How well do you know your country?
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
Which, more importantly, means that it is almost impossible to try new things (let's face it, there is a lot of unpredictability in policies so you can't always foresee what will happen). Basically, this is the conservative vision: we know what we currently have and we'll only accept changes that are absolutely necessary or absolutely proven to be good.
BECAUSE taxes are nearly impossible to roll back, between a legislature that is resistant to reducing taxes, and a legislature that finds ways to repurpose taxes. Slow to the draw on legislation is a good thing. If you have an emergency, that's what a budget is for.
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
we can try different things
Been fooled too many times into that. The fault of this is legislators that won't let temporary taxes expire because it's fresh money to lure voters with.
Nope, sorry.
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
On the top of my head, I can think of several changes to taxes in my country in recent time that were reducing them
And I can think of a magnitude higher where they weren't.
I'm willing to put money on it that you'll lose that comparison. (If we're talking about taxation in the US)
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
So it might not be so much that taxes cannot be revoked, but that we have been unable to decide to abandon something that is under public control back to the individuals.
Yeah, "public control" usually means a governing panel that people don't elect and can't fire. I don't consider that public control. How many years has it been since beltway 8 in Houston was supposed to take down the toll booths...
starts counting
I'll be right back.
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@Yamikuronue said in How well do you know your country?:
Our schools can be pretty damn awful, and there's a lot of good ideas we've abandoned we can bring back as well as new ideas we should try out, but compared to the Victorian norm of minimal instruction plus child labor? Overall, an improvement.
So, basically, false dilemma.
Don't let them remove a single health/safety regulation or they'll dismantle OSHA, and force women to lick radioactive paint?
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@xaade said in How well do you know your country?:
BECAUSE taxes are impossible to roll back.
Meh. You take that as an axiom. Too bad it's wrong.
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
On the top of my head, I can think of several changes to taxes in my country in recent time that were reducing them
And I can think of a magnitude higher where they weren't.
Which is totally irrelevant here. You said taxes cannot be rolled back, I said I know of some counter-examples (and before you ask, not totally meaningless marginal ones either...). The fact that not all taxes are rolled back doesn't mean anything, that's totally beside the point.
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
So it might not be so much that taxes cannot be revoked, but that we have been unable to decide to abandon something that is under public control back to the individuals.
Yeah, "public control" usually means a governing panel that people don't elect and can't fire.
No, "public control" in this case means for me the kind of things @Yamikuronue was mentionning. The fact that our society considers child protection and education more important than the right of the individuals to flog their children and send them to the factory means we need some way to enable and enforce that, which means some money, so a tax that is never going to be rolled back for as long as we don't accept to let people mistreat their children.
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
The fact that not all taxes are rolled back doesn't mean anything, that's totally beside the point.
I mean nearly
And yes, it does matter.
If the likelihood of rolling back a tax upon figuring it doesn't work for society is less than 100%, that should be a serious risk factor to creating the tax.
To put it into development terms.
If you have a vanishingly small budget for reverting bad changes to new code, because you are maintaining too much old code, then you should be slower to decide what new features to make.
Alternatively you could increase that budget, but in our case legislators are ridiculously stubborn and won't do that.
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
The fact that our society considers child protection and education more important than the right of the individuals to flog their children and send them to the factory means we need some way to enable and enforce that, which means some money, so a tax that is never going to be rolled back for as long as we don't accept to let people mistreat their children.
But it's not public control.
Government control, yes.
I can think of a few things that could help create a real sense of public control. Like allowing the public to fire a government employee by vote (instead of just petitioning), or some other measures of control.
But, like I said, these things are controlled by panels that operate independently of public oversight.
I have as much control over social services as I do Burger King.
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@xaade said in How well do you know your country?:
If the likelihood of rolling back a tax upon figuring it doesn't work for society is significantly less than 100%, that should be a serious risk factor to creating the tax.
That I can agree with (I've added the modifier to say that our society is rich enough to support a few misguided duds that stay around...).
I would be 100% behind some kind of law forcing re-consideration of taxes after some years. Too bad so few people seem interested in that -- it seems either you have to always increase all the taxes, or to always cut all the taxes. Am I really so weird for wanting a reasonable middle ground?
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@xaade said in How well do you know your country?:
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
The fact that our society considers child protection and education more important than the right of the individuals to flog their children and send them to the factory means we need some way to enable and enforce that, which means some money, so a tax that is never going to be rolled back for as long as we don't accept to let people mistreat their children.
But it's not public control.
It's "public" in the sense that society has delegated that to some authority above the individuals. Probably not the best word here, sorry...
My point is, what society decides must be managed at some higher level than the individual needs some funding, so taxes that are not going to go away. Whether that management is actually controled by the public (in the conventional sense of the word!) is a different point. It's not the same to say "I don't want my money to be spent on child protection" and "child protection matters but the Municipal Child Protection Office (or whatever it's called) does a bad job of it"!
(and here again you'll probably find that in practice I would favor the same kind of ideas that you do!)
