my friends' list quote of the week

[gusl]

mathemajician
"Swiss Italians however have rather a different problem --- due to their genetics they too feel the need to protest, just like their cousins south of the border, however in Switzerland there is a serious shortage of things to protest about. This is not just a problem for the region's would be disenchanted youths, it's also a serious problem for the region's politicians --- after all, if there are no serious problems just what do you have as your political platform? "We the X party pledge to do nothing whatsoever and keep everything the way it is" would find favour with many of the country's elderly, but it's not about to inspire many to reconsider their vote."

I'm sure the people could use a tax break, but the voice of reason strongly enough. Reasonable, well-informed people tend to not attend protests, and not to have the patience to play the politics game at all.

Comments

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Switzerland already has one of the lowest rates of taxation in all of Europe. It varies from state to state, but in Zug for example the company tax rate is 16%. The impression that I get from Swiss people (and I don't know all that many to be fair) is that they are pretty happy with the current level of taxation and the way the money is spent.

One of the factors no doubt is that each state (called a canton) is highly independent and collects its own taxes and decides what to do with the money. Also everything is controlled by lots of local votes on various issues rather than from central government, indeed the president of the country doesn't do all that much. So what happens is that taxes are collected from relatively small communities and then are spent on community things which the community decided to do often through a community vote of some sort. Because each canton is pretty much free to do what it likes and the people can freely move from one place to another, you get cantons actually competing with each other --- if you would rather pay slightly higher taxes but have less poor people on the streets and better funded schools for your kids then you can probably shift not to far away to a canton that suits your tastes.

The other thing is that the Swiss are well educated and rich. They look at what is going on in Switzerland and then look at other countries and conclude that they are doing really well and so why bother changing too much. As the saying in English goes: "Don't fix what isn't broken".

[gustavolacerda.livejournal.com]

ah... competition between governments... just like in anarcho-capitalism / panarchy...

Zug = Zurich?

[mathemajician.livejournal.com]

Zug is a small town in the canton of Zug about 30 km south of Zurich. Zug is a rich canton with a gross income per capita of 50k euro per year --- so I'd guess that the average income for working people must be around 100k euro a year.