Also, net contribution has nothing to do with whether you can afford to pay to build private roads, or pay for doctors without insurance, or pay for private education. Almost nobody could afford to pay for their own roads, freeways cost billions; that's precisely why we share the cost, even if not every single person uses them. It should be somewhat evident that transportation and distribution businesses and the executives that run them benefit financially more from public roads than individuals do.

By using the term "net contributor" you're comparing tax payers against each other and painting a picture of what's more or less fair from person to person. What I'm suggesting is you should compare the services that come with taxes to what you get with no shared services at all, which is the logical conclusion of the GP comment. I care less about the fear of paying 2% more taxes than someone else when I think about the fact that the services I get would cost me many orders of magnitude more money than I have if I had to pay for them individually and privately.

For the sake of conversation, I wouldn't mind hearing why you think HN demographics makes people net contributors. I'm quite skeptical that services for the poor cost more than the sum total of tax breaks and infrastructure the rich enjoy, if that's the direction you were headed...

And, of course, the entire concept of contributor/recipient is irrelevant if we fund education without raising taxes, and moreso if a national education system were to bring in more money than it costs, which may be the case in Norway & Finland among other places. Fretting over what's fair and worrying excessively about freeloaders might be costing us a lot more than it saves.