Anti-Tax Fervor Closed Their Libraries. Now Residents Are Trying to Go It Alone | Hacker News Reader

Anti-Tax Fervor Closed Their Libraries. Now Residents Are Trying to Go It Alone

nytimes.com

122 pointspm24601276 comments

> until voters turned down a tax increase that would have kept the library system open

Is anyone else wondering why a tax increase is needed to keep the library open? Does that mean it wasn't sustainable? Could it be due to rising minimum wage? Is it reasonable to blame the voters?

I grew up on generational property in rural southern Oregon, and it's true that there's plenty of anti-tax sentiment, including from Myself.

A small town near where I grew up ceased it's police force, and is instead patrolled by county sheriffs stationed in nearby towns. The truth is there are many people out here who just want to live their private country lives, many of who have small income, and spend their year fishing and hunting for food.

City dwellers dramatically subsidize American suburbs and rural areas. Roads, water, the electric grid, communication networks, hospitals, fire suppression, law enforcement, courts, schools, mail delivery, .... public infrastructure and services get more expensive per capita when people are more spread out. On top of that, the federal government intentionally spends large amounts of money in poorer areas of the country (e.g. on military bases and weapons contractors) as an explicit geographical wealth redistribution scheme. 80 years ago the rural poverty in many parts of America was a story of shocking destitution.

If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes on corporate profits, very large incomes, large inheritances, etc., expand enforcement against tax evasion, and eliminate legal or quasi-legal tax-avoidance loopholes. However, the wealthy in this country have largely succeeded in a 50-year campaign to redistribute wealth upward.

> If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes on corporate profits, very large incomes, large inheritances, etc. However, the wealthy in this country have largely succeeded in a 50-year campaign to redistribute wealth upward.

It's an unpopular opinion (because of the propaganda campaigns waged by the wealthy), but a wealth tax is very much needed in this country. The income tax is fundamentally designed to prevent the accumulation of wealth. So us worker bees bear the costs of financing government, while the wealthy, who owing to their accumulated wealth, do not need or have an income, get to reap the benefits.

The wealthy paid taxes on their wealth back when it was income. And they pay capital gains tax if their wealth grows.

"The wealthy" generally structure their income to avoid it being "income", or hide it in jurisdictions the US can't see, or any of dozens to hundreds of other tricks to make sure they don't pay anything resembling their share.

This is a game as old as the US income tax itself; the 16th Amendment wasn't passed to legalize income taxes (they were already legal), but to make sure Congress could tax income "from whatever source derived", since wealthy people were restructuring their income streams to try to avoid taxation.

They still do that today.

That's an argument for changing the income tax rules, not for adding a wealth tax.

In any case, a wealth tax would be easy to game too. There is a lot of room for loopholes in the definition of wealth, what kind of wealth should be taxed, what the tax brackets should be, what kinds of deductions are allowed, etc.

We need to rebuild the Inheritance Tax. Hit the wealth at the moment of inheritance, when it acts as income for the next generation.

I'm worried about the decline of the inheritance tax. It's happening all over the West. In France, "the incomes attained by the top 1% of French inheritors are already higher than those attained by the top 1% of workers".

We could be headed back to a Jane Austen -esque society where ambitious young people seek their fortunes in marriage, rather than in business.

A lot of really wealthy people inherited their wealth, they aren't doing anything useful.

Only if they realize those gains.

Why should unrealized gains be taxed?

You can get interest-free loans against your illiquid assets. With enough income coming in to replace the spent money, it's essentially as if you're spending the illiquid assets themselves, without having had to liquidate (and thereby pay taxes on) them.

This is really more like using the illiquid assets as collateral, not like spending them. The loan payments still need to be made from income, or by liquidating assets, both of which would be taxed.

It's plain-old collateral if you're just spending the money normally, sure. But you can also take that loan and use it as leverage on a bet (i.e. a risky investment.) Then, your upside is more untaxed capital gains; while your downside can be immediately repaid by liquidating the assets, leaving you only with the need to pay the taxes.

There is a reason that investment firms exist: this process is a ratchet for making untaxed (or less-taxed) income.

But the monthly loan payments need to be made somehow, no matter what you use the loan for.

If you pay them with income, you paid income tax.

If you pay them by liquidating assets (including assets you purchased with the loan money and then sold), you pay capital gains tax (unless you sell for a loss).

In this case, I was assuming a risky investment that returns within the same month.

And then sales tax when they buy things and an estate tax when they die.

The wealthy pay the vast majority of all the income tax already.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2017/12/06/the-r...

> The wealthiest 1 percent of American households own 40 percent of the country's wealth, according to a new paper by economist Edward N. Wolff.

There's probably some good discussion to be had around that, but whenever anyone in the US talks about the injustice of the top 1%, I can't help but wonder: if we calculated how much of the world's wealth the 99% in America owned, would they feel contrition for their injustice?

Given that the US has 25% of the world's wealth, and the lower 99% of the US population has 60% of the US's wealth, it stands to reason that "the 99%" have a full 15% of the world's total wealth. Given that the US has ~4% of the world's population, surely resolving "the wealth disparity" is more likely to lower their position than raise it.

This is pretty disingenuous and I'll explain why. The next 1% after the top 1% owns a pretty sizable chunk too. And the next 1% after that a large chunk, and so on.

The top 10% has 75% of U.S. wealth, the top 20% has 87% of U.S. wealth. So carrying on about the 99% as if wealth is distributed in anyway evenly within that group is more than a bit silly. Especially when you look at the bottom 50% having a pittance, somewhere between 1-2% of U.S. wealth.

The next natural group after discussing the 1%'s wealth, isn't the other 99% just because 100-1=99...

So really your argument falls apart for me because most of the 99%, the bottom 70%, end up owning just about 1% of the world's wealth. And that's a fairly small slice of pie to be split between 227 million people. And before you show me the math that it's actually quite a bit per person. Don't forget that in reality the bottom 60% only has almost as much wealth as the whole next 10% and that most of the population isn't seeing the wealth you're describing.

According to this Atlantic article, the divide is between the 1%, the next 9%, and the bottom 90%, with the top 1% increasing their wealth at the expense of the bottom 90%, and the remaining 9% desperately building walls to keep their wealth intact.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

For starters, "disingenuous" implies bad faith on my part and that's pretty uncharitable. This isn't shilling, or paid posting, or social commentating-- nor even is it me stating facts (beyond those contained in others' references). It's just a thought I've had in the past. It'd be nice if common civility meant you didn't jump out the gate assuming bad intent on my part.

In any event, I was not aware of that purported wealth distribution, but the median income in the US is $59k and the median income of the world is 9k. We can argue cost of living and so forth, but it is no exaggeration to say that nearly everyone in the US today is living on the upper crust of humanity in terms of wealth and lifestyle.

Across the political spectrum people tend to agree that keeping jobs in the US is a good thing while ignoring that that perpetuates the very form of wealth inequality they decry when talking about national politics. Not that I think they're wrong to argue that the government should favor its own citizens over others internationally, but it does seem rather hypocritical to me.

You might be interested in this article about how wealth is divided in the US, even if you don't agree with all of its conclusions:

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/06/the-bir...

I will / am reading it, but if as its title and first few paragraphs suggest its discussion is on the top 10%, it doesn't really change my statement. $59k median income means literally half the country-- 2.5% of the world's population-- is making at least 6 times as much money as literally half of the world. It is not until you get to some US income percentile around the 15th that incomes drop below the world's 50th percentile income bracket.

I do not deny that there is wealth inequality in the US nor do I have any elegant solutions to it, but I perceive a lot of self-interested hypocrisy around the issue. Surely fighting wealth inequality means cheering when manufacturing jobs are sent overseas, and the corporation's US base means that we can use economic leverage to enforce safety / wage standards on these new jobs in India / China / Mexico. This brings up the global median income, surely a good thing for anyone concerned with income equality.

Well it's more complicated than that. We mourn jobs that are sent overseas. But a lot of things can be made much cheaper elsewhere and we as consumers benefit from cheaper prices. It's just in an argument about jobs, people don't want to argue the whole picture and the complexities of trade. They want their cheaper prices, and they want all those jobs too, and they want decent wages, and they want someone else to figure out how to make that possible.

The other problem is all the people crying about jobs going overseas aren't the same people crying for wealth equality necessarily. So again, it's incorrect to lump everyone and every viewpoint together when it's really a huge spectrum.

And on top of all that I would argue that arguing wealth inequality in the U.S. is fine because it exists in the rest of the world is a red herring. For starters, no nation, not even the U.S. is solely responsible for the state of the world and economies in every other country. And secondly, no nation is under any obligation to address the world's problems before addressing its own. And it's not effective to avoid the issue by shifting the scope around arbitrarily.

To be clear, I am not arguing that inequality in the US is "fine" because it exists elsewhere. I think I've tried to make that clear in my posts.

I am arguing a few other things:

* That it is hypocrisy for anyone to argue against wealth inequality in the US, but decry jobs going overseas

* That it is wrong to not care about wealth inequality in the world while moaning that we're only in the top 95th percentile of human wealth

* That things in the US are nowhere near as bad as they are commonly portrayed

I don't get why this is always trotted out? If you have the lion's share of wealth (and the continuous compounding passive income that comes with) then this should be expected. And then its just a matter of negotiating the amount, with the society you participate in.

>>> a wealth tax is very much needed

>> The wealthy pay the vast majority [...] already

> I don't get why this is always trotted out?

Surely the context of the conversation explains why.

It is disingenuous to say this in the context of the conversation: that little qualifier -- income in income taxes - matters.

I am paying 0 (none, nada, nothing) income tax. But I am a taxpayer.

This[1] source paints a better picture, and I didn't even bother verifying the data - at least it considers other kinds of taxes.

[1]https://itep.org/wp-content/uploads/taxday2017.pdf

That entire article seems to avoid saying how much INCOME each of those groups are. Yes, the top 3% pay 37.5% of income taxes. But is their total income less than or greater than 37.5% of the total?

Without the numbers, its kind of meaningless.. that is like saying bill gates moves to a town of 50 people, and suddenly pays 99.999% of the taxes.. its expected, unless you give the mean, median, etc, of income.. not just of how much he paid.

That's because most of the money goes to them in the first place.

So they pay the majority. Good. They can pay more too.

Regressive federal payroll taxes are almost equal to income taxes.

Yes, this is an important point. I don't even notice my social security and other taxes really, and some of the charges like for workman's comp insurance don't even show up on your paycheck, but those payroll taxes are a huge issue for low wage workers. Plus they max out - so if I make 150k, my higher income basically leads to a tax cut for high wage workers.

They max out because the benefits max out. IN THEORY, your SS and worker's comp payments pay for your own benefits, as if an insurance company was calculating odds and investing the money.

In practice of course it is politically easier for government to borrow the money and spend more than income, until Greece happens.

