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Comment by mensetmanusman | Hacker News Reader

These type of ‘save the rich’ operations leave a bad taste in my mouth.

With the amount of corruption being seen in police/teacher unions, wouldn’t that be an effective place to use limited federal resources?

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Hell with saving the rich, the number of carve outs that benefit only the wealthy under the guise of protecting the environment should catch your ire instead.

instead of funding EVs and solar panels for those well off enough to pay for them we should be directing the same money to covering schools in solar panels and replacing petrol school buses.

just saying, there is outrage when it comes to government expenditures in every direction but people tend to only focus on what upsets them now.

(but to your point, public employee unions are just political slush funds in disguise and you will be bailing them all out soon)

Well, if your goal is to cover everything in solar, tax rebates to the rich cause the rich to pay 2/3 of the cost instead of none of the cost of your school example. So you end up with 3x the solar deployed for the same amount of government money.

Then again, solar is a productive asset, so maybe it’s still better for the government to retain it.

I like this sentiment but just wanted to add that school buses are one of if not the most efficient vehicles on the road (obviously when you divide emissions by a full bus of people) so this is arguably not a good place for an environmental crusade.

CO2 per passenger or cargo mile is not what we're optimizing. We want CO2 reduction per dollar spent. Converting high usage vehicles is better for that.

Solar panels, and EV's are pocket change to the property tax breaks given to people holding tens/hundreds of millions in property in the name of preservation.

I would love to have huge ranch on some of the most prime lakefront property in texas 15 mins from downtown Austin and pay a tiny fraction of what my neighbors do for a tiny fraction of the land.

https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/tax-day-farms-owne...

I'm all for greespace preservation, but if someone is getting an exception for not developing their land, then it should be open to the public as green space.

edit: (and I should point out the property valuation of the dell ranch in that article is way out of wack with the fact that adjacent housing subdivisions are having their 1/4 acre lots valued in the 200k range for taxing purposes. So turning it into a subdivision would put the just the land value in excess of a billion $ for taxing purposes.)

The point of subsidies is to increase scale if spending for the industry. People with the disposable income to buy it are a multiplier of total demand. It also helps build up consumer facing business practices towards that end vs just effectively being a government contractor.

That was my takeaway from the documentary on the McDonald's Monopoly scam. The FBI spent incredible resources (and they were proud of having a whole field office working on it for months right before 911) to arrest and charge a whole bunch of people who didn't even make any money off it. Then in the end, outside of the core couple guys the harshest sentences were probation, frequently plea bargins, made by people who were themselves borderline victims of the whole scam.

I do think the guy doing the ticket swapping should have been stopped, but there were a lot of ways to achieve that, which didn't involve spending tens of millions+ to save McDonalds from giving a couple million away to an insider. Heck just letting mcdonnalds handle the inquiry with their internal security would have been enough to stop it (if all it did was scare the guy from ever trying it again).

The real victim there wasn't McDonalds, though, but all the people who spent additional money at McDonalds to play a rigged game.

The McDonald's case put some thiefs in jail and hassled people who learned the cost of helping thieves. Thieves don't steal only from corporations on principle.

I think parent would accept that, were it applied equally to all.

Government biases may feel great when they produce the outcome you want, but by codifying the mechanisms of bias in the first place you are paving the way for it to swing the other direction as soon as someone new takes the reins of power.

What you want is for laws to treat everyone equally regardless of how much money is in their bank account at the time.

You also have to remember you are sending signals not just to the victims but to the criminals. Do you really want a society where the rich have a target painted on their backs because law enforcement will not protect them? You might not like the world of private law enforcement they will create to protect themselves, should the need arise.

Federal law enforcement occupies a precarious position where both sides of the isle hate them for certain reasons and tolerate them for others.

I'd really love to see federal resources directed at a boondoggle so spectacular that it brings the whole thing crashing down to the point where the FBI is forced by law to spend a much more significant portion of its time investigating official misconduct and civil liberties violations conducted by state and federal agencies.

> With the amount of corruption being seen in police/teacher unions, wouldn’t that be an effective place to use limited federal resources?

Unions are like political institutions: almost everything you see about them that bothers you is actually legal.

Absolutely. And if collectors are worried about forgery, they have the resources to investigate it themselves.

People making themselves wealthy off of crime is a problem for the whole public. It is grossly unfair to everyone, not just the people they directly defraud.

Only if there's some possible connection to the while public.

It's highly likely that whoever is buying art forgeries is spending money they defrauded from the public, so I'd rather those funds get redistributed to an artist and laborers.

Also, the harm, as a percentage of victims' net worth, is trivial compared to crimes the authorities don't help solve.

As the public my only encounter with some art is if the local museum has it on display. If the local museum buys fraud I'm defrauded by proxy.

