Buying decent tomatoes involved a trip into the city

[conuly]

When I got off the boat, there was a sliced mango seller there. I don't know where she's from, but I'm guessing somewhere Central America. And as I passed her, I also passed this one man muttering under his breath about how a. she doesn't pay taxes and b. it's unbelievable that she's just selling those mangoes, if she was Puerto Rican the cops would shut her right down.

I'm not really sure where this guy got the idea that the cops treat unlicensed food vendors better if they're (probably) Central American than if they're Puerto Rican, but I'm sure that can't be right.

Also, yeah, this woman's not paying income tax, she doesn't have a permit to sell mangoes out of a granny cart. She also doesn't have child care! She's spending 10+ hours standing there with a 16lb baby on her back in a rebozo, I'm not gonna begrudge her a little tax evasion! It's not like she's printing her own money here.

Anyway, when I came home I saw the gaudy greeting card van for the first time since quarantine! Holiday creep seems to have affected him too - I'm sure when I was a kid we'd get a week of turkeys and pumpkins plastered all over the van, but now he appears to have gone straight to Santa and tinsel.

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Comments

[mtbc]

I suspect that if she did record and file taxes then her situation's such that she'd end up with nothing actually owing.

[conuly]

Very likely.

There's also a nonzero chance that she's undocumented, and even if she is here legally she may not be a citizen. That's one thing about Puerto Rican - no matter how much the cops wanna hassle you, there isn't the implicit threat of deportation.

[conuly]

Anyway, she does pay taxes. She buys things. Sales tax is non-progressive. Poor people spend a greater portion of their money on sales tax than wealthy people do.

[lilysea]

Urgh! :(

If he cares about tax evasion, he should be railing against Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk et al, who are tax evading on a MASSIVE scale,

not people who are barely scraping by

and who almost certainly aren't eligible for unemployment benefits/food stamps/Medicare/Medicaid etc

people don't stand on a street corner with a baby selling fruit DURING A PANDEMIC because they are rolling in money!

[conuly]

If he cares about tax evasion, he should be railing against Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk et al, who are tax evading on a MASSIVE scale,

I know!

people don't stand on a street corner with a baby selling fruit DURING A PANDEMIC because they are rolling in money!

If she was rolling in money she probably would've stayed home rather than come to the USA in the first place. Who wants to leave home if they don't have to?

[lilysea]

I would love to see food vending licenses be completely free (and not-citizenship-requiring) for very small vendors like her.

Basically "all we care about is food safety, eg if your mangoes have toxic pesticides. We don't care in the slightest about your immigration status, and we don't expect you to pay us any $ for a license"

[conuly]

I strongly suspect that most people doing that particular job aren't just not citizens, they're undocumented, which creates an additional hurdle to licensing. Especially as NYC is notoriously stingy about handing out those licenses in the first place.

[lilysea]

Yes. Food safety licenses from tiny vendors shouldn't be a revenue raising exercise or a citizenship enforcing exercise,

they should be purely about basic food safety *and nothing else*

Save the revenue raising from food safety licences for $$$ fancy restaurants and mass chains like McDonalds.

[spiffikins]

Here we have vendors on street corners - and in some neighbourhoods, doing door-to-door sales of strawberries mostly - and they are straight from the farms in the area. Also flowers, sometimes oranges.

And in a couple of parking lots in the town next door, on weekends in the fall there is generally someone selling tamales out of their pickup truck, LOL

Pretty sure that *most* of those vendors are undocumented. But the tamales were pretty good, the one time I did buy some :D

And yeah - the lady who sells flowers on the street corner all day has her kid with her - all freaking day, at least on weekends when I see them there.

[chanter1944]

I'd have totally bought a mango slice or two, because F that muttering dude, because the lady deserves to make a living, and because mango is yum.

[conuly]

Oh, I actually hate mango.

[chez_jae]

The nerve of van-man, skipping right over Thanksgiving!

:D

[smokingboot]

People are so goddamn weird about other people's money. I don't get it.