Anyway, charging high-income employees more for SS and then paying them less on retirement would ruin the illusion that it is a retirement plan and not simple theft from the future.

Well, by that standpoint all taxation is simple theft from the future, because you might die and get no benefit from it. Social security and medicare serve a social good. I knew that the idea behind not taxing me past the max was because I couldn't get more benefits. But I already have exposure to many other tax credits that poor people don't get, because they aren't able to make investments.

I agree with your comment that it's easier to borrow the money. Look at our current government, that was supposedly fixated on budget deficits then when Obama is gone they pass a giant tax cut, increase the deficit (with the wish and a prayer that the deficit would go away), and now that there's clearly going to be a much larger deficit their answer is not cancel or reduce the unneeded tax cut for rich people - they want to cut benefits - this was all predicated before the tax cut.

The 401k and IRA are inverse wealth taxes, so naturally you want to eliminate those, right? After all, no one should be so wealthy as to not need or have an income (retire).

seems reasonable. you already can't contribute above some amount tax free, and you shouldnt have more than 30M dollars put away for retirement

> City dwellers dramatically subsidize American suburbs and rural areas

I am not convinced this is accurate, at least in some cases. In some cases, suburbs raise much more capital in taxes per person, are often required by the state to give some back for redistribution (e.g. education), attract business much more these days than city centers, provide much needed infrastructure for city-based businesses to house their employees, and provide many services that are leveraged by urbanites unable to attain similar quality locally (e.g. hospitalization). The unfortunate realization is that many inner cities suffer due to government-based mismanagement and often lean on thriving surburban areas and state handouts to help. It goes both ways.

> If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes

Others believe to reduce the tax burden, you need to reduce expenditures, especially waste. The classist redistribution argument is a great way to let budget makers off the hook for mismanagement while blaming your peers.

> . In some cases, suburbs raise much more capital in taxes per person, are often required by the state to give some back for redistribution (e.g. education), attract business much more these days than city centers, provide much needed infrastructure for city-based businesses to house their employees, and provide many services that are leveraged by urbanites unable to attain similar quality locally (e.g. hospitalization).

Can you find a citation for this claim? Strong Towns did a blog about this and found that downtown areas produce far more tax revenue per acre than suburbs. Source : https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2018/8/7/growing-lasting...

Another effect given is that suburbs and rural areas require far more investment in infrastructure per capita. In short, rural areas and suburbs require way more roads than downtown, and fewer people live there per mile of road to boot. So fewer people are paying taxes to support even more roads.

I would be very curious to see a study that showed the opposite effect, and how it could be possible.

> In short, rural areas and suburbs require way more roads than downtown, and fewer people live there per mile of road to boot. So fewer people are paying taxes to support even more roads.

Yes, but maintaining roads isn't a fixed cost by road length (or even surface area), its determined by volume and size of vehicle traffic, with heavier vehicles doing more damage, far out of proportion to their weight; a single heavy truck doing damage equivalent to 5-10,000 cars in some estimates.

Cities may have less road area per capita, but they have a lot higher utilization and a lot more heavier vehicles than on most suburban roads that have low density traffic composed almost entirely of passenger cars and light trucks.

I'm not sure if you've lived in low-density rural areas that are dependent on many roads, but when you do you see traffic isn't always the dominant factor. In many rural & suburban parts of the US road maintenance is heavily driven by the freeze-thaw cycle's damage - back roads will simply crack, buckle, and come apart. Living in both rural, lower density parts of New England and the even sparser US Rockies you see this continuously. A road with literally no traffic will still start to fail over just a few years. Similarly in wet soils & heavy root areas I've lived in rural roads also accumulate a lot of non-traffic damage even when you don't get sinkholes. Bridges wash out, culverts get blocked, nothing lasts. Even desert areas can have issues with drifting sand and the occasional serious cracking.

Basically dealing with infrastructure in rural areas you can't pretend that the earth is stable & inactive and no rural place can afford the most durable materials.

> I'm not sure if you've lived in low-density rural areas that are dependent on many roads, but when you do you see traffic isn't always the dominant factor.

I've worked in low density rural areas, though I've only lived in urban and low-density suburban areas, mostly the latter.

And, yes, if you have very little traffic and very little of that is heavy vehicle traffic, weathering becomes the dominant factor.

If you have signficant traffic, it becomes the dominant wear factor, even though you still have the full impact of weathering. High population density doesn't eliminate the freeze/thaw cycle.

> Basically dealing with infrastructure in rural areas you can't pretend that the earth is stable & inactive and no rural place can afford the most durable materials.

You can't pretend that in urban areas, either, which (among other factors) tend to be next to major waterways which have substantial impacts on stability.

> and no rural place can afford the most durable materials.

What you mean is “no rural place finds it cost effective to pay for the most expensive materials that are needed for heavily trafficked urban roads, because the maintenance cost with cheaper materials to keep roads in conditions suitable for the actual demands placed on them in those areas is lower than if the more expensive materials were used.”

Which gets back to my point that, sure, low-density areas have more linear distance of road per person, but also lower build and maintenance costs per unit of linear distance of road.

Which claim? Why did we change from per capita to per acre? Seems like an underhanded way for StrongTowns to make a point (I disagree with most of the "StrongTowns" approach as ideologically driven and opposed to the practicalities people prefer). This is the way these goal-driven ideologues muster support. I don't think you can link a source about a specific area or two as refutation of a point about some suburbs, especially when you change from per person to amount of land.

> In short, rural areas and suburbs require way more roads than downtown, and fewer people live there per mile of road to boot. So fewer people are paying taxes to support even more roads.

I know it can read like common sense (I won't ask for a study from you or anything), but it also reads like common sense that a more traveled road requires significantly more maintenance costs. These are just not binary things that you can answer this way.

> I would be very curious to see a study that showed the opposite effect, and how it could be possible.

Opposite effect of which part? Do I really have to provide a study to show some suburbs incur a financially heavier burden due to their neighboring city than vice versa?

> Which claim? Why did we change from per capita to per acre?

Strong towns at least has numbers. So while you may disagree with the methodology at least there is one.

> This is the way these goal-driven ideologues muster support.

It sounds like you're equally biased, at least until you provide some competing numbers. Fine, use per capita. What did you come up with?

Actually, those guys have collected both tax data and spending data. They show very well that the older, poorer parts of cities universally collect more in taxes than they spend on services, and the surplus subsidizes the richer suburban areas. If you have any data at all showing the opposite, I'm sure they would love to see it.

Strongtowns is not some hotbed of liberalism. They guy who started it grew up on a farm in a small town in Minnesota. He is anything but a "liberal."

In some cases, suburbs raise much more capital

In some cases, you may be right.

It is much more the norm that new development gets sweetheart deals waiving all sorts of taxes and fees (which would ordinarily fund the infrastructure costs the local government is about to be on the hook for because of the new development), on a mentality that it's the only way to attract development.

Which then means somebody else has to pay more to cover those infrastructure costs, because the people using the infrastructure aren't paying for it.

This same pattern repeats with both business and residential development, all over the country.

While I agree with you, I am not sure this is specific to suburb vs city. Infrastructure costs are borne by the citizens of the areas, regardless of the density of the area. Or are you saying somehow inner cities are providing more infrastructure for suburban companies w/ tax breaks as opposed to the inverse?

This is not true at all. Rural and suburban areas receive an incredibly disproportionate amount of tax dollars for infrastructure compared to urban areas.

Here is an article with some actual numbers from Halifax, Nova Scotia:https://usa.streetsblog.org/2015/03/05/sprawl-costs-the-publ...

Some of the tables are pretty revealing in there.

Cities tend to already be built up. There are streets, water/gas/electricity/etc. already there, and redeveloping doesn't require 100% of the infrastructure to be run out there and built from scratch.

Expanding the suburban sprawl means going to places where that infrastructure isn't already there, which means adding all of it and adding the burden of maintaining it. And when you then waive the taxes that are meant to pay for the infrastructure, where does the money come from? Out of somebody else's pocket.

On the other hand: try fixing anything that goes beneath the surface in certain cities. There's pipes, cables, subways, shelters everywhere it seems.

People from New York might have some further input here.

It's true that most cities don't have records of everything that has been buried beneath their streets, although I don't know whether the additional costs of finding the appropriate items and the occasional unintended damage to other bits of infrastructure outweigh the increased costs of having to deal with far longer pipes/cables/whatever.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-08-10/nobody-kn...

> the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by

Low income folks just scraping by don't pay taxes as it is -- at least not income taxes.

Particularly relatively to services provided, tax refunds, health insurance premium assistance, free schooling.

> If people want to reduce the tax burden on folks with low incomes just scraping by, the way to accomplish that is by increasing taxes on corporate profits

This is completely wrong.

The poor either don't pay income taxes or pay very little income tax, because the marginal tax rates for low income levels are so low. That's by design.

Wherever the tax is levied - on corporations or on individuals - doesn't affect the incidence of the tax; that is, who really pays, at the end of the day. When you tax corporations, that actually increases the tax burden on the very poor. The amount that they are directly paying in April[0] might be the same, but the total burden of the tax is passed on to both workers and shareholders alike, in the form of lower wages, lower dividends, and lower share prices.

[0] well, withheld in every paycheck, but same idea

Except that corporations have various tax-reduction tools available that are not available to anyone but the super-wealthy. They can move their profits offshore, move wealth around between holding companies, apply for R&D tax credits, and generally arrange things so as to avoid taxes. Whereas the average middle-class person has virtually no access to these things without leading a very specific lifestyle.

"by increasing taxes on corporate profits, very large incomes, large inheritances, etc., expand enforcement against tax evasion, and eliminate legal"

Have the rich write laws to tax themselves? We hope so.

I don't get your point, you probably aren't sarcastic? The wealthy effectively do write tax laws for themselves, through their capture of the congress, and the use of divisive social issues to trick poor people into voting to cut their own social safety network.

Not in our neck of the woods. The jobs are all in the suburbs and the cities grasp at any kind of subsidy they can get their hands on. The schools there are crumbling and bumbling. People don't feel safe. The roads are barely passable. Population is in decline, moving to where the wealth and jobs are.

The wealthiest 1400 people in the US pay as much tax as the least wealthy 50%.

EDIT: citation: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-10-14/top-3-of-...

Calling it a tax increase is somewhat misleading. County services were primarily funded by the federal government charging fees to timber harvesters. This money was redirected by Congress, so the county needed to find another revenue source to keep services going. On the net, yes, it's a tax increase, but it's really only looking to keep the share of tax money going to libraries constant.

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/03/dougla... https://www.oregonlive.com/mapes/index.ssf/2014/12/federal_p...

This newsletter also suggests that library funding was being regularly cut prior to the loss of federal money.

https://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=htt...

I live in southern Idaho and we have similar problems with poverty in rural areas due to declining timber, grazing and mining industries. Those problems are due to a hundred years of unsustainable mismanagement and were anticipated by environmentalists decades before they played out.

