Hacker News Reader

Comment by choeger | Hacker News Reader

In Germany, it's not the social system per se but it's aoparent utter ineffectiveness. We're paying more and more every year but the state/public system seems to fail everywhere and worse so than the year before. It's like the money is completely sucked up by some unproductive black hole.

And no, it's not because of reduced taxation from rich to working class, or missing taxes on property or some other policy. These policies didn't change that much in the last decade or two. Yet throughout the last decade the state and social security systems had record income, record levels of employment and managed to run down pretty much every part of the public system from education, over healthcare to defense. The money just vanished.

I am very much convinced that Germany as a whole doesn't have an income problem, but a spending problem.

View on HN

That is, in my opinion, by far the strongest argument for lower taxes. The money we (the US) do spend in education/healthcare/infrastructure is already poorly utilized, why would we want to spend more and end up like that?

To simplify it dramatically with an example, I'd rather pay $3 on the toll road and $50k for a surgery myself than pay $10 in taxes towards the road and $100k in taxes towards the healthcare system but receive both of them for "free".

I understand the advantages of a social safety net, I do. But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.

> I'd rather pay $3 on the toll road and $50k for a surgery myself than pay $10 in taxes towards the road and $100k in taxes towards the healthcare system but receive both of them for "free".

That would be a nice scenario to choose to be in.

However, the US _government_ pretty much spends more per-person than those countries with a social net [1]. So in reality, you're paying those taxes of those social countries and also getting to pay private insurance ontop of that. Although current taxes are lower than the social countries since the government's expenditures are debt financed but if the USG were to stop they'd have to raise taxes to pay it with revenue and then you'll be really wondering why you're paying the same in taxes as the EU and not getting EU benefits.

[1]: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.PP.CD?most_...

Healthcare is its own issue in the US, as I think the general populous is on average a good bit unhealthier than the average Norwegian, for example. I think it's a combination of poor health education (which also goes back to spending) and culture.

but it's all connected.

- cities designed around cars

- bad worker protection laws

- corporate welfare first before human welfare

- monopolies driving up prices.

US cities were based around cars in 1990. But today, the thinnest state (Colorado) is heavier on average than the fattest state in 1990 (Mississippi, also today's national leader)

Walking is obviously better than not walking, but something other than cars is to blame for the ballooning of the American public. 75% of America is either overweight or obese right now. That alone puts you at risk for about a million health issues and diseases.

> 75% of America is either overweight or obese right now.

Do you have a citation for that? I'm seeing numbers closer to 30% (which is still bad).

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/obesity-overweight.htm

"Percent of adults aged 20 and over with overweight, including obesity: 73.6%"

Woah, I stand corrected. That's insane.

The BMI tables are fairly unexpected. 5'8" normal range is 125-158 and at 125 you look like you run the 2 mile in track.

Of course that also shows how many Americans are overweight since the scrawny track kid is considered super skinny.

Yes, but suppose there's a "road company" you'd have to pay a toll to. Obviously they love profit margins and since they're a monopoly (they own the road) the toll would soon balloon to $20 then $35 then $100.

I think landowners should declare a value for their property, that is used for taxation, but also allows anyone to immediately buy the land from you at that price. This would allow rival road companies to quickly purchase the land necessary to build an alternative road. Such wasteful duplication would rarely happen in practice, though, because the knowledge that they do not have a guaranteed monopoly, that another company can build an alternative road if they charge exorbitant fees, will keep the charge to use the road reasonable.

>I think landowners should declare a value for their property, that is used for taxation, but also allows anyone to immediately buy the land from you at that price. This would allow rival road companies to quickly purchase the land necessary to build an alternative road.

I don't really think "Yankee Swap" is the best model for land management, my guy.

Then don’t take the road.

You can’t opt out of high taxes.

And do what, fly?

Every medium sized city, and above, in the mainland U.S. is serviced by multiple highways.

I highly doubt either any future city government would allow all the highways to be converted to privately owned toll roads.

Let them eat cake!

While flying in the skys above the poor plebs in one those soon-to-come eVTOLs?

Private companies can certainly hold their own when it comes to waste and incompetence. Government doesn’t have a monopoly on these things.

Companies certainly can be wasteful and incompetent.

But at least they won't put you in prison if you decide not to buy their product.

If they do that for long enough though they go out of business. There is not really an equivalent to going out of business in government, or at least the bar is much higher for it to happen (I.e. violent revolution).

> There is not really an equivalent to going out of business in government, or at least the bar is much higher for it to happen (I.e. violent revolution)

There's absolutely an equivalent, publicly elected officials lose re-election campaigns all the time.

Is a failed government policy generally stopped and corrected by an electoral change in practice? In my experience this almost never happens. Whereas if a company goes under, whatever failed action it was taking just stops happening. Not equivalent IMO.

Agreed. There is very rarely a sober look back on any government policy to see if it actually met the objectives it set out to achieve, and at what cost.

