Where scrappy Berlin shines as the A+ example

  • StereoTypo@beehaw.org
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    11 months ago

    It raises an interesting question; if it were feasible to implent without massive privacy concerns, would you support income-proportional fee structure for government services? I’m imagining below a certain cutoff income-bracket, everything would be free.

    • MJBrune@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Well, I would in the terms that taxes are literally that. Our taxes pay for the service, you shouldn’t need to pay again to use it. You already paid for it. I wouldn’t replace taxes with a proportional fee structure either. This is what living in a society is. Sometimes you’ll put money towards something that you’ll never use, sometimes you’ll use something far more than what you paid for. A government and really, a society, or community is only as inversely strong (weak?) as its most selfish person. I’ve seen a lot of people recently who are applying logic that they wouldn’t give 100 starving people a meal if one of them didn’t “deserve” it. We need to fix this mentality or we are doomed as a society and frankly, with that line of thinking, I’d question why government bodies even exist since the people pay most of the taxes.

    • Rentlar@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Caltrain and Metrolink (California, USA regional trains) have the right idea. Low income Americans by and large carry EBT cards. They give a 50% discount on tickets when scanned. Of course this could be technologically easily made free but it’s a start and the remaining challeges are financial and political.