There is a strong anti-tax sentiment here, especially in northern and southeastern Idaho, but I don't share it. The truth is that the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to the military, corporate welfare (tax breaks) and debt service. At the state level, the biggest costs are due to loss of taxes as incentives for corporations to relocate to certain cities, the loss of main street small business taxes that closed when Walmart/Amazon took over, and subsidies to factory farm conglomerates like Simplot (where your french fries come from).

So a $6 tax to keep libraries open is a pittance. To me it represents a last desperate dismissal by the people of a government that has utterly failed them. Sadly all of the above causes stem from good ol' boys in Republican clothing, who made backroom deals to enrich themselves and their cronies while working folks got taken. But we keep voting for them so the situation is unlikely to change anytime soon.

The saddest part of all is that due to the electoral college and overrepresentation of low-population states like mine in the US Senate, our short-term populist thinking has spread to the national stage. People don't generally change political parties, and unlike us fringe intellectuals frequenting HN, are hesitant to examine their own ignorance and learn from the past. For me there is little alternative but to spread the truth about what happened in us flyover states and wait for the youth to vote for a better future.

I know this people say that people in red states vote against their interests, but I think it misses some aspects. Red states tend to have onerous voter disenfranchisement which tends to target people of color but also poor whites as well who are also likely to not have IDs. Moreover, poor people have to work, and aren't as willing to lose time in the day and get fired in order to vote.

It's similar to the discussion about 2016. Forever the media narrative has been poor whites voted for Trump, but the exit polls show that his voter base skewed towards higher pay than did Clinton's, and that doesn't even count the myriad of people who never vote because they don't see the exercise as having a positive benefit for them.

May be the media and politicians in red states hypes taxes etc., but polls show a majority of people in the US support raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations[0]. So, I've never really believed people in red states really that anti-tax in the majority. The ones who I've come across who are tend to be wealthy.

[0] https://news.gallup.com/poll/1714/taxes.aspx

What does this mean?

> The truth is that the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to [...] corporate welfare (tax breaks)"

That sounds like me saying that the majority of your salary comes from me not stealing it from you.

You're correct that I mistyped "the vast majority of federal tax money today goes to the military, corporate welfare (tax breaks) and debt service". What I meant to say there is that the greatest mismanagement of our tax dollars happens with those things, so we would save more money through reforms there than by shutting down public works like libraries which are relatively inexpensive per capita.

The taxation-is-theft phenomenon is relatively new. During my first government class sometime in the early 90s socialism, progressivism, populism and libertarianism were low single digit percentage demographics in US politics. At that time, it was still considered patriotic to fund the UN/NATO, public schools, farmers, medical research, levies to build bridges etc etc etc. We fought tooth and nail to prevent sales tax from going from 5 to 6%, but only fringe groups talked about reducing social security withholding.

Somehow that's all changed, correlated with the decline of US infrastructure and the rise of trade deficits and the national debt. Personally I think that was all orchestrated starting from the Reagan era, because if those monies don't go back to the public then some rich guy gets them. We've swung from democratic institutions to republican institutions and either extreme has its dangers.

I'd recommend the guns vs butter argument if you want an interesting Wikipedia crawl. The USSR fell due to overspending on the military and authoritarian agencies instead of investing in its people and economic productivity. The same thing could easily happen to us if we succumb to late stage capitalism when it eats itself through policies like austerity that have no mathematical basis (that are dogma).

> During my first government class sometime in the early 90s socialism, progressivism, populism and libertarianism were low single digit demographics in US politics.

No, they weren't all, though “progressivism” as a label wasn't current (what it now refers to was mostly referred to as “liberalism” in the 1990s).

But it's true that the early 1990s was the height of the neoliberal consensus when there was a historically narrow range of ideas within mainstream political thought on core issues outside of the partisan division on culture war issues. But that was an exception, not the norm.

Is anyone else wondering why a tax increase is needed to keep the library open? Does that mean it wasn't sustainable?

Declining timber revenues.

https://www.vocativ.com/news/434974/douglas-county-oregon-la...

https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/index.ssf/2017/03/dougla...

> Does that mean it wasn't sustainable? Could it be due to rising minimum wage?

One recent trend that could incur additional costs for libraries would be e-books. I had always sort of assumed (without evidence) that the cost to benefit ratio for ebooks greatly favors publishers vs. consumers. I found a couple articles that suggest as much [0][1], but they do seem to be biased against ebook publishers. Does anyone have more information?

I know a library doesn't -need- to jump on the ebook bandwagon, but ebooks are one way for libraries to service a more rural clientele. I know the Boston Public Library and New York Public Library (probably among others) offer library cards -- including ebook borrowing privileges -- to all residents of the state.

[0] https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/here-is-a-breakdown... [1] https://goodereader.com/blog/e-book-news/why-do-libraries-pa...

For decades, local counties in Oregon were allowed to put a small tax/fee on each load of timber hauled out of the national forests. This was because while it was federal forests, the county still had to maintain roads, build hospitals, schools, etc. In the 90's, logging was drastically cut back, due to several factors (the spotted owl being a major one). For about 20 years, the federal government kept making those payments. About 10 or so years ago, those payments stopped. Most of the counties couldn't/wouldn't cut back, even though they knew that it was coming (their senators had brought home the bacon the past years, etc).

But no longer having that subsidy, plus the very anti-government (this is the state of jefferson [1]) anti-tax people that lived there meant funds were re-allocated to critical infrastructure only. (ie, parks are no longer watered/mowed, no libraries, the bare minimum gaurds at jails, (not what is best practices), etc

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jefferson_(proposed_Pacific_st...

> Is anyone else wondering why a tax increase is needed to keep the library open? Does that mean it wasn't sustainable? Could it be due to rising minimum wage? Is it reasonable to blame the voters?

Of course it is reasonable to blame the voters. There was a ballot measure that would have saved the library and they chose to vote against it. It was entirely in their control.

> Of course it is reasonable to blame the voters. There was a ballot measure that would have saved the library and they chose to vote against it. It was entirely in their control.

This is the folly of modern day politics among the citizenry. That the only option is take more money or fail, so it's obvious that the ones given two bad choices are at fault. Was there a ballot measure to reroute funds from somewhere else? Why not? We should not pretend budget-making is entirely in the voters' control when the only options they are given is to throw more money at a problem or lose a library.

Blame then for what? If something becomes too expensive, and it's irresponsible to fund it, then you take that thing out of the budget. Why would a library need additional money other than to pay utilities, staff wage, and new books? Besides new books, that's just operational cost and shouldn't need a tax increase.

I don't know the specific reason in this case, but buildings don't last forever so maintenance and renovations could have been part of the increase in cost.

Maintenance often gets deferred because there was never enough taxpayer money provided for it in the first place, until it becomes such a big problem that libraries and schools need to resort to ballot measures and municipal bonds.

There was probably not enough taxpayer funding of the library system in the first place, and eventually it became impossible to continue operations.

I don't think a library has been self-sustaining since they stopped being private and started being public.

Technically libraries should get cheaper to operate, since at least the once around here now don't have staff most of the time, requiring a card to get in.

Honestly, it seems like most of those communities are dying out though.

Sorry, by sustainable I meant with including whatever standard tax the library collected each year, minus the increase that apparently is needed.

You could say the communities are shrinking, but you have to understand that they weren't really ever big to begin with.

Libraries don't collect taxes.

And there are more people who want to live in a wild west dreamland. Without police, those with the money always win. Those with land. Those with cash. Those with relatives. Those with guns. Want to dump you used motor oil in the river? Move to somewhere without enviromental officers. Good luck with that fishing. Want to abuse your kids? Move to a town without social workers. Want to be a racist? Move somewhere with no functional legal system. Cops may often be corrupt, but not having any cops is always corrupt.

I know plenty of people living the Wild West Dream without abusing the environment or their families.

Nah, the Wild West is long gone and exists only in Hollywood characterisations which people today imbibe as truth.

Governments in general do a terrible job at PR. I remember a "controversy" during the Obama administration which was caused by the phrase "you didn't build that" which was basically him trying to promote the stability and infrastructure that the government provides for innovation and entrepreneurship.

For a rich nation like the US there's a lot we need to be thankful to our government for. The fact that I can hop on a cross country flight and have no worries at all about clashing with another plane is a testament to the FAA. Organizations like the NIH provide valuable research for drug development. DARPA help to fund the internet!

The government deserves loads of criticism but at the same time our views of it are so cynical it leads to situations like this.

Your example is dangerous territory for political discussion here. The Obama example cited was intentionally misquoted (by providing a snippet without the full context) to make him bad.

Government PR to a certain degree is a good thing to promote support and appreciation for programs, but it can get into dangerous territory when wielded with the intent to deceive (as we're now seeing).

I've wondered if this is part of why politicians are so long winded and won't directly answer questions. Not just so they can appear neutral and avoid answering hard questions, but if they actually say something meaningful in a few words it will probably be taken out of context and used against them.

I think that's their point; that when government tries to do PR, there is a segment of the population that, depending on who is in power, will twist those words.

It's pretty damn hard to do a "good" job when a statement like that is twisted so quickly to mean something drastically different. The fact that certain people ate that up like candy is troubling on several levels.

I know here in California, there were some Republican state legislators who were upset that the state was putting up signs highlighting projects that were being paid for with the new Gas Tax, because they were afraid that if people saw what the tax money was going to fund, they'd be in favor of it, and not vote against the repeal ballot measure.

There is a wonderful documentary "Flint Town" (currently on NetFlix) that follows the police department of Flint, MI, a town that is struggling. At one point, officers end up campaigning for a local ballot issue to renew a tax that supposedly supports them, but in reality doesn't. There is a vague promise that they will see the money if the measure is renewed.

After passage, the scene where the Flint city council ultimately screws over the chief of police is appalling. Municipal politics can be brutal too.

> Municipal politics can be brutal too.

Municipal politics are the most brutal. I've seen fistfights at school board meetings! National politics get a lot of attention, but local is where citizens are directly affected.

See K. C. Constantine's Rocksburg series of murder mysteries. They're set in a small city in the western Rust Belt of Pennsylvania, featuring a police chief who has many runins with the rest of the municapal government.

Then again, my kid brother, a liberal Democrat, spent 20 years in his local government in the most Republican congressional district in New Jersey, serving on the planning commission(20 years), the school board(13 years), and a regional board of education. So cats and dogs can occasionally co-exist peacefully.

I had a co-worker who served on a rural school board. He would get death threats from the more radically anti-tax constituents of his school district. They were opposed to the whole "socialist" enterprise of educating the community's children. More than once he woke up to find a dead groundhog on his front step.

