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Comment by mschuster91 | Hacker News Reader

As an European, so much of what has been described here is mind-boggling at best. WTF why does America have different sales taxes between counties? Why are "dry counties" even a thing? And why do healthcare costs differ so wildly?

As a comparison, here in Germany it's one federal level of sales tax (19% and 7% for food and a couple other exempted items), one federal level of healthcare costs (7.3% of gross wage, plus .5-2% of surcharge depending on insurance company), and legal drinking/smoking age is federal 16 (beer/wine)/18 (tobacco, other alcohols), and you can buy alcohol and tobacco products everywhere.

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America doesn’t just have sales tax differences between counties! It can have sales tax differences between different parts of the same city, if they decide to set it up that way - usually as part of a Community Improvement District, or a Transit Development District, or what have you. The idea is that they built some infrastructure for retailers to take advantage of, and the retailers should add an extra 1% or so to pay for it.

This is one reason why applying sales tax to online purchases is such a pain, and helps favor the incumbents like Amazon.

> As an European, so much of what has been described here is mind-boggling at best. WTF why does America have different sales taxes between counties? Why are "dry counties" even a thing? And why do healthcare costs differ so wildly?

The United States is a big place. We have a similar landmass to all of Europe. The GDP of the state of California is almost as big as the GDP of Germany.

It makes more sense when you think of the United States as, literally, a collection of states that have significant leeway in how they operate their affairs. Even individual counties can vary widely in their culture and governance practices.

Dry counties are rare and usually associated with a highly religious population that chooses to live somewhere without alcohol sales. Generally these locations are not far from counties that allow liquor sales so purchasing alcohol is a matter of driving a short distance. However, most of the people who live there deliberately choose the location because they have no interest in alcohol so it’s not really an issue for them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laboratories_of_democracy

https://www.pbs.org/tpt/constitution-usa-peter-sagal/federal...

Due to its history and immigration, the US is much larger in population and size and more geologically, philosophically, and demographically more diverse than most countries. One size does not fit all if one is seeking a stable long lasting democracy.

>And why do healthcare costs differ so wildly?

Healthcare costs vary because labor, land, utility, legal, and other costs vary by location (especially legal as that is subject to many states' laws and judicial systems).

Health insurance premiums vary because the risk pools for the insurance that individuals can buy via healthcare.gov are separated for each state. There is the federal law, ACA, but on certain states have more rules that distribute the healthcare costs even more to young/healthy people. See this page for some examples:

https://www.valuepenguin.com/how-age-affects-health-insuranc...

And in general, the administration and regulation of insurance pricing is on a state level too, so there might simply be variance due to that.

Ah, but America has freedom, so there are a lot more laws regulating what people can do.

Jokes aside, the USA seems to have an enormous amount of local democracy with significant powers.

The side most obvious to outsiders is where it seems to work badly - the bad sheriff who keeps being re-elected, quirks like dry counties. But it's admirable in a way, that people have some power to determine the local rules, together with the freedom to move away if they don't like it. If local democracy were extended further, there would be more variation, and more weirdness, but perhaps it would be a good thing overall.

I often find myself really liking the idea of local democracy and wishing for more of it where I live, but then I remember the kind of insane moral puritans with nothing better to do that get attacted to local politics like flies to rubbish tips! My country has a very authoritarian instinct among many in society to ban anything that doesn't neatly fit into their beige conventionality, and as bad as our heavily centralised government can be at least it keeps a muzzle on those sorts of people to an extent.

Local democracy sounds nice in the abstract, right up until you look at it: https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/05/handforth-in...

(Note that a 'parish council' here is for a civil parish, that is the smallest type of administrative unit in the UK; it's not a church parish)

At that point, you will probably be relieved that those idiots aren't allowed do anything important.

I suppose in principle if local authorities were more important, you might get more competent people running for election onto them, but given the average quality of _national_ backbenchers, this seems optimistic.

I think we have to fundamentally change how the party system works if we're going to get people in politics for the right reasons in general, but especially in local politics. There's no reason that the people collecting bins, filling potholes, and providing essential services along those lines need to be associated with the moral abattoirs that are the national political parties for example, at least in my experience these local politicians are voted on based on an area's national political inclinations rather than any individual merit which lets all sorts of lunatics in. The first thing we need to do is break this link and make local government completely non-partisan.