I for one didn't read this article and think that I was getting shafted

Wrong incentives probably?

Gone are the days when good work alone was enough to get noticed and get appreciated. These days, everyone needs to be aggressive and market themselves, so everyone tries to do stuff that gives them maximum exposure with minimum risk.

Maybe it makes sense for law enforcement to get the attention of the mega rich than that of a struggling school teacher who makes 40K a year.

Not saying it is right, just that as a species, our priorities are completely out of whack.

Corruption in politics too. Of course, that's a larger issue. We need to get big money out of politics. Most other democracies do not allow the same level of campaign donations (especially mysterious ones like Super PACs). Also, lobbying as we know it has to end. There's no room for organizations to have that level of impact on actual laws. Politics should be like military service -- you do it to serve your fellow countrymen, not to get rich. If the law isn't for the benefit of the people, it shouldn't be written.

Problem is money is most useful to the unknown candidates. Get on the ballot as a major party and you have guaranteed 30% of the vote, and another 30% will research you even if they don't vote for you. By contrast if you are not one of the two major parties you get 5% at best that even serusouly research you, and only large quantities of money can convince more than that to look.

Other democracies actually have a solution to that too, the government provides financial support to the kind of candidates you describe. That kind of spending is not ideal, but if it means reducing corruption and getting candidates that support the people more than a few corporations then it seems like money well spent.

They have to decide who is serious about running and who is pretending to run to get that money...

I don’t know why people are lumping teachers unions in with police unions. I’ve never heard of teachers rolling up in an armored personnel carrier and jumping out with batons and tear gas or kneeling on someone’s neck until they die. Sounds like you just don’t like unions.

Definitely a vast difference in the level of physical violence between those two groups. But similar how bad performers are shielded by the unions for both of those groups. That's likely the issue that has OP lumping them together.

Corruption obviously isn't the right term - but there is something inimical about a group of public workers organizing against the public interest, and (from my perspective) workplace rules that prevent bad performers from being fired certainly fit into that category.

Teachers union corruption looks a lot different for sure and is likely less insidious but there are lots of examples of problems.

From teacher protection clauses that mean teachers who aren’t legally able to teach being retained to opposition to any pension reform in bankrupt states.

I’m certainly not anti-union but I lump teachers unions in with police unions and the teamsters as cautionary tales of their downsides.

Fighting for a decent pension is a legitimate thing for a union to fight for. Fighting to be able to murder with impunity is not. Teachers are notoriously underpaid, and there is a lot of pressure to convert the school system to charter schools in order to bust the unions. Meanwhile administrative costs skyrocket every year. There’s a lot wrong with our school system but I don’t think teachers unions are one of them. Paying teachers even less is not the way forward.

Fighting for a pension is of course a legitimate union activity.

It’s equally legitimately to state that one way unions become problematic is when their demands are not financially viable and are in fact part of the problem fiscally.

I'm fine with them fighting for one. However their incentive needs to include ensuring that the pension fund actually has enough money in it to cover the future payouts.

I don’t consider it legitimate because of the proven conflicts of interests involved in taxpayer funded defined benefit pensions.

The math can be fudged to purposely understate costs, never mind the fact that predicting that far into the future is impossible.

So you have politicians with an interest in keeping taxes low in the short term to get re elected, you have union bosses who are older and also don’t care about fudged numbers way into the future, since they will be getting theirs before shit hits the fan.

The people screwed are future generations of taxpayers and benefit recipients who have to accept cuts to their benefits.

Cash remuneration works for everyone else, if the union members want an annuity, they can negotiate for higher cash pay and then go purchase an annuity from an insurance company. I don’t want my kids to pay for labor that was performed today just so can pay artificially low taxes.

Teacher pay is highly variable. Teachers are usually paid above median for their local community.

I'm not sure either. I guess it's some sort of "both sides" going on. A bad police union leads to deaths, maimings and loss of freedom. I'm not sure a "bad" teachers union can match that level of malignancy.

Entrenched teachers' unions protect bad teachers. Bad teachers create disinterested kids, conditioned for a lifetime of following overbearing bureaucratic authority as "just the way things are". Kids stuck in a pointless system with no worthwhile authority figures are more likely to become bullies. And bullies get older and gain employment as bad cops.

This.

Also, kids stuck in pointless systems get bored and commit crimes.

New York City pays on the order of $30 million dollars a year in salary to teachers accused of misconduct who can't be in a classroom with children, but as per their contract cannot be fired.

The police budget of New York City is 10.9 billion dollars including 2.8 billion dollars for pensions.

The school budget is 24 billion. So $30 million is a drop in the bucket. My point was not really about the money. It was about the inability of the Department of Education to fire teachers who are deemed a threat to children. I can only imagine how hard it is to fire someone for simply being bad at their job.

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