I know that my suggestion sounds like a knee-jerk reaction, but I wish that each and every public service had one or more prominently-displayed large signs on their premises saying how much their expenses were and where the money came from to pay for it. My reasoning? It's easy to tunnel-vision on your own financial situation when you are sufficiently ignorant of what services your taxes are paying for.

It surprised the hell out of me as it will you but ignorance of how much it cost and where the money goes wasn't an issue here. These Douglas county voters mailed in their rejection of a dedicated library tax.

Most everywhere else in the country your suggestion makes sense. In my county library funds are bundled in the county general ad valorem property tax.

How it works:

Government officials want more money for random nonsense and corruption. Voters disapprove. Government officials pick something to hold hostage, such as the library. They propose a special library tax. Meanwhile, the random nonsense and corruption is getting funded.

The voters aren't that dumb. They know the library could be funded, and they don't wish to fund random nonsense and corruption.

It's a threat, "Give more money or we'll cut something you like!", when the voters can plainly see that funds are going to things that are improper.

Suppose the voters fund the library. Next year, when that funding gets diverted, the government will come asking for more. Maybe it will be a different thing needlessly on the chopping block.

That is surprising, but I'm willing to believe that it is also the exception and not the norm.

I think that's what Steve Ballmer is trying to push with usafacts.com. Get people to be more aware of where their money goes. Or something like that, I've never actually checked it out, just heard him in an interview.

Every local government tax bill here in Auckland, New Zealand comes with a breakdown of where each dollar goes. It comes every 3 months. They also publish it on their site. I’ve probably read it before but certainly haven’t in the last few years.

It'd be nice to see it on the actual building providing a service. I know that a lot of governments (national, state/provincial, local/municipal) publish this information, but having a currency value next to school or a library is powerful thing. Imagine a political candidate advocating for tax cuts in a local debate, and a member of the audience asks, "Candidate, after your tax cut, where will the $X for my child's school come from?"

Meanwhile, in the united states, people are sued for copyright infringement for publishing publicly available information such as "laws".

I wish our local and state governments were as transparent as yours; sometimes they are, but it's not universal, and it's a sad disgrace that our country's (US's) governing bodies are so enthralled with secrecy in most public matters.

ADDENDUM: Apparently either people think I'm being off topic (maybe), or I'm making stuff up, so, here's a source:

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/03/public-records-a...

Let's say your city government has a budget of $100M and spends $20M on schools, $20M on roads, $20M on the fire department, $20M on police, and $20M on a solid gold hot tub filled with wine in the mayor's office.

You see the signs on the schools, the fire stations, the roads, the police cars, and you think, "wow, my taxes sure are paying for lots of useful stuff!". You may be less enthusiastic about the solid gold hot tub, since it doesn't benefit you at all, but the system "corrects" for that automatically: since you don't use it, you never see the "paid with $20M of your taxes" sign that it, too, prominently displays.

Later some jerk runs for mayor with a bid to lower taxes by 20%, but thanks to the signs, he's easily defeated. Instead you vote Yes on Proposition Q, which raises taxes by 5%. The mayor buys a bigger solid gold tub.

You really think the politicians will allow you to make them accountable for spending ?

Tell me you havent been around end of the year spend your budget parties / memos ?

We can always try. The end-of-year-spend-your-budget phenomenon is definitely real, but could be mitigated or eliminated with the correct incentives e.g. what your department saves rolls over into your budget into the next year.

I would prefer to get the information in the form of a detailed breakdown at the end of the year of what my share of the taxes paid for.

"That police station cost $X million dollars" is too abstract for me to be able to understand without doing additional research. "You personally spent $X.00 funding libraries" is something that I can wrap my head around.

I like this idea, but I think you can have both too.

We can also require that of private businesses that get tax payer money.

Can we also have the opposite? I would like to know exactly what tax dollars are spent on. Preferably going back in time as well.

Some governments have this capability already, but it's definitely not widespread. An extension to your idea would be able to record and publish these near-instantly (sort of like Mint, but for government and the results published for the public).

I like this. Would every highway, road, and street need to have a sign every so many miles/blocks?

Also add costs of pollution and health costs for accidents.

I know Oregon does this to an extent; I have seen signs located next to state highway projects "Your tax dollars at work.".

These signs rarely state how much the project costs, though. They just say it was part of such and such tax. At least the ones I have seen.

Yeah, the actual cost is what I am interested in as well as how much was paid for via taxes.

This is a great lesson in how we tend not to notice the effect of these services paid for with our tax dollars... until they're missing.

The people did not vote down the library tax because they were unaware of the library. They voted it down because they did not value the library.

I think it's great that the townspeople who do value libraries are telling the outsiders to fuck right off. People in American cities and towns have been subsidizing their exurban and rural neighbors for many decades, while those people have systematically and intentionally undermined the very cities and towns that benefit them. At some point the proponents of civilization have to draw a line.

Libraries served a very important purpose, but nowadays with the proliferation of computers/smartphones and all literary classics, scientific information, etc. being freely available online, physical libraries feel like less of a necessity. They can serve as hubs for other community activities, but those can just as easily be held elsewhere. Only real use I've had for one in the past years is the odd time I had to print or fax something. Maybe libraries should eventually be downsized to simple community cybercafes with links on the desktop to some of these resources and a printer/fax machine.

Ah, the old "I've don't need the service therefore no one does" argument.

It's obvious you don't use libraries, because you left out a couple dozen other services they provide that are not easily replaced. I'm also not sure how a community center is supposed to be easily replaced without tax revenue.

While the "libraries are outdated" line is oft-repeated, it's still inaccurate. Libraries provide large economic impacts, on top of less easy to measure things like being community centers. Here's one article about a study that shows for every $1 in tax put towards a library, it generates anywhere from $2.50-$5.00+ in economic benefit, depending on how you measure it: https://www.toledoblade.com/local/2016/04/28/Toledo-Lucas-Co...

If you google for more, you'll find a dozen other examples.

All of those things could perhaps done even better if they weren't pretending books was still their main service.

Perhaps an office in city hall could have computer 24/7 or other things.

I like libraries - but they shouldn't be welfare/job centers -- we should build institutions that specialize in that and can be evaluated on their effectiveness.

This is an example of perfect being the enemy of good.

>I'm also not sure how a community center is supposed to be easily replaced without tax revenue.

Any of the various other places that happen to be around where you can congregate, like a park with a gazebo.

The value of publicly accessible computers and printers is obvious, I'm just not so sure about all the other things that a library does. I'm curious exactly how this study quantifies all this.

In Oregon? A gazebo? In the winter?

> but nowadays with the proliferation of computers/smartphones and all literary classics, scientific information, etc. being freely available online

The problem is, all this stuff isn't freely available online.

Yes, there is enough online information online to put together a 6th grade essay on the Battle of Gettysburg. But if you actually want a more-then-superficial understanding of a subject, you will, at some point, hit the shelves, and crack open a dozen books.

The classics may be freely out of copyright, but books that analyse them aren't. Most of the literature of the 20th century is still under copyright.

There are thousands of free online courses, each of which would cover ~100 pages in a book. Yet, there are over a hundred million published books. Many of them are out of date, or dreck. And many of them contain information that you won't find on the internet - for any price, and definitely not 'free'.

You will find many of them at your library, though (Or available through inter-library loans). Another thing that you will find at your library is a librarian, who can help you figure out what you are should be looking for. Google won't do this for you.

Just because you can, in five seconds, find a half-baked, incomplete blog post tutorial on how to ship HelloWorld in the flavor-of-the-week-crap.js framework, doesn't mean that a library is useless in 2018.

I've never had to use a physical book for any of the papers I got an A on in college, except in the few cases an overzealous English professor made it part of the requirements that you cite a physical book, in which case I had to find some token fact in one just to satisfy it.

In addition to all the great content you can find free online, libraries get free access to EBSCO databases.

I've also never needed the help of a librarian, ever.

Having the old books around will remain useful only up until the point we find a way to fully digitize all of it and make "borrowing" solutions more widespread/work around the copyright issues. For now for 99% of cases you don't need a physical book.

I like my ereader. I can carry a thousand books and not break a sweat.

Unfortunately my ereader doesnt provide the community with a quiet place for the less fortunate or a way to read those digitized books you have.

A library is not just a place of books, it is a place of learning for those who arent in college who like to learn on their own .... not to get an A.

You only need a superficial understanding of material to ace a typical undergrad college paper. I should know - I've bullshitted on all sorts of topics in my electives.

Most of the time, you don't even have to look at anything not on the prescribed reading list.

Think of them from the perspective of others too though. Where does the person who can’t afford internet get a connection for free? Where does the supply of books for children come from? They can memorise several in a day easily. Have a look at the people who are there working or doing homework. It’s quiet, safe and warm. As much as a screen is easy, a physical book is still nicer to read from for many people too.

According to Pew in 2016 half of adults reported using a public library in the last 12 months. The annual report "Public Libraries in the United States" estimates 4.5 library visits per capita in 2015. Libraries are one of the most-used services.

I wouldn't discount libraries so quickly. There are still some in our society without smartphones and computers. There are also those who simply cannot afford books. Local libraries are a resource for these families. Additionally, some libraries have experts on staff who can help with research in areas of genealogy and history.

I live between Palo Alto and Mountain View, and parking lot for the local library closest to me is always nearly full from 10-5, I can imagine that if there is this high of a demand for public libraries in Silicon Valley, there might be demand in other areas of the country.

Well let's look at that...

Palo Alto/MV are considered one of the thought capitals of America, so that's not a clear correlation. If Boston's library's are full, I'm sure Detroit's library would be too. I wouldn't think that Boston/Manhattan/Palo Alto library use would have any correlation to half of America.

Also, anyplace where rent ranges are higher free study space is more valuable.

This survey from 2016 says the non library users are the outlier among those over 18 by a wide margin. I guess this could be biased by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and whoever else funds the Pew Charitable Trust, though it is non partisan by charter.

http://www.pewinternet.org/2016/09/09/a-portrait-of-those-wh...

That's largely what a lot of modern town libraries are now. They have a bunch of computers for people who don't own their own, and a bunch of books that they've had for decades.

These things are never so cut and dry. Politicians know to cut funding from the most visible places first -- parks, police, roads, fire, schools, etc. It allows them to justify raising taxes. Then they turn and put the new revenue towards something else entirely. Finally the whole cycle repeats decade after decade, until [sales tax + property tax + fed income tax + social security (12% counting employer contribution) + state income tax + vehicle registration] is over 50%. Without trust earned through good action over time, good citizens are trapped with nothing left but to pull the plug.

Good citizens could elect good representatives who spend wisely. Unfortunately, that takes more effort than voting straight ticket once every four years and complaining the rest of the time.

Perhaps there exist socially and economically positive things which taxes can fund more beneficially than individual spending for equivalent services.

Perhaps you misunderstand. I am not opposed to taxes that support the common good. Simply pointing out why it is hard to distinguish between reasonable taxation and excessive taxation made necessary by irresponsible use of revenue.

