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Comment by flurben | Hacker News Reader

You seriously think that everywhere in America with reasonable tax rates is just getting fiscal transfers from SF?

Define "reasonable tax rates." I'll tell you this: states where there are very low taxes (e.g. no income taxes, low sales/other taxes) tend to be net takers when it comes to federal dollars: they get more from the federal government than their populations pay in taxes. States like California are net givers: their populations send more to the federal government than they get back.

As a bonus irony, the "taker" states also tend to house the most vociferously free-market/anti-government types.

I'm taking a look here (visualization is crummy, but there's a list below) https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/donor-state...

There are only ten donor states in 2019:

    - Connecticut (- $4,000)
    - New Jersey (- $2,368)
    - Massachusetts (- $2,343)
    - New York (- $1,792)
    - North Dakota (- $720)
    - Illinois (- $364)
    - New Hampshire (- $234)
    - Washington (- $184)
    - Nebraska (- $164)
    - Colorado (- $95)

And these are the top taker states:

    - Virginia ($10,301)
    - Kentucky ($9,145)
    - New Mexico ($8,692)
    - West Virginia ($7,283)
    - Alaska ($7,048)
    - Mississippi ($6,880)
    - Alabama ($6,694)
    - Maryland ($6,035)
    - Maine ($5,572)
    - Hawaii ($5,270)

The majority of those top taker states are under Democratic Party control, and 40 out of 50 states are takers of federal dollars, so I don't see much evidence for your point.

Virginia/Maryland are a special case, since they are immediately adjacent to DC, so are home to a large number of federal workers. New Mexico is impoverished and filled with elderly retirees, and also has (relative to population) a large number of well-paid federal workers at Los Alamos and Sandia national labs.

In every state though, rural and ex-urban areas are subsidized by federal and state tax revenue coming from cities.

New York put together a report for 2017 that seems more reliable than the list you are using: https://www.osc.state.ny.us/reports/budget/2018/federal-budg...

The source of your data is a SUNY Rockefeller Institute of Government report: https://rockinst.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/1-7-19b-Bala.... Scrolling down to page 14 shows a nice visual that completely supports my contention. The two surprises to me are ND and California, but the rest essentially show that taker states tend to have higher populations of individuals who are opposed to the federal government spending money ("anti-government spending").

Thanks for sharing this. What I see on page 14 is a map of the same data I shared. It shows that there's a small number of net producer states, and a larger number of net takers. If you look at page 17, you'll see that most states actually fall into the low tax and low spending quadrant. So while they may need to raise taxes by some amount, they're hardly being hypocritical the way it seems you want to paint them.

Personally I don’t think “low taxes” are “reasonable”. We live in a complicated society and we all benefit when we collectively pay people to do a huge variety of important jobs which are hard to fit into a pure-profit system. Cutting funding for those exposes us to a wide variety of risks and eliminates many future opportunities, in the long term harming us all. The Covid pandemic is a perfect case study in the way that e.g. public health infrastructure, expertise, and political support can save hundreds of thousands of lives. (While we are talking about San Francisco here, it’s worth noting that SF and the Bay Area has done by far the best of any US city / metro area at containing Covid and preventing needless deaths of residents, despite some failure especially early to properly target testing resources toward poor/minority areas full of “essential workers”.) But infectious diseases are only one of the many risks that individual people cannot adequately understand and protect against on a personal basis, for which it helps to have collectively funded public institutions.

Instead of income or property taxes, some places raise money via sales taxes instead, or other regressive schemes. Some places raise money by questionable fines on their own residents. Some places make money off the back of wanton environmental destruction.

Some just accept shoddy local services. (When you compare the US to other wealthy nations, it’s really shocking how poor our basic infrastructure and public services are, even in the richest US states and cities.)

But most low-tax areas of the US are substantially supported by federal-level transfers, for example from federal highway budget, from military bases and defense contracting located there, from federal agriculture subsidies, from federal welfare and healthcare funding, from social security payments to people who retired somewhere different than they lived while actively working, ...

There are really two axes that everyone seems to conflate into one. There is funding, as in whether or not there is sufficient funding to achieve certain outcomes. Then there is competence, as in managing the resources to achieve certain outcomes. Both are necessary but neither sufficient by themselves, only together.

The U.S. seems to be stuck in a loop wherein the available funds are argued about endlessly, and everybody acts as if that's the only dimension about which to speak and win. Not nearly enough is done to boost competence in the government sector. I think this is plenty true even if we set aside the current U.S. administration in which a number of federal entities are headed by naked toadies (to be fair, it's certainly not true of all federal organizations even now).

I tend to agree with you that the U.S. is probably not taxing enough for consistently high-quality outcomes in areas where the government is responsible. Yet I'm sympathetic to those that point to places where tax rates are high and so is wastefulness. But when the only lever it seems that can be pulled is on the revenue/spending, it's no wonder the correlation between that lever position and good outcomes is low - it ignores the competence with which any of those funds are managed.

I think it's entirely possible to have competent government if that is made a priority and addressed with some flexibility.

There is a single problem with this line of thought: you cannot raise taxes over 100%. Yes, more taxes gives you better services and it benefits the society more (not the tax payer), so increasing the taxes is the logical way to go... until you reach 100% and you are stuck. At that point one can still argue taxes should be increased for better services, but it will be harder to do it. Then people will start thinking about how to limit the spending and how to get the most from less money, maybe even to reduction in taxes.

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