Fairness of Income Tax

Yes, ok, it was unfortunate. I was referring to the general approach people have when thinking about organizing the state. By the way, it was posted that 25% of the budget goes for roads and 25% for sports. That’s a lot of money that goes for sports. Where can I get some of it? What amenities can I use free of charge?

I did not say we should remove the public services that are in place. I just think it should come from other sources than income tax. I got convinced by a Polish businessman/politician who runs his own tax advisory firm and knows the subject in and out. If he says it’s doable then I trust his judgement.

That was in his community. Maybe your community does not spend anything on sports. Also, it could just be subsidized and not free of charge.

Sorry, this wasn’t meant to deter discussion or anything, just pointing out those have regularly been discussed and I doubt anyone changed their mind as a result :slight_smile:

And to stay on topic, if we want to reduce inequality further we should probably increase wealth tax (or maybe have a much higher inheritance tax).

I am quite open to changing my mind and admitting I am wrong. But, I am a scientist and will remain skeptical in absence of scientific evidence.

Coming back to what I said before, I don’t think our goal should be to reduce inequality.

So long as a person has enough to lead a satisfying life, why should it matter whether there are other people who have more?

So our goal should be not reducing inequality, but helping those who don’t have enough to live.

Why shouldn’t the people who had more luck in life give some back so that the people who had less luck have a better life?

There are lot of concrete reasons why inequality can be bad, including economic reasons. However, I do think that it is a slippery slope to start defining who has “more” luck and who has “less” luck.

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Right. Because, why only even out people’s income? Why not their looks? It’s not my fault I was not born handsome! I demand compensation! :wink:

Please watch this:

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That is easy, successful people are more lucky than less successful people.

In the end, everything will boil down to luck eventually.

That doesn’t mean we should equalize everything because evidently it leads to a bad outcome for nearly everyone.

But everyone should be fully aware that if they are more successful than someone else, it is because they were more lucky than the other person.

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I’m asssuming this is probably not a representative year for average expenses in your municipality, right?
Sports and roads were probably a huge part because they built new infrastructure. And that usually only happens every decade or so…

It’s possible that building a school gym counts as this expense. And they often have dual use, where citizens can rent it for a low fee in the evening. So it might just be that much of this expense exactly targets “confused children” :wink:

I would go a step further than the division of luck and skill. Skill is also a product of luck. This is also the case for skills like being able to work hard or making good decisions.

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Me too. Not to brag about anything, but as I kid my IQ was tested at 127. It’s not genius level, but I think only 3% of the world are at that level or higher. So I got lucky there. The next thing is that I was born in Switzerland, the richest country in the world measured by median net worth of an individual. By the time I was born only 0.13% of the world population lived in Switzerland. So what are the chances of being born in Switzerland and being gifted with intelligence on that level? Probably close to 0 and here I am. So it’s easy to look at the rest of the world and tell yourself: I did all of this with my determination and hard work. In reality it was just pure luck, nothing more.

So why should we punish people for bad luck? We tax people that won the lottery as income (30-40%) too. Nothing wrong in doing the same with with their high salaries.

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Yeah, and those core beliefs around what society should provide have nothing to do with science so nobody will be convinced :slight_smile:

Those things likely change through personal experiences, but now sure how much a forum thread can have impact (though maybe I underestimate it, at least there’s evidence that some social media do impact people’s belief system, if we believe those who study how conspiracy theory spread).

Maybe pointing out the obvious but the sports costs are there because the inhabitants of the commune decided by vote to build a soccer pitch and pay for it out of their taxes

Oh are they?
Or is that just the Talk that the Republicans and Trumpists are trying to make people believe?

Why don’t we look up the the poverty rates by state?
I did it for you so don’t have to.
Here’s the top 12 states with highest poverty rates:

  1. Mississippi
  2. New Mexico
  3. Louisiana
  4. West Virginia
  5. Arkansas
  6. Kentucky
  7. Alabama
  8. Oklahoma
  9. South Carolina
  10. Tennessee
  11. Texas
  12. Georgia

Doesn’t look particularly democrat-leaning, does it?

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Ok my bad. I mixed poverty with homelessness.

Thanks @Bojack for splitting the thread. :slight_smile:

Bingo. The numbers take only into account the expenses paid with local taxes, I’ve not taken a deeper look at my Kanton’s and federal budget (yet).