In your story cycle, there is this sort of promotion of learned helplessness of the citizen which can only end in pulling the plug. Perhaps I mistook that focus on the tax aspect instead of the benefit aspect of governing as being generically anti-governement.

In general if you want more efficient use of money, I think it's better payoff to focus on the actual uses and how to get to the benefits more efficiently instead of concentrating on reducing costs. I feel that's true for businesses as well as governments.

How do I pull the plug?

Used to live in Oregon... it's hard to really pin the blame on anyone, here. Politicians are voted in and out of office and ballot measures are passed mostly based on issues with short-term visibility. In the heyday of the timber industry it was hard to justify more cautious and measured approaches to growth, and easier to fund projects with bonds based on projections of property tax growth that turned out to be optimistic.

There is a bit of an anti-tax fervor in Oregon, I wouldn't claim that it's unique or special compared to other parts of the country but it exists. Oregon passed a "kicker" which makes it so any state revenue surplus gets refunded to the taxpayers. This makes it basically impossible for the state to save any tax revenue surplus, so budget shortfalls can mean immediate reductions in service and infrastructure projects are paid for with future obligations. This is really nothing more than leverage (and extra risk exposure) on a state scale... when the economy does well you get money back from the state, when the economy does poorly you get service cuts. It's easy to see both sides of this issue... it's easy to see why it got passed (I overpaid taxes, so give me the money back!) and it's easy to see why it's a bad idea.

This is an unintended side effect of the way the political process works in Oregon. The ballot initiatives in Oregon (called the "Oregon system" even though South Dakota did it first) were a big force for progress in the early 20th century (e.g. women's suffrage in 1912) but ballot initiatives seem to really suck at making any kind of coherent or sensible fiscal policy. And that leads to today, with rural Oregon paying the price for decades of mediocre fiscal policy, once propped up on timber profits but not anymore.

I'm really glad we have the initiative system but I'm also glad it's limited in scope and power. I can vote on whether marijuana should be legal but I can't vote to change the Fed's target rate.

You see the same in most governments though. A surplus is rarely banked. Instead a budget surplus is immediately spent on structural spending like increased wages. A ballot measure to force the government to give back budget surplus is a smart move - the borrowing and service cuts give people a direct linkage to how their economy is doing.

Look at Germany. Huge budget surplus last year which is now predicted to be spent entirely on helping migrants who turned up after Merkel invited them in. Would the Germans have liked the money back? Most likely! Were they ever going to be given that option when politicians had the option of feeling good about themselves through additional spending? No way!

Most governments and municipalities do a horrible job of articulating what their constituents taxes go towards. People see giant buckets and have a very hard time converting that into what they see and use day to day.

OTOH, broken out expenses often serve only as fodder for bikeshedding cynics who want to rail about big government mismanagement. For example, most people's notions about NASA's budgetary process begin and end with million dollar toilets. Overly specific knowledge about budgets can be poisonous.

The million dollar toilet example doesn't sound like a broken out expense, but instead the exact opposite.

Its more likely a black ops type off the record funding was absorbed by the toilets.

It might be deliberate. Taxpayers would see how things like badly managed and/or lavish pensions eat up large parts of the budget.

There’s certainly a popular belief that government is mismanaged, but I’m not entirely sure it is, or at least is to the extent and in the areas that anti-tax advocates believe.

Of course make government more effective and efficient. Very few would argue against that. But at some point, there’s just nothing to trim. However if one’s underlying assumption is all public spending is bad, then of course there’s more to cut, it’s just that the argument to justify the cut is disingenuous.

The higher-level point was just that more detail will invite more scrutiny. I can certainly, though, cite examples of large cities with multibillion-dollar pensions that are close to being insolvent. Dallas is one of them.

Pensions make up less of the budget than you might think. A rather large chunk of the budget is spent on Social Security or other programs have a low employee to cost ratio. The DoD for example spends quite a bit on defense contractors and has relatively few people who stay long enough to collect a pension.

Think cities. Firefighter and police pensions.

Ahh, ok that really depends on the location. Firefighters are often not Social Security eligible and the government moves it's 6.25% SS contribution into a pension account. Combine that with employee contribution + investment interest and the net cost is fairly reasonable.

Granted under funded pensions are often an issue, but that's a effectively loan the local governments have taken out. Their problem is debt not the upfront costs involved.

PS: I tend to put all taxes into the same pool as I care less about the specifics than how much I get to keep after Social Security, Medicare, Federal, State, and freaking Local all take their cut.

As the song goes “You don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone”.

The town tested out life without libraries and saw it was bad for kids. This got the votes to reopen them. I think sometimes it’s healthy to see if we “really need it”. Especially when physical books are becoming obsolete.

I don't know about these libraries specifically but all of the libraries by where I live serve many more purposes than just a warehouse for physical books. Free internet access, community gardens, 3d printers, audio books, some even run classes for kids on various topics like personal finance and how to put together a resume.

To be totally fair, I might get upset over a "library tax" that turned out to be actually funding community gardens. Those aren't even related ideas.

I haven't used it personally but I'm pretty sure the library with the garden that's near me actually uses the garden for classes to teach children about things like how insects pollinate plants and how to grow stuff. I think it's mostly an educational tool as opposed to a way to feed the neighborhood on the tax payers' dime.

Maybe community garden is the wrong term for it. I would also be a bit unhappy if my taxes were paying for a library to feed the neighborhood. There's other/better ways for the government to give food to people from collected taxes.

Why can't the kids just hang out somewhere else?

Where? Smoking weed behind the dumpsters? Loitering in the mall? Watching someone scream at a video game on twitch.tv?

I'd much rather encourage them to spend time at a library instead. Kids love to read.

I'd like to see malls made more friendly to kids once again, yes.

http://deadmalls.com/ no further comment needed :-)

In my small, rural community, it was evident several years ago that the city wanted to shut down the library. They had obviously cut back on staff and had cut back hours.

Likewise, we went through the same with recycling and trash, where there was a proposal to add $3/mo to the recycling bill to keep weekly service. The city instead cut back to every-other-week, with the option of paying $30/mo if you wanted a second bin (because families produce more recycling over a two-week period than one bin will allow). Once recycling costs increased and it was no longer a revenue-generator for the city to sell their waste to Chinese recyclers... guess what, the rates increased anyway.

In short, I've found that small-town services boil down a lot to: 1) Who is willing to speak up for them.

2) Fervent anti-tax retirees who moved to those small towns thinking their costs and taxes would be less.

3) Poor, often corrupt governance.

4) A limited tax base to begin with. In many of these rural areas, there might be at most tens of thousands of residents.

> tens of thousands of residents

I'm thinking tens to thousands of residents.

True - I was being generous, realizing there are counties throughout the west with a few hundred, and there are others up to say 30,000 (roughly mine). There are differences, yet similarities across these that stand apart from say, Multnomah or King county.

It's called firemen first. There's usually plenty of waste, especially in the more opaque and unaccountable areas of government, such as the school system administrative staff.

So, they get rid of something people will really notice and guess what? Next time people will say they must have really needed that money.

> In recent months, some communities voted to pay to reopen or support a town library, while others insisted that volunteers alone would suffice.

In other news, voters in a democracy use their franchise to decide priorities for their community. Elitist Northeastern newspaper writes judgmental article about it because its editors have different priorities.

The central rural parts of Oregon are killing their communities out of ignorance.

In 2014 Josephine county voted down a tax to keep their jail open.

Another counties entire sheriff's department resigned recently, due to lack of funding to properly staff the office; they were all burning the candle at both ends.

There are other examples of this behavior over the last decade that are easily Googled, so I'll avoid posting it all.

If you talk to these people, or see their commentaries online, many of them are thinking they'll just make taxes low, and of course someone will build a factory, in the middle of nowhere, with a poorly informed workforce, and no social services.

The locals don't want to shoulder the cost of education and security, but of course some private business owner will.

That seems part of a larger pattern.

The excellent book _Sundown Towns_ [1] pointed out something I had never noticed. People from suburbs and exurbs expect without question to be able to use big-city facilities. E.g., parks, libraries, and all manner of for- and non-profit organizations. But suburbs and exurbs often either restrict facilities to residents (as with parks) or don't have them at all (as with drug treatment centers, halfway houses, homeless support, hospitals).

That worked well enough for the suburbanites in the early decades of suburbanization; well-off people moved out of town and stopped paying for the central facilities. But as those communities become less homogeneous over the generations, they too started needing drug treatment, homeless support, etc. Except that the residents are very used to low taxes, so city managers don't have the money to fix things.

I get the desire for low taxes; who doesn't like as low a price as possible? But there's a toxic combination of penny-wise, pound-foolish thinking and pure IGMFY out there that seems so misguided to me. I don't have kids myself, but I still believe strongly in making things better for the next generation and the one after that.

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Sundown-Towns-Hidden-Dimension-Americ...

> The central rural parts of Oregon are killing their communities out of ignorance.

Are you sure? I am not sure about this instance, but in many other rural instances where these measures are voted against, it's not out of ignorance. Rather it's out of disagreement with money mismanagement. Again, can't speak to this case in particular, but too often outsiders judge these actions by voters as anti-funding instead of anti-waste. Then they call them ignorant and wonder why they vote the way they do in larger elections that do affect them. On the opposite end, I am seeing more and more people guilting their fellow citizens into raising taxes because something can't be funded otherwise as though the amount currently taxed isn't enough. Nobody ever wants to fix/reroute budget-making/spending at the top, they just want to assume you need to take more to fund anything and label their peers as ignorant who disagree (not saying you are doing this because, again, I don't know about that county in Oregon).

> anti-funding instead of anti-waste

A decade ago there were big fires in San Diego county which overwhelmed the dramatically underfunded county fire department and required other counties and the state to send help. Even still, a huge area burned and many structures were destroyed.

2 months later, the county heavily voted against a ballot measure which would slightly increase taxes to fund county fire suppression. Because “okay my neighbor’s house just burned to the ground, but it won’t ever happen to me so why should I pay to prevent it?”

This is not about “anti-waste”. There are quite simply a large number of people in the USA (encouraged in their beliefs by decades of far-right propaganda) who don’t believe in paying for public services. The same people are the first to start begging and whining for state/federal support the moment anything goes wrong for themselves personally.

I'm employed by a county EMS agency, and we see this all too often. Everyone wants a 5 minute 911 response time, even out in the far reaches of the county. The county has a population of about 45,000 people and is about 1000 square miles. The small towns out in the east part that generate maybe 10 911 calls a month want us to station a 24/7 advanced life support ambulance in the area, yet continue to vote down any sort of tax increase to pay for it. We can't even get them to contribute donations in lieu of tax increases for the service. As a result, we really can't go ahead and just do it because we literally can't afford it. state/federal tax revenue is low enough as it is and medicare reimbursements for EMS are awful.