I wish there was an empirical way of screening out moral puritan types with the aim of directly eliminating their influence, but I'm not sure that can be done without endangering democracy itself. A more difficult but much more ethical approach I think is to try and create new social norms that make aggressive conformity something to be ashamed rather than proud of, puritanism in any direction should be made into a sign of weakness rather than strength. We need a society that instinctively defends "witches" when the witch-hunters are in town.

> The first thing we need to do is break this link and make local government completely non-partisan.

That's impossible; political parties naturally emerge in democracies. Very few countries have the official recognition of parties that the US does (party registration, official primaries etc) but all democracies have political parties.

Even if we kept national politics partisan which I'm personally against for a number of reasons, the petty squabbles and power plays of Westminster are utterly irrelevant to the functions of local government and should play no part in its selection.

Non-partisan democracies do exist, some of them are even directly associated with the UK such as the Falkland Islands and the Isle of Man which are roughly the size of a British parish and a council respectively.

I think part of the problem is media coverage of the democracy - at some point, coherent, competent analysis and coverage becomes impractical.

Remote work via the internet will likely amplify the selection pressure too. Without being tied to a particular location due to your job, you can now shop around for an optimal location for your needs. If a bad state law is enacted, you might see people flock to another state.

It’d be nice to see some CoL data on the international level too.

Remote work is realistic for a tiny fraction of the population, and other pressures reduce the number of available remote work jobs even further (management culture, people who have no social life without the office, etc.). Remote work will change absolutely nothing.

> Remote work is realistic for a tiny fraction of the population

I'm skeptical on this point. I think that we're already around 10-20% remote work and might get to 25% remote work in the coming years [1]. I don't think this is a tiny fraction. I'm expecting technology to further reduce the dependence on physical presence over time.

I think remote work has had a significant change (e.g. less commute time, less pollution, more family time) and could cause changes in politics too. Imagine flipping a couple senate seats in a low population density area to further a remote work friendly lawmaking (i.e. land use rules, healthcare, etc...).

[1] https://www.cnbc.com/2020/12/15/one-in-four-americans-will-b...

I don't think most people realized that not only is remote work feasible but for many professions - especially those in "knowledge work" - it's a huge boon.

Peoples eyes have been opened and the genie is out of the bottle. I fully expect remote work to transform America to the extent that the post WWII suburbanization will look like a statistical anomaly by comparison.

I think you vastly overestimate a) how many jobs can feasibly work remotely, 2) how many companies are willing to allow remote work under non-pandemic conditions, and c) how many people want to work remotely.

I would love to work remotely, but I'm not seeing any realistic probability of that for me in the near future.

It's easier to get in the face of local politicians vs. ones hundreds or thousands of miles away.

Indeed I would argue the more we defer to national politics the worse (dramatically worse!) things get. Senators were set up to be elected by the state legislatures on purpose to encourage people to pay attention to their state legislatures. The House of Representatives were selected by popular vote.

Separation of duties/check and balances. The 17th amendment "fixed" that - and I'd say every since it's been downhill from there. Pure democracy's CAN NOT work - it's why we are (for now) a representative republic. There is no perfect system as long as humans are involved, but we were blessed with a pretty good one. I wish people would stop trying to tear it down - we know from history the alternatives are pretty gawd awful.

A very well-travelled photoblogger I used to read once remarked that no country in the world loves posting paragraphs of fine-print regulations and signs telling you what you can't do, all over every wall, sidewalk, curb, and business entrance like the US does—IIRC only a couple others (I wanna say Australia?) even came close. Most have, comparatively, practically none, democracies and authoritarians states alike. After having that pointed out, I can't un-see it. We really do love it.

> 19% and 7% for food and a couple other exempted items

You're understating the complexity a bit here, I think. For instance, what's VAT on a loaf of bread, vs a bagel, vs a croissant? (I don't actually know for Germany, but in Ireland a loaf of bread is zero-rated, as is a bagel, but a croissant is reduced-rate, but for a period of around a year a few years back a bagel was also reduced-rate...)

The US gets its tax complexity from regionalism, and Europe gets it from baroque VAT rules. It's debatable which is worse :)

You're completely missing the point. The code style doesn't matter as long as it's consistent across the codebase.

Sure, but the big difference between Ireland vs the US is that in Ireland, the VAT is in the price you see on the object, whereas in the US things just cost extra when you go to pay for them.