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
I would be 100% behind some kind of law forcing re-consideration of taxes after some years. Too bad so few people seem interested in that -- it seems either you have to always increase all the taxes, or to always cut all the taxes. Am I really so weird for wanting a reasonable middle ground?
Those exist in a lot of cases.
And they just blindly revote the taxes in.
Alternatively to consider, Bush tax cuts "expired". (I know it's more nuanced than that, but it's humorous to mention in this discussion).
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@xaade said in How well do you know your country?:
[forcing re-consideration of taxes after some years.]Those exist in a lot of cases.
And they just blindly revote the taxes in.
Yeah, it would need to be formulated in a better way to avoid that. I'm not sure how, maybe at least adding some constraint to have an external review part of the revote? Either a bi-partisan committee or a technical one, depending on the political mores of the place (if that's not obvious already, I am not so familiar with the intricacies and details of the US system...).
That would also need to tie-in with some direct allocation of taxes to specific goals, i.e. you don't blindly raise sales tax, you set a specific goal for it that can be evaluated later (I think there is supposedly something like that in France but also think it doesn't apply to sales and income tax that are probably the biggest ones, so it's a bit moot...).
And it would need to actually come as a change of mindset (i.e. legislators shouldn't try to game the system -- that's not so wishful thinking as it might seem, mentalities to change across time...). I think we're slowly starting to see this kind of shift in Europe where talks of budget deficit are becoming more and more important -- not that budgets are more balanced, but I get the feeling that governements have to work harder to justify that now vs. a few years ago. Partly because of EU rules, but the fact that these rules exist (and that, for once, they are not really seen that much as the big-bad-bureaucrats-ruling-our-life-from-Brussels) is a sign.
Alternatively to consider, Bush tax cuts "expired". (I know it's more nuanced than that, but it's humorous to mention in this discussion).
Sorry, I have no idea what that means. I'm guessing he voted in some tax cuts with a short lifespan and when time came to renew the law, that didn't happen so taxes were raised again? And for added humour, I'm going to go out on a limb and say that the democrats had the majority when that happened...
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
That would also need to tie-in with some direct allocation of taxes to specific goals, i.e. you don't blindly raise sales tax, you set a specific goal for it that can be evaluated later
We found a new goal.
War on Terror.
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@xaade said in How well do you know your country?:
@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
That would also need to tie-in with some direct allocation of taxes to specific goals, i.e. you don't blindly raise sales tax, you set a specific goal for it that can be evaluated later
We found a new goal.
War on Terror.
Sure, define from start some metrics as to how it's going to be evaluated. Have these metrics validated by a cross-party committee or a panel of judges or whatever your system deems acceptable and not totally partisan.
There will always be ways to game the system (at worst, rewrite the constitution -- some countries change it every few years according to the ruling party...). But you can at least try to make it difficult and that doing so will be obvious, so that it won't slip by unnoticed.
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@Yamikuronue said in How well do you know your country?:
Our schools can be pretty damn awful, and there's a lot of good ideas we've abandoned we can bring back as well as new ideas we should try out, but compared to the Victorian norm of minimal instruction plus child labor?
It seems like this is more a function of societal wealth. Before they were working in factories kids were working on farms.
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
Sure, define from start some metrics as to how it's going to be evaluated. Have these metrics validated by a cross-party committee or a panel of judges or whatever your system deems acceptable and not totally partisan.
That's the entire point of "war on terror" is to make it not defined.
Even Obama admitted that to Trump.
(Matter of fact, he sounded a lot like Bush)
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@boomzilla said in How well do you know your country?:
@Yamikuronue said in How well do you know your country?:
Our schools can be pretty damn awful, and there's a lot of good ideas we've abandoned we can bring back as well as new ideas we should try out, but compared to the Victorian norm of minimal instruction plus child labor?
It seems like this is more a function of societal wealth. Before they were working in factories kids were working on farms.
Except the farms were owned by the family, so there was no arbitrary big bad to blame everything on.
I'm beginning to the think the political status quo of both parties is to create a boogey man, dehumanize them, and blame everything on them, then pretend the other party is the only one doing this.
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@remi said in How well do you know your country?:
Am I really so weird for wanting a reasonable middle ground?
You do know you're posting on
thedailyWTFthe internet, right?
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@boomzilla Yeah, that's one of the more fascinating angles: child labor was, for many poor families, a way to drag themselves out of poverty. Children did not earn as much as adults, but 3-4 boys working could easily make as much as 1-2 adults depending what they did.
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@xaade said in How well do you know your country?:
That's the entire point of "war on terror" is to make it not defined.
Then fuck off with this and you won't get my money (well, if I've got a say on it...). If the whole definition of a policy is "I'm not going to tell you", you'll have to work very hard to make it palatable to me.
I've got the exact same issue with the emergency state currently in place in France (since the attacks last November). It's one thing to use, well, emergency powers to react in the days following an emergency. But it has been renewed at least 3 times since then, with basically no justification from the gouvernement apart from screaming "terrorists!" as loud as they can. That's bullshit.