Clearly you've never worked in the government.

No, but both my parents spent their careers working in the VA system, which routinely trounces private health care in measures of efficiency.

If a private company wastes too much, it eventually goes out of business.

If a government entity wastes too much money, their budget is increased for the next fiscal year. There is no feedback loop to govern the waste.

Agreed, but private companies also face competition (which incentivizes as little waste as possible) that the government does not.

Competition over the past couple decades is less and less of a factor for private companies, however[1].

[1] https://hbr.org/2018/03/is-lack-of-competition-strangling-th...

The harder it is to create a startup in an area, the less competition you’ll have there. Things like regulation and labor protection laws have the unfortunate side effect of discouraging founders to embark in the "startup adventure".

Having or not having the money to spend doesn't really seem to be a real factor in whether or not it's spent well.

See: Everything you just talked about and cost-plus contracts. The US demonstrates both.

I agree. Tax rates are a bit of a moot point when money printer go brrr.

The IRS recently got a significant amount of funding, and call times went down by a lot.

There are certainly inefficiencies out there, and we should always be trying to root them out, but sometimes if you starve an organization of funding, it doesn't perform very well. Shocker!

Well, if you understood what we already spent on healthcare you'd know that we spend more per capita than everyone and we have an entire industry whose whole existence is siphoning off their cut of profit from every little transaction.

So yeah, I'd rather have single payer healthcare, and we can just fire all of the leeches.

> The money we (the US) do spend in education/healthcare/infrastructure is already poorly utilized, why would we want to spend more and end up like that?

The whole point of a single-payer system is that you will spend less, by virtue of the government using its single-buyer negotiating power to push down prices.

And also by virtue of firing all the useless parasites and middlemen that create, consume, and shuffle the mountains of paperwork that surround US health insurance, advertising, billing, etc. Unsurprisingly, these middle-men don't look kindly upon being eliminated, and have somehow convinced half the country that if it weren't for their heroic efforts, grandma would never get a cardiac shunt, and that the world would literally end if Medicare was actually allowed to negotiate drug prices.

You would never had the chance in the first place to earn this kind of money if it wouldn't be for the society.

Roads, education, healthcare etc.

Also other people work as hard as you do.

And you know of course it's better for you obviously but only as long as you are part of that group.

There is a reason why people do gofundmes after they can't work anymore.

And the riots etc? Guess what social injustice increases either your life risk or the money you spend of protecting you.

I just presented an argument for a specific case. I think you read a little too much into it.

Historically, we've had lower taxes for decades now.

https://taxfoundation.org/historical-income-tax-rates-bracke...

So, you'd have to show that since, let's say 1940, the QoL of Americans has improved as a direct result of lower taxes.

We should be able to look at things like salary, cost of living such as price of homes, education, and food all improving against inflation. So, unless you can do that, your argument for lower taxes is baseless and without merit.

> But misappropriation of someone's hard-earned money is frustrating as well.

Hard-earned money that is earned because of the society supported by the taxes that person pays. Without that society, you would not be earning the same amount. No hard-earned money is earned by an individual in the US.

So because the government is perceived to be bad at stuff, we should instead redistribute (an even greater part of) the wealth to rich people, because they do a really good job bring societal good with their piles of gold?

Lowering taxes and allowing people to keep their own money qualifies as "redistribution" now?

Yes. Guess who is profiting from higher taxes? Poorer people.

Who has most from low taxes? Rich.

And yes I know I know hn also has plenty of fang people

For a fair comparison of health care costs, you would need to know how much that $50K surgery would cost the German government. US health care costs are notoriously high.

As long as we're making up numbers though, I'd rather pay $3 for surgery and $3 for road taxes and then have the state pay me $50k in unemployment while I'm recovering from surgery. The reason we have to make people miserable is because of cries about inflation if we just give poor people money but it turns out greedy white collar crimial capitalists are really the root cause.

If the last couple of years proved anything, it's that money is all made up. It doesn't mean anything, like points on HN or Reddit karma. You happen to be able to use money to trade for goods and services, but outside of that, it's a made up numbers game, like Monopoly.

No libertarians in a bank run

There's this really bad logic that seems to govern social spending everywhere, and it states that if a program doesn't work very well, the problem is obviously inadequate funding so increase that. Over and over and over. The end result is this black hole you talk about, endlessly sucking up money.

No one stops to ask why the program or government office doesn't do it's job well, the issue is funding!

It would not surprise me if there has been an explosion of administration instead of actual people delivering services.

> people delivering services

This is a misunderstanding. These people are not "delivering service". They are doing "governance and administration". And administration size on Germany is acting like a ratchet: growing sometimes, but never shrinking.

The problem isn't spending it's the effectiveness of it. The last thing that you want to do is have the government cut spending because it doesn't get rid of the corruption it just cuts the stuff that helps people.