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Comment by LatteLazy | Hacker News Reader

Full disclosure: I am a londoner and this is basically how our tax system works except without any of the optionality.

I am not at all convinced that towns have a claim to the tax revenue of people who don't use it's services. The fact regions can force this onto Tokyo etc is a failure of democracy, not a success. We're living in a time when Cities work, and bigger cities work better than smaller ones. They're cheaper, greener, have better social outcomes, provide more opportunities etc. And the response is to try to starve them of revenue to maintain some strange tradition life of worse health, poorer people, less equality and more pollution.

/rant

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There is a time skew between use of government services and when you pay back with taxes. Why shouldn’t a city that paid to educate a kid from age 5 to 18 not receive some of the tax revenue when that kid uses that education to get a job in Tokyo?

How is this how the UK tax system works?

Do you simply mean that the counties get most of their income, not from local tax but from national tax? This then counts as 'stealing from the city' because most of the national income is created by the city?

I think this is amusing because a lot of those cities are stealing jobs so it is only fair for them to pay.

I never understood this attitude (assuming it's serious). If a job is created in a city that wouldn't exist in the country, where is the stealing? To me this sounds like the city is creating value _ex nihilo_, and the "payment" here is an orthogonal, collectivist redistribution.

The city is stealing people from the country. And a lack of people leads to a lack of jobs. Because fewer people means fewer amenities and services (less shops, less offices, no more swimming pool, less budget for nice things in the municipality). And few people and little amenities and services make it less attractive to start a business there, because it is hard to find employees locally, and hard to attract them from far away because of the amenities.

> except without any of the optionality

Or the reciprocal gifts, or ....

I'm not entirely sure it is "basically how" the London/UK tax system works ? Perhaps you could elaborate.

Local government is ultimately funded by central government, which is (as we've seen from the present UK government) subject to political whims as to who gets what and how much (Tories favouring Tory seats/councils).

I suspect you might have Council Tax in mind, but I'm not entirely convinced that is "basically the same thing" either.

The purpose of the hometown tax is wealth transfer to less populated, poorer regions. In that sense, the reciprocal gifts etc. are just a funny implementation detail.

It’s insanely corrupt. Up to 40% of your taxable income can be paid as Furusato nozei, and you get kickback in the form of a “thank you gift”(30% value).

The parts about hometowns are almost irrelevant, as each donations are one time transactions.

If this isn’t scheme of a fraud I don’t know what is one.

> Up to 40% of your taxable income can be paid as Furusato nozei

No, 4% of your taxable income. There's a 10% residence tax on your taxable income, and 40% of that 10% can be paid as Furusato Nouzei.

This argument, against redistribution from cities to rural areas of a country, seems to also apply against aid from rich countries to poor ones. In both cases, there are less-expensive, less-"developed" places where it is possible to have a family and raise children; richer, more-developed places where all the jobs are; and a flow of people from the former to the latter. These might be called "core" and "periphery".

The obvious solution would be to introduce a negative interest rate on cash so that rich city dwellers cannot accumulate massive trade surpluses against small towns which then means people don't have to move out of town to get a job.

It's quite tiring to see all these "faux" free market advocates or liberals, while they do absolutely nothing to actually get closer to the impossible ideal. They see the free as in free beer, i.e. reducing "government intervention" to let special interest groups get away with shady behavior instead of addressing known conflict sources and making control over them irrelevant.

People in cities still need rural towns for farming and related agriculture production. Maybe in 20 or 50 years most farming will be automated, but until then lets not lose sight that big cities are dependent on those rural towns with "strange tradition life of worse health, poorer people, less equality and more pollution"

Everyone needs everyone else for the goods and services they provide. We pay farmers for the food they grown when they buy it. We pay them again with farm subsidies. Do we really need to pay a third time with town subsidies?

As far as I know here in Belgium most of the factory work also happens far from the big cities.

>We pay farmers for the food they grown when they buy it. We pay them again with farm subsidies. Do we really need to pay a third time with town subsidies?

Not allowing them to be squeezed so much by oversized supermarketchains and the like would probably do more

Vertical farming and recirculating aquaculture could revolutionize food production in wealthy nations. Remote work and high housing costs could slow the urbanization trends somewhat.

Vertical farming requires nuclear fusion. What's your schedule for that?

Seriously, why exactly are we throwing away free solar resources only to have to generate them through some other method that is much harder?

I'm all for growing food in regenerative and no plow agriculture, but from what I understand it won't scale to current population levels. Vertical farming can be intensive in electricity demand and construction materials, yes. However, it can produce more food with less water and fertilizer than traditional industrial farming.

My understanding of vertical farming is that the only thing they've succeeded in growing in leafy greens.

I believe that Bowery is growing tomatoes and strawberries now.

>I am not at all convinced that towns have a claim to the tax revenue of people who don't use it's services.

The article mentions such a service tho. Education. On the other hand I don't think the support for those early years amount to 40% of ones paycheck but not everyone participates so...

>worse health

How so? I would think it is the opposite based on studies about allergy prevalence, etc

>less equality

I don't think this is a constant either. I'm curious to see a broad study but if there's ever places i've seen stark wealth divides to slap one in the face it's been big cities.

That said as towns person I still agree that the move to cities is not a bad thing especially if we wish to preserve more nature and so is the push for it. I also think this continuous urbanisation will help their or our birthrates but the world population can't and shouldn't grow endlessly.

> amount to 40% of ones paycheck

3.2% of one's paycheck. 40% of the residence tax, which the article asserts is about 8% of one's pre-tax salary; 40%×8%=3.2%.

Did you miss this part?

To the extent that taxpayers donate to their hometowns, Tokyo no longer freerides on the substantial public expenditures required to raise and educate internal migrants.

The cost to raise a child to adulthood in Japan is around $300,000. That's quite significant.

Your $300k includes costs paid by the parents, though, but in this case we only care about government costs.

but in this case we only care about government costs

Why? Raising a child is a six-figure investment of money that doesn't go somewhere else. Every expenditure that doesn't immediately go back into the local economy like food is wasted when a person leaves. That fraction of a tax is probably never going to equal what the hometown spent on things like education it will receive no return on.

I think it's very weak logic.

First, even if someone actually paid the 300k it takes to raise a child, that doesn't mean that person owns the adult.

And second, who is paying that? Education (in Japan and the UK) is primarily funded at a national level. So Tokyo/London, have already contributed significantly to the cost of that person's education (and to the education of plenty of people who will never move there to work). And most of the costs of raising kids are paid either by parents or at a national level.

It seems to me this is just post hoc justification for taking resources out of productive areas that need them and sending them to unproductive areas that don't. That might be "democratic" if there are a lot of unproductive areas. But it isn't fair or efficient or effective. And it will soak up resources better spent helping people who actually need them...

Yes, Lexit! London should declare independence from the UK. Then it won't need to maintain all that inefficient non-megacity infrastructure.

It won't have to pay to maintain the roads between the city and the farms. What a bargain!

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