You're right.. there are a lot of people that just do not believe in paying for any public services. A lot of "healthcare should be free for all" types that will not entertain the idea of paying for it through taxes.

This is what I'm talking about. You are telling other people that their votes were about. There was no room in the existing budget for fire suppression? Maybe they think the people that are clearly not very good at fire suppression shouldn't be given another chance? You really think they all thought "okay my neighbor's house just burned to the ground, but it won’t ever happen to me so why should I pay to prevent it?" The real propaganda is government mismanagers forcing you against your fellow citizen by making a vote against a tax increase for something to be a vote against that something. And, suppose that everyone voting against are ignorant and potential beggars/whiners and that there was no other reason they disagreed with the fire suppression and tax increase measure, this anecdote is not enough to support the general assumptions about why people vote against tax increases.

Your comment seems to suggest that there's just extra money in a budget for whatever. After years of slim budgets the easy things have already been cut out of budgets. At a state level with switching state governments, the new people are always looking for waste to hold over the heads of the incumbents. After a while there might not be much left to cut.

Ive lived in small towns like these where everything got defunded. Maybe there were a few individuals who cared about mismanagement of funds. The majority, and the vocal ones, were saying "Why should I pay for schools when my kids have graduated?", "Why should I pay for fixing the roads when I live on a state maintained road?", "Why should I pay for firefighters when no one's house has burned down in my neighborhood".

They are explicitly anti-funding and of a "fuck you, I got mine" mentality

And I've seen it where they had to basically rework budgets from scratch and prosecute officials mismanaging funds that sowed decades of distrust in the system. Maybe there were a few individuals who actually cared about funding important items and being fiscally responsible. Is your anecdote more apropos than mine or are these just anecdotes?

> They are explicitly anti-funding

"They" who? All the voters against this tax increase? The small towns you lived in? People that disagree?

The libraries needed more funding because county revenues were plummeting as the timber industry declined in the area. Maybe residents also felt the libraries were being mismanaged, but the crisis wasn't brought about by ballooning library budgets.

In hard times, prioritization is required. Mismanagement can include the mismanaging of these priorities by reducing choice to more taxes or less library. If, as these citizens have fallen on hard times, the library actually was at the bottom rung of the prioritization ladder for funds, it is reasonable for it to be cut first. The appalling thing is blaming those on hard times for not ponying up more money. A lowering tide affects all boats so to speak.

Well, like all things, there are a range of opinions. Point taken.

My anecdotal experiences, talking to people online (mostly Reddit) and in-person (I grew up in rural midwest, have an affinity for those small towns, but live in PDX, and like to road trip to those areas), the reason there are no jobs is because taxes keep businesses away.

I agree that it's short-sighted to assume ignorance in these cases. Selfishness is a major factor as well.

I suppose technically, with regards to money, the selfishness factor grows alongside increased poverty. A pretty easy target to be sure.

I don't see the problem here, though I am questioning who's providing police services in that county now.

If people want to vote to refuse to fund having a police service, how is that wrong? If they want to go without, that's their choice. Of course, that could have some pretty nasty consequences, but again, they voted for it, and it's their choice. I do hope, however, that the state and federal authorities will keep an eye on things, and if anything bad happens which results in a huge lawsuit, that the people of that county will be literally forced (even if it means forcibly seizing all their property) to pay the judgments.

As a very wise Frenchman once wrote, "every nation gets the government it deserves". The people in these rural counties are getting the government they deserve.

> If people want to vote to refuse to fund having a police service, how is that wrong? If they want to go without, that's their choice.

You can't really let people have a say with regards to everything they pay for, because a lot of people have an "I got mine" attitude, so as long as no house has burned down in their neighborhood lately, they might be tempted to vote against funding the fire department as well.

If the whole town goes up in a blaze, then will you expect the federal government to step in and help them? If yes, that means everyone foots the bill for their stupidity; If not, can we still call ourselves humans?

Some basic services should be funded, and if you don't want that, you should be able to go live in the woods, or at least that's how I see it.

I think that is the point - some of these people do live in the woods.

Also, they might have a volunteer fire department. Or perhaps none, and they are fine with that. I am too as long as they are comfortable with their choices when things go wrong.

> I am too as long as they are comfortable with their choices when things go wrong.

People that make these choices don't necessarily stop to calculate all the risks they are subjecting themselves to, and instead only think that at the end of the year they'll have more money in their pockets. Essentially, they're comparing the possibility of something really bad happening (which most people avoid thinking about) with the guarantee of having more money - a relatively easy choice for most.

I think any developed state should put a priority on protecting its citizens, even from their own greed or ignorance. The state needs these people to be safe and healthy so that they can work, pay taxes, and create offspring to continue the cycle. In order to ensure that works, some basic services need to be provided.

People that have had their house burn down won't be making more offspring any time soon due to financial risk; people that are unhealthy can't work and end up costing the state money on treatments; crime lowers the property value of an area, making it less attractive to businesses or people looking for a place to move to, and so on.

>I think any developed state should put a priority on protecting its citizens, even from their own greed or ignorance.

You're literally arguing against democracy here. If the citizens are greedy and ignorant and vote for policies that reflect that, then if you support democracy you must support giving them those policies. Otherwise, you're arguing for authoritarianism.

as long as they are comfortable with their choices when things go wrong

Right, yet it seems like that often isn't the case. See hurricanes & NFIP/FEMA, see wildfires & the USFS.

In each case, with residents who just want to do their own thing and ignore things like building codes & defensible space.

> they might be tempted to vote against funding the fire department as well.

Ironically, Grant's Pass in this very region has privatized fire departments, three of them, and homeowners put a sign by their mailbox indicating which FD serves them (or none)..

Actually, not three. Because, well, people saw an opportunity to get rich, and this was the result:

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhD_5T4F7aw

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PaG6fYBKXg8

You might notice some 60s and 70s era fire engines in these videos.

Realize that this private Fire Department only came into existence in the mid 2000s.

It has since been shut down by the State Fire Marshal.

I'm imagining my neighbors on either side having no fire protection and while they're properties are allowed to blaze, mine is sitting there in the middle. Sure would be nice if the fire department could have stopped the fire sooner....

Actually, in some places where certain residents don't pay for fire services, the fire department will come out anyway and watch their house burn, while making sure that the fire doesn't spread to their neighbors' (who did pay) houses. This happens in places like Arizona where "county islands" exist, where a few people refused to allow their property to be annexed into a municipality, so those people don't get any protection from the fire department.

> You can't really let people have a say with regards to everything they pay for, because a lot of people have an "I got mine" attitude, so as long as no house has burned down in their neighborhood lately, they might be tempted to vote against funding the fire department as well.

While I despise your position, I admire your honesty about the fact that these policies are paternalistic and violate consent.

What makes you the person who gets to decide for them what they should or shouldn’t spend their money on?

> these policies are paternalistic and violate consent.

Like I said, if you don't like living in a society where the rules aren't to your liking, you can go live by yourself in the woods where there's no one to violate your consent.

What if the majority of voters in that society vote for "I got mine" policies? That's what we're arguing here; this isn't a situation about a handful of malcontents.

The person deciding is ostensibly the person elected to do the deciding.

> What makes you the person who gets to decide for them what they should or shouldn’t spend their money on?

I don't know who is qualified to be that person, but somebody has to if you want to avoid tyranny-of-the-majority. "You can do any goddamn thing you want as long as you can convince 51 voters out of 100 to back you" is not sustainable. (See e.g. unpunished lynchings in the post-Civil War South.)

It might not be sustainable in your opinion, but it is literally what democracy is. Do you support democracy or not?

> If they want to go without, that's their choice

and then later

> I do hope, however, that the state and federal authorities will keep an eye on things

So they get to choose to go without paying taxes for local policing but we need to tax everyone to police them? Seems like we're only letting them choose if they want to pay into the keep everybody safe fund. They're going to get the service regardless of which way they vote.

As a very wise Frenchman once wrote, "every nation gets the government it deserves".

Yes, but we can still castigate them for it.

You appear to have inferred a moral conclusion that wasn’t in the post as I read it.

That said, there is a history of rural areas cutting off their nose to spite their face then taking a bailout later.

See the soybean situation.

It’s hypocrisy and in a social system such as ours, they’re not as strictly isolated as the corporate and state propaganda they consume lead them to believe.

>That said, there is a history of rural areas cutting off their nose to spite their face then taking a bailout later.

This is why I think these rural voters should be forced to pay for their bailouts, even if it means seizing their property and evicting them into homelessness. They voted for these stupid policies, so they should be forced to live with the consequences of their votes.

What about the minority of residents that didn't vote for that government. What about the children?

Do you support seizing children from their poorly-voting parents and placing them in better (or foster) homes?

Parent post didn't use the word wrong, the statement was that they're killing their communities out of ignorance. It sounds from your post that you whole heartedly agree it is ignorance.

So, I definitely see a problem with it!

" I do hope, however, that the state and federal authorities will keep an eye on things, and if anything bad happens which results in a huge lawsuit, that the people of that county will be literally forced (even if it means forcibly seizing all their property) to pay the judgments."

You know that won't happen, and the rest of the taxpayers are going to end up subsidizing them.

I know, and that's what I don't agree with at all. They're getting to benefit in the short-term from their poor, selfish choices, and then getting the insurance of getting bailed out later when the SHTF. It's just like the auto industry bailouts; those companies should never have been bailed out, they should have been broken up and sold off for pennies on the dollar to better-managed foreign companies instead of being bailed out by taxpayers for the benefit of executives and maybe the employees.

I grew up on generational property in rural Oregon (near Josephine county. OP says that it's in central Oregon, which isn't even remotely true), and it's true that there's plenty of anti-tax sentiment, including from myself.

Grants pass town (Josephine county) is generally a bad place to be, with lots of bad drugs and crime. But the country nearby has really scenic lakes and mountains, and is a good place to live if you have property. It's about an hour drive to anything better (Jackson county), so it's somewhat isolated.

It looks like the county wanted to levy property tax from $0.58 per $1000 of value, to $2.57 per, which was their plan to fund the sheriff Dept., DA, and juvenile detention. The people fought back and won. [0]

It's hard to expect people who want to live small lives to pay for other people to have bigger lives, especially when the gap is large. Oregon isn't too bad of an example, but I was living in Illinois recently, and I saw the same situation there but much more drastically imposed. Chicago is obsessed with huge funding and high taxes, and the rest of the state is being dragged along unwillingly with an entirely different view. Unfortunately Chicago is about the only interesting thing in Illinois, so you can imagine which side gets votes.

[0] https://www.oregonlive.com/news/index.ssf/2012/05/josephine_...

It's hard to expect people who want to live small lives to pay for other people to have bigger lives

This is a beautiful short talking-point answer that glosses over a lot of awful.

