I used to work in fair tax policy. It exists.

Everyone hates it. That’s all I ever learned from years of work on the issue. Even the people who would benefit from it, hate it.

People really really like unfair tax policies, because they imagine themselves on the unfair side of it benefiting from it. They love loopholes because it makes them feel ‘smart’, etc. Our politicians are aware of this. They know that fairer tax code reforms are unpopular. People very much adore the system we have of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ and they generally want more of that because emotionally that is what they regard as ‘fair’.

There is a major gap between what people say they want, and what they actually want. Everyone says they want ‘fairness’ but what they want… is a system they feel they can exploit to their own advantage. They want the appearance of fairness, but the don’t want to pay taxes, especially taxes that come due as separate payments once a year.

I won’t even go into the other problem that ‘fair’ taxation would be incredible intrusive.

I worked for 5 years to promote LVT.

In real life it’s far more complex to administer than a straight property tax, that’s why it will never be popular. It also creates bizarre outcomes where where it rewards some land uses and punishes others and creates weird incentives about land topology and parcelization.

Who is going to assess the value of the land as distinct from improvements? Geologists? Environmentalists? Different parents will presume different values and push those values. Property taxes are assumed basically based on other similar properties on the market, in terms of size, age, and space. But 2 parcels of 2 acre right next to each other could be radically different values depending in there topology and environments. I lived on a 2 acre parcel once, and our neighbors had 1/4 acre plots, but our 2 acres was mostly swampy low lying land that was not adjacent to the part the land our house was on that was regular. It was also weirdly shaped and the ‘access’ to it was a narrow 10ft corridor. It was essentially… useless land attached to our parcel, we couldn’t even develop it because in order to clear it you’d have to get permission form your neighbor to drive construction equipment across their driveway/lawn and destroy it. The extra ‘land’ in our case added 0 value to our property and in fact removed value, as houses around us were often selling for more due to the extra liability our extra land came with.

It introduces just as many problems as it those it claims to solve. It makes sense in some limited contexts, like say, urban land use across small and regular parcels, but not all land is urban land.

You forget that George was writing when society 70% agricultural and rural and working off a model of undeveloped land. in 2026 only 17% of the USA population lives outside of cities.

Georgism is an ideology.

They think the LVT will solve all social problems ever. That’s the premise of the book he wrote about it.

He’s basically like Marx, but instead of communal ownership of production he thinks taxing land value will solve all society’s problems. Like communists, Georgists think if you just read this book and BELIEVE poverty will disappear.

The LVT has a lot of merits, but it has lots of drawbacks. It’s difficult to value land as district from property, for one. It would also be highly inaccurate in the case of mineral rights and other factors.

These aren’t properly prepared chickens. They are McChickens. They are fast food that is full of artificial crap to make it taste good.

Low income people eat a lot of fast food because it’s an affordable luxury for them. That doesn’t mean it’s not a luxury, or that it’s a good choice to make a regular part of your diet. Especially due to the long affects.

One of the first things you figure out when you get out of being poor is that paying more for food is not a luxury, it’s a necessity for a higher quality of life overall. I got this lesson in college, which was the first time it was regularly available to me.

when I was 14 years old and eating shitty food everyday, I thought healthy food was ‘gross’ and ‘crazy expensive’. I was wrong. I was just poor and trapped in a poor person’s mindset and had no idea about long term costs because i was consumed with getting things as quickly as possible for as cheap as possible.

Yes. These are sold more cheaply now because it’s a loss leader and they are pale imitation of the true product that they represent. They loaded with extra fat and salt, which is why people love them. Like they are literally injected with a solution of fat, salt, and chemical agents to tenderize the meat. It’s the same as McDonalds, but people are under the delusion it is ‘healthy’ and ‘natural’ or something. It’s processed food make for mass consumption at lowest possible cost.

A legit rotisserie chicken is 2-4x that cost and would not taste nearly as good because of the lack of fat and salt.

I did, but you’re being a typical lemmy troll who refuses to acknowledge any counter point to your simplified narrative that lacks any context because you want to bite the ragebait that makes you feel morally superior for doing so.

the article is designed to make you upset and troll you by going at your bias that premade grocery store chickens are some sort of nutritional necessity that is liberating people from the doldrums of their suffering at the evils of capitalism… even though it the chickens being sold like this is really an evil of capitalism itself.

you can’t have your pre-made chicken rage and eat it too!

cheapest here and now comes at a long term cost.

these chickens are a loss leader in order to get people to hooked on shitty premade food that is profitable for the stores so they never learn to cook better food.

i grew up poor. it was splurging for us to buy this stuff. our regular food was frozen and canned. even uncooked fresh food was a luxury for us.

you can eat however you want.

however engaging in poverty finance is a way to keep yourself in poverty as it prevents you from developing smarter and healthier behaviors around food and persisting in myths and thought patterns that are objectively unhealthy and defeating.

