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Comment by johnchristopher | Hacker News Reader

Bear with me as I don't live in the US but doesn't some money taxed by the federal entity trickle down to the states somehow ?

edit: What's the state/federal taxes ratio ?

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See a sibling comment. It does work like that. There an interesting power division between fed, state and local.

Fed usually use the "carrot" approach to distributing some taxes. So instead of "forcing" states to comply say to set a speed limit. They'll just withhold the funds for road repair and maintenance if speed limit is not set according to some standards. Perhaps the same goes for other things welfare money, drinking age, etc.

Some people are fiercely in favour of more state control (almost down to a religious type conviction). I never really got that. I came from Europe and when I think of "government" I think of one government entity. It operates at multiple levels but it is more or the same entity. And basic things like traffic laws, gun laws, sales taxes, etc are uniform.

Because in theory you have more control over your state and (even more) your local authorities. This is a consequence of simple voting power theory - and extending the notion of 'control' beyond single votes to activism, letter-writing, pamphleteering, etc. (In practice it doesn't work that way because no one seems to care that much about the local authorities, probably because it's more exciting to keep people excited about people in power at higher levels).

Europe will come to understand that philosophy as it merges to become the EU. Already the EU is an overcomplicated mess where the dynamics of agency are unclear. It will get worse as the EU claims more power over the member states.

> Europe will come to understand that philosophy as it merges to become the EU

I'm not sure that is very likely. France for example is 65 million people, so around 1/5th of the US. That is not a very large difference, and that's twice the size of the largest US state.

With anywhere between 1 and 11 million inhabitants, French régions are actually close to US states, yet since 1789, there have been little will to delegate more power to the régions (or the smaller départements).

Some people like having a central government that ensures equality between all parts of the territory. On the other hand we might have more little overseas régions that might have a hard time fending for themselves if the central state didn't allocate more money to them without asking the other régions' opinion.

I'm not sure about your comparison. 315M is a lot closer to 500M than it is to 65M. And as far as land mass and GDP go, the US is bigger than the whole of Europe. The EU is newer and so it's hard to say if it will ever get the teeth the US federal government has, but it should be noted that State's Rights are enshrined in the US Constitution, so philosophically it's closer to the EU than to French régions. There no is question of delegating power to states, it's a question of states ceding power to the federal government.

Well, have you thought about Kant's theory that larger Republics are actually more stable? In practice that has seemed to work out.

I agree, as a foreigner living in the US, it's baffling how different each state is in regards to law/budgets/etc.

What do you think of the EU? Is it a reasonable level of state control? Would you expand it's reach?

US States are European Countries. The demographics are similar. State/Municipal governments are far more integrated than state/Federal, much like the EU/Country divide.

The ratio is different for every state and every tax bracket, but in California, on a married developers salary with a house, we pay something like 17.5% Fed, 9.3% state, and local (property tax) is 1.4376% of the value of your home, which on my salary is something like 5%.

So for us, income and property tax add up to almost 32% of our income.

Home ownership is the big wildcard in that calculation. You could pay nothing to your locality (other than sales taxes) if you don't own a home and instead pay a higher percentage to the feds.*

* - of course, someone owns the home and is paying property taxes, but your personal tax bill doesn't reflect that.

To answer your first question: yes. However, the amount varies greatly by state and changes year to year. Many of the programs for which states receive federal money are temporary in nature. Others, like federal subsidies for state Medicaid programs, are more permanent in nature. The actual ratio is going to be very uneven throughout the country.

Yes, but only if you live in a poorer state. Every state I've lived in has been one of the rich states that gives more money to the federal government than it receives in services.

But that does not mean that federal taxes do not enhance the state budget. That just means your federal taxes amount to more than the assistance your state gets. So your state budget is still enhanced by federal grants, over what it would have been.

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