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Comment by honkdaddy | Hacker News Reader

I think it's difficult for someone to have much perspective on how much their own lifestyle is subsidized when the same can be said for the vast majority of people who enjoy benefits from the government, regardless of where they choose to live. Most people take more than they contribute, I don't think someone making $120,000 and paying $40,000 in taxes should feel any guilt for living in the suburbs when so many others can pay almost nothing in taxes and still enjoy huge amounts of government benefit.

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The person making $120,000 is heavily benefiting from a public infrastructure that makes $120k/yr jobs possible. A ditch digger needs almost no infrastructure besides a shovel to do his job. An engineer needs schools and universities to educate his colleagues, roads and railways to deliver parts required for the product he's working on, and police services that deter theft of those products once they're built. Not to mention a consumer base with enough money to afford the product in question.

This is right. The suburbanite wants the benefits of agglomeration, but they want to define their existence within it so that they aren't exposed to any of its downsides. It’s a neat trick.

There are downsides to living a suburban lifestyle as it is typically designed. They just don't care or unaware.

And the ditch digger requires the engineer to tell him where to dig. Digging a hole for no reason isn't very beneficial.

Even if you take away this public infrastructure you would get private infrastructure in its stead.

There is no more ditch digger of old. They now use $1M excavators that are probably leased from a mega-corp that purchased it from another mega-corp.

Of course there are ditch diggers. You can't dig everything with a machine.

No one who pays "almost nothing in taxes" enjoys huge amounts of anything. Except maybe the actual rich with their tax avoidance games, but actual poverty fucking sucks and whatever meager benefits you manage to access don't change that.

The people we call rich pay the majority of taxes.

>In 2019, the top 1 percent of taxpayers accounted for more income taxes paid than the bottom 90 percent combined. The top 1 percent of taxpayers paid $612 billion in income taxes while the bottom 90 percent paid $461 billion in income taxes. [1]

You're right though, poverty does absolutely suck and realistically nobody's 'enjoying' EBT or assisted housing or whatever benefit they receive. The point I was trying to make is that poor people shouldn't feel badly for contributing less to the pie any more than 1%ers should feel righteous for contributing more.

[1] https://taxfoundation.org/publications/latest-federal-income...

So you admit that living in the suburbs is like being on welfare?

If you want to look at that way, sure. The point I'm making is that it's not a particularly interesting or descriptive way to look at society.

the american individualism is showing.

I'm not American.

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