The track record of American political movements dedicated to the principle you've articulated above is... appalling. Not even as a matter of subjective taste; as a matter of demonstrable historical record. The shocking state of rural Appalachia, which launched the "War on Poverty", was the result of generation after generation of people who voted to "live small lives" and "just "live their private country lives", and forgot that they weren't just making that choice for themselves as individuals -- they were also forcing that choice on their neighbors and their children, who got trapped in the resulting cycle of poverty.

I am perfectly comfortable telling you that you should not be allowed to vote your neighbors and children into that situation, and that they should have the right to interfere with your attempt to do so.

Not to mention that as soon as something happens that hurts their small lives...they want other people to pay to fix it.

> (near Josephine county. OP says that it's in central Oregon, which isn't even remotely true),

References to geography in Oregon are funny. Portlanders always refer to Bend (for example) as "Eastern Oregon" even though it is the center of the state. Actually, it's to the west-center if anything. Wallowa, Union, Baker counties might as well be the other side of the planet. ;-D

Nothing new there. Colombus, OH is in the "Midwest", despite being nearly in line with the Jacksonville Atlantic coastline.

After living in Michigan for a while, I've learned that just because you use EST does not mean you're I'm the East coast.

I don't think I've ever heard someone call Bend Eastern Oregon. That's just ignorance

The dividing line is the Cascade Mountains. If you've ever seen both sides of those mountains in Oregon or Washington, you know why: very different climates.

If you look at the rhetoric of the "State of Jefferson" proponents it's clear that they believe simply clear-cutting the remaining forests will fund their society.

“There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.” —Heinlein

It seems to me that believing in democracy also requires in believing in democratic outcomes even when they are not your own personal preferences or opinions.

Not everyone wants to be forced to buy more things from the government.

They can do that. But I’m not paying for them either. Pull federal funding for their police and libraries. No LSTA for Oregon.

It turns out that writing good books doesn't make one a font of wisdom in all regards.

First there isn't necessarily much difference between the government or cronies seizing the sources of wealth eg oil and spending it before it touches citizens hands and seizing a portion thereof after it comes into citizens hands. In either case it siphoning off a percentage of the productivity of the nation and spending it hopefully for the common good. Even passing regulations are laws can be seen as tilting the field in favor of one or the other. Effectively taking the money for example of the power plant operator and making them buy equipment they don't want to sanitize the air the rest of us have to breath.

The tyranny you are decrying is a function of every functional nation in history. Economics it turns out is a poor tool by itself to manage the public good because consumer attention is finite, information imperfect, and circumstances complex. How precisely do you vote with your dollars now to keep the power plant operators from collectively poisoning you.

Well you vote for people who promise to write regulations with the help of scientists to avoid poisoning the planet and blackening your lungs because this solution has proved at least semi functional.

Your parent never advocated forcing anything. Democracy doesn't mean we have to like, agree with, or approve of what others do with their communities.

The Heinlein quoter is suggesting that taxation is theft, and it's immoral to force someone to pay for a public service if they personally don't want to.

I love this philosophy. If I don't want to have kids why should I have to pay for schools!

Carefully ignoring their own education, their desire to live in a functional society, their care and keeping when they get old etc.

That quote is peachy and all, but do understand that that attitude is exactly why America has awful education and healthcare systems, right?

I plan to go child-free, but I still vote for tax increases to fund my local schools, because I care about children in general, not just the ones related to me.

The reason America has awful education and healthcare is not due to lack of taxes. It's due to government mismanagement.

No, it's due to the fact every school gets the majority of its funding from local property taxes, and America has 200 years of experience packing all the poor people and minorities into districts that white elites don't contribute to.

There is an aversion to investing in society at large because it benefits the poor and black. Even if that investment pays off double, triple, sextuple times what is put in[1]. People value white supremacy higher than even their own safety net[2].

1. https://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2016/12/12/504867570/how-inv...

2. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/americans-welfare-perce...

It's almost as if the government mismanaged this whole affair.

You can keep pushing that view, but it is too narrow to be of use whatsoever.

The government here is structured to make public schooling answerable to local concerns and funded by local taxes. It's the barest minimum government you can apply.

Private schooling only amplifies the issues with this system. It has all the same problems, along with not needing to be transparent or accountable to the public.

It isn't too narrow, it's the exact problem. The US has failed to protect the people, it has failed to protect our planet, and it has failed to protect anybody but the rich. The US government is fundamentally flawed.

> The US government is fundamentally flawed.

I think part of this stems from how much power the states have, to be honest. There's no overarching system of, say, education that can really be used to hold States accountable for what they teach and appropriation of funds and such. Sure, they're bound by some regulations if they accept federal funding, but it's nowhere near enough. They can choose willy-nilly to just change it up, by stopping the federal funding...which is often a decision made on politics rather than what's good for the kids.

Not to mention that American secondary schools are going through an identity crisis, as I see it.

Flawed unless you are one of the rich you mention. I think things work rather well for a few and rather terrible for many, the question is how much longer things will keep working so well for the few?

What government do you mean? My understanding is that schools are managed by local boards. You can't get farther from the "government" and closer to people than that.

> My understanding is that schools are managed by local boards.

The local boards often do not have the power to:

(1) Raise revenue that would fund much independently of outside funding,

(2) Freely control how much of funding they do have is spent, because the outside funding sources or superior (e.g., state) law independent of funding sets narrow parameters for many of their decisions.

For every where I've lived (granted, 4 districts all in California), neither of those were the case.

Districts can raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars via bonds (requires voter approval but usually passes). They can also pass parcel taxes, which aren't subject to Prop 13 although they can be regressive. Most of their money does still come from the state, but IMO that's not a bad thing, since keeping it more local raises issues with income inequality.

There's very few limits on how they spend their money. I think the only caveat is that districts get extra amounts of ADA money based on the attendance of certain categories of students (e.g. ones that are still learning English). They're supposed to spend that money on relevant programs, and the county has to certify that the spending on those programs lines up with the amount of extra money that is being received.

The department of education and no child left behind are two federal disasters that have wreaked havoc on public education.

On average, school funding in the US breaks down to about 45% from local, 45% state, and 10% Federal.

Couldn't a state, or a district in a state, opt out of Federal funding and then be free from those Federal programs and policies?

Yes, they would lose 10% of funding, but if Federal policies are the reason our schools spend way more per student with worse results than other OECD countries, then getting out from those policies should let them massively improve even with the reduced budget.

[1] https://www.npr.org/2016/04/18/474256366/why-americas-school...

I don't know of any government that's not mismanaged. Some are just worse than others.

The same can be said of private industry. True in my experience.

Thank you for saying what I was thinking. Anyone who has worked in a multi-billion dollar corporation has experienced mismanagement. I think it has to do with organizations that get beyond a certain size.

I think it's just the human condition.

Or any individual firm.

You get functional systems through competition, having many choices so that even if one (or 90%) of them are crap, you can go to the one which isn't. There is by definition no competition at any level of government, which is why so many government-managed services are crap. There is also little competition with most big businesses, which is why big businesses are crap. There is plenty of competition among small businesses, which is why you can go to most walkable downtowns and pick a restaurant and it'll be pretty good, or visit most AirBnB hosts and have a decent stay, or look for a favorite YouTube channel and find one that's interesting.

Singapore?

FWIW, America has some of the best healthcare in the world. It just sadly also happens to be the most expensive.

There's something really interesting here. Consider what you just said and then go check this [1] out. Those are data from the OECD for expenditures on education per capita. We spend more than nearly anywhere else in the world on education. You might be thinking 'well that's because university costs so much' but those data show the breakdown in costs by various filters such as primary or secondary. And you'll see there too we spend more than nearly anywhere. For all combined education outside university we're 5th in the world.

The public/private spending tables are not so useful because they measure based on GDP, which leads to bizarre results like South Africa and Costa Rica being top of the world in education, but you can convert it into usable data. For instance we see that we spend 3.2% of our GDP publicly on all education outside of university, and we spend 0.31% of it privately. So we can combine those two to tell us that 3.2 / (3.2 + 0.31) = 91% of all spending on education outside of university is publicly funded. Since we spend $12,424 per student per year on this education group, we can then say that we publicly spend $11,327 of public funds per student per year. Now going back to our education table we can see that this means we are ranked 8th in the world by spending even if we only compare out public spending to every other country's public+private spending.

The point of this is that we spend alot on education. Yet as you yourself have said, we have quite an awful education system. By contrast you'll find many countries spending a tiny fraction of what we do, even parity adjusted, and excelling. For instance here are the PISA results, which provide a means of comparing educational performance between nations. [2] We definitely have a major problem with education, but I think there is no evidence that more money is anything like a solution.

If you genuinely care about children in general, then I think a far more productive idea would be to do something like join the Big Brothers and Big Sister's Program from United Way, and get to play a positive role in the life of disadvantaged youth. That program works, is fun, and you'll spend way less than you would just asking the government to take more money from you and others, and you can actually make a very positive change in somebody's life.

[1] - https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm

[2] - https://www.businessinsider.com/pisa-worldwide-ranking-of-ma...

As a teacher, I see two major problems with education in the States.

1) It's so inconsistent across states. Like, some required a masters to teach, some don't. Some require you to have Algebra 2 to graduate, some don't. etc. etc.

2) Our schools are going through an identity crisis, are are trying to be everything to everyone. The schools are trying to prep students for college, while also trying to make them career ready. We haven't struck a balance, and instead are trying to do both for all students, instead of setting one of them on a vocational track. Yes, some schools are good at that, but then those vocational students still often have the same graduation requirements as those who are planning on going to college; or they only have slightly lowered ones (at the school I teach at, the difference is chemistry and 2 years of a foreign language).

It's an issue that can only be resolved, in my opinion, by basically creating two types of schools, and separating the students at, say, age 15 or 16. And, of course, allowing them to change if they show the desire (and ability) to later.

> “There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him.” —Heinlein

'No Man is an Island' - John Donne

Anti-tax fervor seems like a scapegoat. The library wasn't producing enough value for the residents to care about continuing it and I don't blame them. This is how a democratic government is supposed to work - eventually things will converge to the median view.

I've been voting against my libraries for as long as I've been able to vote. They're just not super valuable to me - they're not keeping kids out of trouble, in fact, it seems like kids go to the library to get into trouble - junkies routinely overdose in them.

In the past 3 years, I've purchased at least 70 books. Each time I purchased a book, I checked to see whether I could get it from the library and they didn't have it. My county library system has 2,038 books of and about feminism and ~300 books of and about LGBT issues, but it has scarcely anything about conservative / right wing political philosophy or Abrahamic theology. It doesn't have a single book by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Evola, or Carl Schmitt. The library doesn't seem like a service that's open to everyone, it seems like a subsidiary for a specific viewpoint and agenda.

