Japan's Hometown Tax (2018)

From the article:<p>&gt; Educating children is incredibly expensive. The regions are quite annoyed that they pay to educate their children but that Tokyo reaps all the benefits. This state of affairs has continued for decades.<p>We see the same problem in USA states. State taxpayer dollars pay for some amount of public college education for state universities. These are typically called &quot;State Appropriations&quot;, and varies between 30-80% of the student&#x27;s overall tuition costs.<p>Back in the 1980&#x27;s, taxpayers footed most college tuition using state appropriations, so college was &quot;cheap&quot; for students back then. Now (2023), (at least in my state, Michigan), state appropriations typically cover 20-40% of a college student&#x27;s tuition.<p>There is concern with this though, because of what is called &quot;brain drain&quot;. Citizens spend all these taxpayer dollars educating youth at colleges, then the graduates from U of M, etc all move out of state to California, Boston, Seattle, etc for big tech jobs.<p>Then the state of Michigan doesn&#x27;t see any more tax dollars from those students. Which begs the question, why pay tax dollars for higher education if those who benefit from that education do not contribute back?

Man, this would be so good for the US to implement.<p>The exact tax details and how money is exactly moved around are, of course, the devil in the details.<p>But, forget all those very important but very arduous details for a minute, and just imagine that system up and working.<p>You pick some small town out there on the Gift website. You like, I dunno, Country Hams. There&#x27;s a small place outside of Harrisburg, PA that specializes in that gift. They send you a medium sized ham around the holidays. It&#x27;s not a mass market ham, as that&#x27;s against the rules. It&#x27;s real home grown and processed country ham. They put in some advert for the country ham festival in October or some month (I don&#x27;t know anything about the ham world, sorry!). Its free tickets to get in. You think, hey, why not? Go out there, spend some hotel&#x2F;AirBnB money, eat at the diners, buy gas, etc. Great little fall escape. You do this every year for a while. The town gets a reputation, they&#x27;re the Country Ham town now.<p>Boom, a little cottage industry, government mandated to exist and help out the people there. The town gets to choose the cottage industry, of course. But they can leap frog it, make something of it, get things going again. Government is just coming in and priming the pump.<p>I don&#x27;t know. There&#x27;s something so damn wholesome about this idea that I just love it. Helping out each other, getting things moving again, diversifying the market, keeping things alive.

A local Texas guy told me once that he donates quite a bit to the local church, explaining that he would prefer his money do good locally instead of being diverted to the war machine that sucked in his son.

As a military brat who doesn&#x27;t really have a hometown, or even a clear regional identity, I like that this system lets you choose a town to donate to without forcing it to be connected to your birthplace or life history.<p>It&#x27;d be nice to be able to earmark it to particular government functions, maybe even charities in the area, etc.

Not sure I understand all the subtlety but as a Canadian (where we have about 3 big cities and the rest has no voice) I&#x27;d love to be able to divert my tax away from the city I live in and to my home town. If course we don&#x27;t really pay income tax directly to the city, so it would be complicated and probably just make more bureaucracy.

What the author calls a &quot;beautiful&quot; system to me seems to be bordering on fraud and undermining what the law was originally intended to do. Basically random small towns hire consulting companies who run advertising campaigns asking people nationwide to send them their 40% &quot;hometown donation&quot; and get 20% of it back as a &quot;gift&quot;, thus conveniently evading half their taxes? Who exactly is benefiting here?

Had beers with a community college president last week... he shared that there&#x27;s a problem brewing where Arizona State (and perhaps others...) are going to high schools offering a program where for low tuition rates, kids can pick up some college credits. Sounds great on the surface, but the problems are that a) it means fewer of those students attending programs at the local community colleges, IE: taxpayer dollars going out of state, and b) apparently the credits offered are really only transferable to - you guessed it - Arizona State. It&#x27;s all part of a disagreement between the school districts and the community colleges over where the kids are spending their time, and thus getting their share of state dollars.

previous discussions:<p>posted 2018, 249 comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18256660">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=18256660</a><p>posted 2022, 105 comments: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31152365">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=31152365</a><p>Not here to complain about a repost, just mentioning in case someone is looking to dive further and see what people said before.

This was great! One question, on this:<p>&gt; And there, that’s Japan’s most novel redistribution program in a nutshell.<p>How is this &quot;redistribution&quot;?

Two initiatives I&#x27;ve thought about:<p>1. Schools receiving state tax dollars must adhere to percentage-based breakdowns of general tuition use. Basically, only x% of general tuition can be spent on administration costs, sports facilities, etc.<p>2. Percentage of tuition covered by tax dollars is set by local demand for that degree path and adjusted periodically.

This needs clarification. If you can gift it anywhere, can you gift it back to Tokyo (for example)? I would think that the kickback that the place you actually live (services, access to events, etc) would be more valuable to the taxpayer than would be services in a city where you don&#x27;t live.

I find it curious that more countries don&#x27;t do what America does, and tax you wherever you live. While this policy would absolutely screw me over as someone who lives in a very low tax country, I&#x27;m not sure what the argument _against_ it for a country like the UK is.

On the practice of returning 30% of a gift back to the sender as yet another polite reciprocal gift --<p>Having been to Japan now and having seen the amount of gift wrapping and boxes and packaging of little food items and treats, I wonder if this simple social rule actually drives quite a notable amount of consumer spending and economic activity in the country!

Well, I don&#x27;t know if this is a <i>good</i> system or if a similar system could be applied well in my country, but the article certainly made me smile.

The core concept of Hometown tax is okay, redistribute money to non-rich areas. How it currently work sucks. People chose where to donate by how much gift those local govt return for tax payers. Quite inefficient and nonsense criteria.

&gt; Educating children is incredibly expensive.<p>So people who&#x27;ve been homeschooled can opt out of that tax right? I mean: that&#x27;s only logical.

It&#x27;s a stupid system. Taxes should go to your current city&#x2F;state to run the services there. If you&#x27;re not able to sustain programs on your shrinking tax base then you should start reimagining the existence of your city. If you need temporary assistance you should finance it with debt, or ask the national government for help. This is a silly and inefficient system that pours funds into parts of the country that should be left to die. If you want to revitalize places, you should be investing into industries that can bring youth and life to places, not leach it from others.

There&#x27;s a better fix for this. Stop measuring success by how far away you have to live from your mum to get a job.<p>Once we have a Job Guarantee, not only does that mean interest base rates remain at zero permanently (ensuring permanently low mortgages), but it also means you can live where you want in the country.<p>Business then has to go where the people are if it wants any labour - which of course it largely can in a majority service based economy.<p>Stars shine not because of gravity, but because of the outward pressure that stops them collapsing in on themselves.<p>Countries need to adopt similar policies if they wish to shine and not collapse.