This was a fairly classic year in our budgets, but the sports part is due to a sports complex that is highly debated at every legislative assembly when we speak about budgets or accounting. The road situation is actually fairly normal for a mountain Gemeinde with a wide network. I’ve not accounted for cantonal subsidies or intercommunal solidarity (which would reduce the weight of that amount) because that money still comes from taxes, though it may have helped to draw a less specific picture applying to a specific Gemeinde. I wanted to use real numbers for which I knew what was behind them in order to evaluate if I had a personal use of the services they provide but the expenses of each Gemeinde will be split differently, and big differences between cities, villages, plain, mountain and other factors will play a big role.

My purpose was to adress the personal usefulness of taxes vs social contributions witheld from the gross salary. The purpose was not to adress the specific numbers (though I’m more than willing to discuss them with anybody wanting to do it) but the overall usefulness of what taxes pay for.

It’d be hard because, mostly, I don’t know what my life would be without them. I’m actually working as the head of road planning (among other things), so I know about that budget and I don’t think we’d reach more efficiency by having it handled privately though, of course, other taxes than income taxes could be used with equal or better efficiency (taxes relative to the actual consumption that is done of the infrastructure can reduce the use of it, and the need to handle more trafic). Is it worth 125.- per month to me, which is what my local taxes contribute to it? Yes, I do think so. That’s roughly what I pay for fuel, or car insurances, and less than my gifting budget, the service, to me, is worth it.

That price is possible because the GA is heavily subsidised. Taxes pay for railroads in order to allow cheaper access to the population because we want to encourage people to use public means of transportation. That would be our public transportation budget. We could erase that and let people pay the full price for their ticket but then, the railroad company would probably not be able to be profitable and we’d loose access to train.

A comparison could be made for phone coverage. My abo is certainly not covering the price of coverage in the remote places where I go hiking, some of it is subsidied, by other people, potentially by the state. I could be made to pay for the true price of the service but that would mean that remote places wouldn’t be covered anymore. That’d mean people who can be rescued by helicopter after a mountain accident could no more call for help. That’d be a different society. Would it be worth it? I don’t know, I feel that we, as a society, do have a really poor risk tolerance and would benefit from rediscovering what risk really is but on the other hand, lives are at stake and I do believe in saving the people we can when the price isn’t too high.

The system can be optimized. I’m very grateful for vita trails and access to cheap sports halls, swimming pools and other facilities. Our Gemeinde has made the choice to pay for a big facility, other Gemeinden have lesser costs. I’d choose to pay less and have a more select set of accomodations if I were to make the decision on my own but then again, that’s roughly 125.-/month of my income I’m paying for it and I do hate being stuck behind slow people, so having more people be fit is a net win for me. Overall, the service is worth its cost in my view.

More than the 45.-/mo (540.-/year) that my local taxes pay for? Assuming I’m living for the average 82 years of male life expectancy in Switzerland, have the average 0.75 child (the other 0.75 making the full rate of 1.5 being attributed to my partner) and they go to mandatory school (which is what’s in that line of accounting) for 9 years, that’d cost me roughly 6’600.- per school year if my local taxes paid only for my child. That also makes it so that other children have a better shot at life if they have poor family conditions so, worth it to me. Not all geniuses who have changed the course of humanity were born in wealthy families, the more people we educate, the better shot we have at having breakthrough inventions popping out of the blue. I think we agree on this one though what you say of having wealthy people pay for the education of their own children is kind of what happens with income tax, I’d say: people with greater income will pay more of the education of the children (up to more than what it’d cost them to educate their own children only) to allow for people with less means to have cheaper, or free, education.

Of course, a combination of wealth and consumption tax would make a lot of sense too and could replace income tax if done properly (once again, my opinion).

Personally i think the goal should not to reduce inequality in general, but to give everyone equal opportunities.
With that in mind I agree with you that a wealth tax is a good one and I join @nabalzbhf in advocating for higher inheritance taxes, so that the offspring of rich people doesn’t start off with a massive undeserved advantage over the others.
This of course only works with good public schools so that’s something I’m very happy to finance with my taxes.

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Quote: “Total people experiencing homelessness”.
Your map data visibly correlates with the population by state.

The more people living in a state (in total), the higher the total number of homeless people.
Hardly surprising, is it? :man_shrugging:t2:

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