way to have nation states, otherwise we'd have to go back to city states (which some people like Taleb actually advice).
Of course, TFA describes a different way to come to substantially the same result. Tokyo still makes the important decisions.
https://www.moneytips.com/is-your-state-a-net-payer-or-a-net...
That's just the political rhetoric. Red-staters love their entitlements just so long as they go to the "right" people.
I have friends who say literally that (taxes are theft). How does one argue against that? I have a hard time finding a way that it's technically wrong. I mean, taxation is literally the state taking your money (whether you want it or not, voted against it or not, etc).
I can't help but feel that there's some difference, but I can't find what it is. Do you have suggestions on readings that would inform me better on the issue?
Taxation is much more like "protection money" than theft.
E.g. Germany is the largest net contributor to the EU, but guess what would happen if Germany decided to stop putting out those few billions a year. Yeah, not so good for the economy (not just of Germany, pretty much everyone). Turns out, those few billions spurred trade much greater than that. It's literally "one stick, alone, weak — many sticks, together, stronk". Just that the bundle is stronger than its constituents.
(I've heard the UK is working earnestly on an experiment confirming this.)
I can't wait for tax redistribution to be renamed "fascism". :D
So that's why they say those people are living in the sticks.
Isn't there a word for a bundle of sticks bound together?
The issue is that you are forcing the stick to give up its national identity, borders, fishing rights, and laws in order to be part of the bundle.
As for all the rest, they can't disappear soon enough. None of those things work in favor of the general people. And while we keep cultural and national identities, we could also do away with nationalist politics. They are irrational and nowadays it just feels like Religion Wars 2.0.
The Union wasn't fighting for more powers for the federal government, just for the integrity of the existing federal government and it's powers.
The war resulted in some expansion of federal power, but that wasn't what motivated the Union.
The Union wasn't (particularly the slave states in the Union weren't) fighting to abolish slavery, the Union wasn't fighting to preserve the Union, a goal to which the popular (in most of the North) cause of abolition had been deliberately subordinated in the elections prior to the war.
OTOH, by seceding, the rebel states also lost their leverage on preserving slavery within the Union, so the whole rebellion backfired. Abolition probably would have happened eventually without the war, but it wouldn't have been right away.
The federal government doesn't seem concerned that the state I live in requires you to pay about $200 and get the local chief of police to sign off before you can exercise a particular right in any capacity whatsoever.
Civil asset forfeiture is still a thing in many states.
Some state could adopt an obviously unconstitutional hate speech law tomorrow and it would take years before it's struck down and even then there'd be no recourse for those already punished under it. If the state continued to enforce the law then what would happen? After another year or three of hearings and court whatnot they'd get cut off from some funding or something.
The best you can hope for when your state is violating your rights is a supreme court ruling that makes your state go "aw shucks boys, guess we can't do that anymore" and that your state actually does stop doing it. I don't see a weaker federal government changing that status quo.
The danger of putting all your eggs in the federal basket is that when something dumb happens on that level it affects us all (e.g. the net neutrality debacle). At least with the states the stupidity has to happen on it's own in each state.
It’s far from perfect. States still try to violate civil rights and it still takes a long time to fix that, if ever. The feds sometimes push more restrictions against the wishes of states that want more freedom, like with marijuana. But overall, based on history, I think that giving the states more freedom would be a huge step backwards.
This is been tried already, and it didn’t work. What changed things was force, first military, then legal.
There's a huge culture problem in the US.
https://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2016-05-17/after-brown-...
Schools are still segregated. We're still enslaving people in prisons.
Sure. There aren't LAWS that say segregation MUST exist. That's a step in the right direction, I suppose...
Often it's the other way around - for example, in the pre-Civil War era, a big point of contention (that was specifically cited later by those states that tried to secede) was that the federal government enacted the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, which forced the free states to, basically, participate in enforcement of slavery on behalf of the slave states.
Small countries don't have much leverage on their own on the world stage. CA and NY are almost certainly better off as part of the greater whole.