I know this from personal experience. cheap ready to eat food is awful for you and long term does way more damage to your health and fiances than learning to cook healthy food at home. cooking for yourself is objectively healthier as you get to control what goes into your food.

but yeah if you are narrow terms of gratification and raw cost, why not just grind up the chickens into hot protein paste and let the poors eat that? or perhaps we think there is more to life than calories and macronutrients?

because it’s premade food.

fast food prices used to be similar, was that a healthy smart way to get calories? a burger and fries from mcdonalds used to be 3 bucks or so.

because conspiracy theory nonsense and the government is inherently evil, or something.

apparently ‘freedom’ is living in the backwoods your entire life as an undocumented citizen or something.

and medical care and social security are ‘evil’.

because in the USA we hate teachers. it’s really that stupid and simple. and we hate poor people even more than we hate teachers… and most public teachers are automatically poor people due to horrible wages.

teachers are now viewed as professionals worth of respect. they are seen as losers who failed at life and deserve to be punished and hated for it. they are seen as inherently lazy for choosing it as a profession. teachers are public servants, and public servants are all leeches on society.

it was this way growing up for me, and it’s even worse today. and all our public policies and funding around education reflect this.

our society loves to go on about education, but in practice is essentially anti-education.

the last time the USA made public investments in education was post ww2, because of the Soviets. Then we rapidly clawed it all back during the 1980s and it’s been in decline for 50 years now. we did that because we had an existential threat and were in competition with the Soviets. Once we ‘won’ we no longer had any need to care about education and we essentially have a two-tier system of seduction, one for the rich that is the best in the world, and one for everyone else that is on par developing nations.

If you come here and got to spend a day in a rich school vs a poor school, your mind would be blown. One will be doing amateur rocketry, and the other can’t even do basic arithmetic or reading.

you can learn to write fast and legibly.

that is not an inherent trait

the idea that people inherently good at things, or not, forever, is really stupid and destructive.

you did if you took calculus. but only 20% of students take calclus and only 40% take pre calc.

you don’t need them for geo, tri, or algebra

they are happy to spend money on technology and shiny new buildings.

they aren’t spending money on teaching staff. teaching staff who are now more credentialed than ever, but know less than ever.

the issue is the metricization of education. everything must be measured… and this creates a perverse system where everything is now about increasing the metrics, regardless of improving education.

not to mention the changing in parenting where ever parent things their child is a genius and it’s the ‘school system’ that’s failing their kid, instead of their kid being a dumbass jerk who refuses to learn or participate in their own education.

or maybe kids should learn to do that on their own free time as it interests them and focus on more basic skillsets.

you can’t code if you can’t read or do math. you can’t do graphic design if you don’t know how to draw and the basics of color theory and all that.

one of the greatest mistakes in modern usa education is forgetting the idea that skills build on one another and you can’t do more advanced things without mastering the basics first. but today we shove kids forward no matter their level of competency because we are not allowed to punish or poorly grade those who fail to learn new skills. we punish the teachers for holding the students accountable to standards, and we reward the teachers/schools who shove kids through the system and ‘innovate’ new ways for them to inflate test scores.

the problem with American education is cultural. other countries have stronger cultures around education.

and certain groups in America have very strong cultures around education, mostly Asians and wealthier people, but those are minorities in the broader culture which basically sees education as annoying and stupid crap they have to do to get a job, that they want to do in the cheapest way possible.

if being a teacher started at a salary of 80-100K, things would be a lot different. But it takes a decade or more of teaching to get that level of pay. The only people paid well in education are administrators, who are the ones who give themselves raises and stagnant teacher pay to their own benefit.

and it’s the same at all levels of education, because American culture says ‘be a greedy shitty person on top who enriches yourself at the expense of everyone else’. and we see the classroom as place to wage a culture war first and foremost, and education is much lower on the priority list.

this isn’t healthy food anymore than KFC is healthy.

if you make it at home, it’s going to be far healthier because it’s not going to be loaded with crap to make shitty quality meat taste good… just like fast food does.

a single chicken doesn’t feed a family of four.

it’s a loss leader because it gets you to buy the 6 dollar sides of potatoe, veg and cheese and the dessert and then you’ve spent 30-40 bucks. the 6 dollar mashed potatoes is very profitable.

it’s all incredibly unhealthy too. full of margarine, salt, and chemical stabilizers for texture and shelf-life.

people who are on gut health diets are usually already wealthy.

i’ve had co-workers who feel the same way. kept fucking up at work, not showing up on time, and blaming everyone else for being mean to them. they were shitty people and work is much better without them around. being around competent people who take pride in their work and themselves is a joy.

edit: it’s not a system dude. It’s the choices you make. if you’ve made choices to make yourself a caged chicken and you hate it, you’ve nobody to blame but yourself. chickens don’t have existential angst.