Sigh. I'm not quite sure how to respond to this, it comes across as selfish and staying in your ideological bubble. Libraries exist to serve a community. Young children aren't junkies and your assertion seems specious. Libraries aren't crack houses or heroin dens and using that as a reason to not support them is, well, far fetched.

You can ask libraries to get books you are interested in. Further you can request the books you want via the ILL (Inter Library Loan) System from around the country or the world. You get the value out of the library that you put into it.

People should be voting selfishly, who else is going to look out for your self interest? If most people do NOT think like him, then the library will stay. If most people do not want it , why keep it?

You can't run a government like this. Most people don't use most government services, yet the smaller number who do use them really benefit greatly from them. If we voted down all government services that <50% of people use then society ends up suffering greatly. Hell, most people don't even use firefighters; should we vote them down too?

No one is saying that we should vote down all services that aren't used by <50% of the population. My only point is that decisions are democratically valid if they're ratified by the majority.

The majority of people deciding to have libraries is just as democratically legitimate as the majority deciding not the have libraries.

We vote to fund firefighting because we all know we COULD make us of the service even if we haven't...this is still a self-interested vote

but in the case of firefighting, most cities could drastically reshape their emergency services to put much of what firefighters do in the hands of an emergency response office that is much cheaper to run. its no coincidence that firefighters make sure they are in the critical path of vehicle accident response etc...they realize that structure fires are vanishingly rare and they might otherwise see drastic cuts. there isn't any real reason why a fire truck should be responding to someone with mild whiplash in a rear-ended vehicle (and no, the reason isn't because the vehicle might spontaneously combust).

People should be voting for what's best for society as a whole. Sure, consider your own interests as part of that, but "I make $200k therefore people making $200k should get tax breaks" is a pretty shitty way to be.

> it comes across as selfish

this is how voting is supposed to work - you vote YOUR interests.

libraries are one of these things nerds get excited about but don't use. I would be surprised if 5% of HN readers have checked a book out of the library in the last five years.

I fund, like and visit my local library but wouldn't see its closure as a sign of the end-times.

> this is how voting is supposed to work - you vote YOUR interests.

Of course it isn't. I'm a man, one could make the argument I have no reason to vote for maternity leave, legal and safe abortions, equal pay. But I'd vote for it each time because it provides a better society for people I have no relation with.

Your view of voting is just a reflection of your own selfishness, not a definition of the idea of political participation. Many people vote for something more than pragmatic concerns.

I would be surprised if 5% of HN readers have checked a book out of the library in the last five years.

Sure, I might not have checked out a book in the last five years, but I use my local library probably once a month. Libraries are much more than places to borrow books.

> I might not have checked out a book in the last five years, but I use my local library probably once a month

How do you use a library while not using books it hold?

Before moving to very-much-big-city, my very-much-not-big-city library had:

* nice meeting rooms we used for interest group meetups and community organizing (of the "pick up litter" variety)

* copies of TAOCP and of Bourbaki (pro tip: tell your librarians what you want!)

I never checked out TAOCP but I'd always show up to meetings an hour early to meetings and read a section. Also a good way to spend a cold Saturday. Made it through a good chunk.

You can read books without checking them out.

But you're paying for the books. If you want a community meeting hall with internet access, it can be run much more cheaply

I'm not sure if most people know that the first libraries in America were privately funded subscription services, established by Benjamin Franklin. The first American lending library (Library Company of Philadelphia) was set up in 1731, where it operated for literally over 100 years as a private institution, and exists to this day as a nonprofit. The first taxpayer-funded public library was established 102 years later, in 1833 (New Hampshire Town Library). The optional market good served its clientele better than the non-optional public service for over 100 years.

From the Revolutionary War to 1800, when the national government was in Philadelphia, the Library Company also served as the Library of Congress. Until the 1850s it was the largest public library in America. All of the books the Library Company acquired year by year over more than two and a half centuries are still on its shelves, along with many others added since it was transformed into a research library in the 1950s. In the 21st century, the Library Company serves as a resource for a variety of readers, from high school students to senior scholars, from novelists to film producers, and anyone else with an interest in our collections.

https://librarycompany.org/about-lcp/

Nah, the rich were only able to afford libraries. Now that they are "free (with taxes of course)," anyone can use it. You can use the same logic for school. You want schools to be paid? Okay, then the poor wouldn't be able to afford anything and they are stuck in a ever-looping hole of poverty.

According to this it is a non-profit corporation open to the public. A corporation is just a legal structure around ownership interest. The corporate shareholder structure allowed the shareholders to collectively share their books in the library which they provided to the public. Nothing about being exclusive to the rich.

Income is a continuum. Schooling (not to be confused with education) at its essence is just a room with a teacher, pupils and study materials. It can be realistically attained by nearly all income levels but the extreme lowest.

The library may not be valuable for you, but it is valuable for many. I see poor children using the computers. Even if a few learn programing and start their own companies instead of selling crack, then the library would pay for themselves. As fort the viewpoint, pressure your library to add more conservative stuff. As for security and junkies, why aren't you doing anything? Go volunteer yourself. Many junkies are actually desperate themselves. I actually read a lot of conservative stuff myself to ground myself. Why don't you?

It seems to me like the real value in a library these days is in the computers. Somewhere you can go to use one if you don't own one, or if you need to print or fax something. I'd be fine with all the books being digitized and libraries being more like just community cybercafes with no cost overhead for the skills of a librarian or keeping around books.

That's a horrible idea. Books are still extremely valuable for providing information in a distraction free medium. Books should not be underrated.

> My county library system has 2,038 books of and about feminism and ~300 books of and about LGBT issues, but it has scarcely anything about conservative / right wing political philosophy or Abrahamic theology.

Since it seems you counted every book in every library in your county and classified them according to left/right political ideology, and were able to come up with a precise number for books "of and about feminism," why aren't you also providing the same for " conservative / right wing political philosophy or Abrahamic theology?" Or for that matter, the books which fall into neither category?

That's just bad statistics.

>It doesn't have a single book by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Evola, or Carl Schmitt.

Bullshit. I refuse to believe you counted ~2,338 items of "feminist" literature in a library system that doesn't contain at least one copy of The Prince.

>The library doesn't seem like a service that's open to everyone, it seems like a subsidiary for a specific viewpoint and agenda.

It does seem that's what you want us to think, sir or madam green account created specifically for this thread.

>Since it seems you counted every book in every library in your county and classified them according to left/right political ideology

I didn't. I just queried the search engine.

>Or for that matter, the books which fall into neither category?

Because I don't really care about those books. I'm only interested in books about conservative / right wing political philosophy and/or Abrahamic theology. My library doesn't have many of those, however, it has a lot of books of ideologies that are hostile to the ones I'm sympathetic to.

When I'm not accommodated in a public place, I tend to look around to see who is. I can see why leftists love libraries, they're welcome to that opinion. I'm just going to vote in a way that's contrary to continuing financial support for those libraries that don't accommodate myself or my interests.

>My library doesn't have many of those, however, it has a lot of books of ideologies that are hostile to the ones I'm sympathetic to.

I have a difficult time believing you, partly because libraries don't actually serve a leftist or feminist agenda, and therefore the situation you describe is dubious, and partly because in another comment you mention "all men are bad feminist literature" which is a straw version of feminism promulgated by redpillers, incels and trolls.

So please mention the county you live in so we can do our own searches and verify the feminist/liberal/anti-right wing agenda for ourselves.

>I'm just going to vote in a way that's contrary to continuing financial support for those libraries that don't accommodate myself or my interests.

Do what several commenters have suggested and ask them to get the material you want, or don't go there.

Why do you feel libraries which don't "accomodate" you, personally, also don't deserve to serve the rest of the community?

>Why do you feel libraries which don't "accomodate" you, personally, also don't deserve to serve the rest of the community?

My general view is that People can do what they want as long as they don't involve me. I have no problem with libraries, I just don't like them enough to want to pay for them and whenever the issue comes up, I'm going to vote to free myself from the burden of supporting things I don't want to support. If libraries become a place that's interesting to me, my personal feelings might change.

Also, I'm sympathetic to kids having access to books. Whenever I'm done with my books, I bring them to my neighborhood park's lending library. It's supported by people in the neighborhood and people can exchange books. It's a practical, low cost solution. Though sometimes my books upset my neighbors, but I don't see how "The Concept of the Political" is any more controversial than say "the Life and Narrative of Frederick Douglass"

You continue to dodge literally the only salient question in this thread: which county do you live in?

The rest of the conversation in this thread is built upon the IMO extremely implausible claims in your first comment.

There's good reason for us to simply not believe your claims. I wrote a Python script to search US library catalogs for Prince, Leviathan, the bible, and some standard texts on christian/jewish history. I didn't find a single library that doesn't have at least one out of three, and nearly all libraries with catalogs my script knows how to handle have a copy of both Prince and Leviathan.

Furthermore, nearly all of the libraries without these texts have the keyword "elementary" or "middle" in their names, which... yeah, Leviathan isn't exactly written at a fifth grade reading level.

e: I also searched library catalogs for the intersection of 2k+ books on category/keyword feminism and no copy of Prince. Zero results.

> >Since it seems you counted every book in every library in your county and classified them according to left/right political ideology

> I didn't. I just queried the search engine.

Liar. Provide the search engine URL if you dare and let us confirm.

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Unless you're in an exceptionally isolated part of the country, your county library is part of an inter library-loan system that can get those books for you. Requesting these books signals to librarians that they need to have those books on premise.

I'm surprised they didn't have any of Hobbes or Machiavelli's works, as they tend to be utilized by a lot of classes.

But for Evola or Carl Schmitt, I don't see that as anti-conservative in any sense as most conservatives/mainstream Republicans have largely embraced classic liberalism that Schmitt opposed. Evola is equally divorced from mainstream orthodoxy outside of the alt-right, which itself has little interest in its own philosophical underpinnings. His work is definitely worht a read if you want to understand the underpinnings of European neofascism but you're talking about pretty niche stuff here.

> It doesn't have a single book by Machiavelli, Hobbes, Evola, or Carl Schmitt.

Probably for the same reason you won't find Hitler's book in German libraries. Their ideas of immorality, absolutism, fascism and nazism simply lost against other, better ideas. Get over it.

If Carl Schmitt and Julius Evola lost, why did Barack Obama get away with using drones to execute American citizens? Why did the CIA and the Bush administration get away with using torture?

To be frank, I simply don't believe you.

What county do you live in?

Classic diversionary administrative state clickbait headline: "More taxes, because libraries!"

How about why are our taxes not spent on libraries? What are they being spent on? The people who talk to the people who fill out the forms for the people who are supposed to be managing our libraries? Or was it that our libraries were actually sold by the people elected to supposedly make sure our libraries stayed open? Oops that was the US post office...

Total government revenue was $6,300,000,000,000 last year[1]

[1] https://www.usgovernmentrevenue.com/total_2018USrt_20rs1n

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