I agree that VAT rules are a bit nuts, but most of the insanity is shielded from most consumers.

Oh, yeah, from a consumer perspective VAT is a far better experience, but that's largely disconnected from the nature of the tax, and more around consumer law. VAT is simple for consumers because the EU forces sellers to present inc-VAT prices. US sales tax is messy for consumers because the US doesn't. It's totally possible to imagine a VAT-type regime with US-style consumer rules, where you'd have to figure out if your bread was actually bread before putting it in the shopping basket.

> It's totally possible to imagine a VAT-type regime with US-style consumer rules, where you'd have to figure out if your bread was actually bread before putting it in the shopping basket.

That would be hilarious, especially if you're shopping with friends.

It would be ludicrous though to actually implement, rather like the US's sales-tax system.

I rather like having items and taxes separately. God knows how crazy our politicians would get with taxes if they were buried and not readily apparent!

Receipts in Europe will typically show VAT; it's just that the price of the item on the shelf or website or whatever must be inclusive of VAT (assuming that the target market is consumers; b2b sellers are allowed show ex-VAT figures provided they also show inc-VAT figures).

The original political system of the US, before it was significantly changed in early-to-mid 20th century, was pretty similar to the current political system of Europe, where the role of US Federal Government was similar to current role of European Union, and the individual US states were like individual European states. In this view, US setup shouldn’t surprise you, it’s what you yourself experience.

Dry counties were thing here Finland early 00s even now counties can forbid selling beverages that contain alcohol.

Also in Wales, but only to the extent of "pubs closed on a Sunday".

I wonder what you're referring to because Finland doesn't really have counties.

With dry counties you mean counties that 25+ years ago allowed retail of alcohol only in Alko, the state monopoly store?

I don't think counties can fully forbid sales of alcohol.

We had this little thing called a "civil war". Turns out a lot of our country doesn't like the idea of a federal government, and wants to do things its own way whenever it can. Trying to fix that in today's political climate would probably start another one.

I think that's why we've been the big superpower for so long. We're fucking nuts. We'll invade your country for no reason and then try to make you pay for it.

Yeah... The US will invade countries for no reason but the trillions spent are added to the backs of our own citizens.

Iraq and Afghanistan aren't paying us the trillions we've wasted these past decades.

Lots of countries have had civil wars. Most of them, one side won and the other side lost.

In the US, one side lost, and was then venerated as heroes, which is particularly odd.

I'm not sure it's _that_ odd, really. Like, who won the English civil war? _Really_ won it, long-term?

You could argue that one both ways very easily; on the one hand, there's still a monarch, and there are no puritans. On the other, the monarch has no power (though you could convincingly argue that that was part of a process that was ongoing anyway, and the civil war didn't necessarily change the pace that much).

It's difficult to say either side is venerated as heroes.

It's the combination which is very odd. Plenty of countries have civil strife and have one side viewed as heroes. In the US both Robert E Lee and Abraham Lincoln are venerated.

One thing Europeans often don't consider is that the population and size of a European country is about on par with a bigger US state and that US states have a lot of legal independence. So the variation is a bit less crazy than it sounds.

Not sure this is a good explanation as, for instance, the concept of a dry county/municipality is alien to most europeans.

Similar with healthcare where it's by and large provided by the state.

Obviously speaking from my experience which is limited to the bigger countries in europe

Many original settlers including the pilgrims were religious extremists that the Europeans were all too happy to get rid of.

https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/religion/rel01.html

I've lived in dozens of locations across the country and never lived in a dry county, and only occasionally encountered it in my travels. The amount of the population they affect is minuscule, despite the impressive looking charts - many of those counties are pretty low population. And as others pointed out pretty easy to work around. Even crazier than dry counties was South Carolina's mini-bottle laws. If you want something truly mind blowing do a quick search on that madness.

As for our healthcare - I'll keep our system, warts and all. Not saying it can't be improved but at least I know when I need care I will be able to get it in my (literal!) lifetime. And if I'm sufficiently motivated I can get the best care available. I'll take that over any least common denominator one-size-fits-all model any day. Maybe your politicians are just better at running government programs - ours aren't. They are stupid bad at it. All I have to do is look at how well the free government provided health care is for our military veterans and know I don't want our government anywhere near my healthcare, thank you very much.

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