5 ms·

I'm suggestioning that American stop subsidizing vast unpopulated areas of its country for the benefit of a subset of the country. Once the subsidies are devert

I'm suggestioning that American stop subsidizing vast unpopulated areas of its country for the benefit of a subset of the country. Once the subsidies are deverted, the areas will naturally depopulate.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
madengr 10y ago
Subsidize? Maybe those vastly unpopulated areas of the country ought to stop feeding those 100 miles from the coast.
- dao- 10y ago
  Automation is a thing, fewer and fewer people work in farming, and those who do spend less and less time doing manual labor. I'd rather support this trend and work towards full automation and remote control.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- trashtoss 10y ago
  It is subsidization, on too many fronts to name. If anything it has been too effective because it is quite invisible and taken for granted by the recipients, which then allows them to see their own life narratives as stories of succeeding in the market economy due to hard, honest work. The work may indeed be hard and honest, but it only succeeds at the costs and prices it succeeds at due to vast subsidies, which again are taken for granted (if even seen as such--or seen at all). The worst part is that even with this heavy subsidization the cost difficulties of modern infrastructure under sparse settlement leave non-urban residents feeling shortchanged despite the disproportionate spending they receive. Here's how that usually goes: basic infrastructure (roads, power, water, communications) has costs that scale roughly linearly in terms of how much you build: your build and maintenance cost are roughly proportionate to how many miles of road or miles of pipe or miles of wire, and so on. Thus as you have a population that is more widely spaced-out your effective per capita infrastructure costs go up: you have more road per person and more wires per person just to deliver the same level of capability. You often wind up, then, needing as much as 5x or more the per capita budget in a sparsely populated area to build and maintain infrastructure at a comparable level to a denser area (whether this is done or not is about administrative competence but that is a separate issue from the cost themselves). At a state level, however, it is hard to have wildly disproportionate per capita spending: you can maybe get away with spending 2-3x per capita on infrastructure in non-urban areas versus urban areas, but not 5-10x. But this spending-effectiveness discrepancy means that even with heavy subsidization--eg non-urban areas effectively getting 2-3x the infrastructure spend of the urban ones on a per capita basis--the spending outcomes will likely be better in the urban area because the cost efficiency is that much higher. This thus leaves the non-urban areas feeling neglected--the infrastructure isn't as well maintained etc--even though they are in fact already given disproportionate resources...they just aren't given resources that are disproportionate-enough! Ironically the "decaying small town" is the best proof of this effect: you go from comparatively well-maintained state highway to a city of 10-20k with crumbling streets and broken street lamps, etc., back to well-maintained state highway...because the state highway is subsidized by the entire state (and often federal funds), but that small town is on its own fundingwise, and reveals what the surrounding area can actually afford, sans subsidization from outside money.
  - msandford 10y ago
    The modern infrastructure that you're talking about, is that phone and electricity and water and sewer? Because most of the small town inhabitants pay for that themselves, or get small subsidies through federal programs. For example, the "much" higher cost of bringing phones to rural areas is a surcharge on your phone bill. In 2014 it was about $7 billion. That's a lot, but a complete joke compared to the federal budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund Rural electricity is often run by co-op because the big power company doesn't think it's worth spending the money to string the power lines to everyone. So those folks are literally doing it themselves. And they pay for it in their power prices. http://www.electric.coop/our-mission/powering-america/ http://www.electric.coop/our-mission/powering-america/ Rural water and sewer often doesn't exist again because the houses are too far apart for it to make financial sense to run the pipes. So people have wells and septic systems. That they pay to have installed and maintained out of their own pockets. You can argue all you want about the road subsidy for state run roads and I'm sympathetic to it, to a point. But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities. You might be able to make do with less rural roads, but certainly not none. I suppose you could argue that trains are all that's really needed (private investment) and that farmers can make and maintain their own gravel roads. But now we're just talking about funding the road maintenance in a different way, through higher food prices instead of taxes. But for that to really work, everyone in every city would have to be willing to forego fresh vegetables and all collectively be OK with the corresponding health outcomes that would result.
    - trashtoss 10y ago
      The point I tried--and failed!--to make is that in general the recipients of these subsidies have very simplistic and one-sided views of them (if they even see them as subsidies). I'll pick on this statement of yours: > But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities. ...it's not wrong, but it's incomplete: you forget as well that for modern farming, you also need all/most/some of those roads to get tractors/fertilizer/pesticide to those farms so they can actually have surplus food to bring to the city to sell (and presumably the farmers would like clothes, housewares, televisions, and so on...). Sure, at an aggregate level the numbers wind up the same--you save some on roads but fresh produce has a higher sticker price--but it's grating that the recipients of said subsidy consistently take such a one-sided view of the implicit transaction. Sticking to just the roads, it's also very partial-equilibrium: stop funding those roads (e.g. so they devolve to dirt or gravel) and what happens to the cost-effectiveness of those electrical coops? Maintenance and repair gets pricier b/c it becomes harder to get where you need to get...and depending on how crappy we're letting our roads get in this thought experiment we're maybe having a much harder time getting the generating and related equipment to where it needs to be in the first place. Moving on a bit, when you dig into things like that universal service fund it's IMHO a mistake to take it at face value. The first issue is assuming the surcharge is the only form of subsidization; this isn't generally true. It's quite common for e.g. telecom utilities to charge roughly uniform rates over surprisingly wide geographic areas, with surprisingly wide operating costs "under the hood". There are a lot of reasons behind this pricing uniformity, but regardless of why it exists it's effectively a second layer of (hidden) subsidization (b/c the residents of lower-cost-of-service areas are effectively contributing funding to the residents in higher-cost-of-service). There are enough reasons for this uniformity it's hard to imagine it disappearing...but it's still important to be aware of b/c otherwise you assume that that subsidy is sufficient to cover the true cost-of-service differential. A second issue is mis-understanding the incidence. Let's use pretend #s to make it easy: everyone's bill looks like $localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge (so the subsidy is collected from everyone and then redistributed as-needed). We'll use that $7 billion / year figure as the total subsidy collected, and as a nice round # assume 350 million people paying, so basically everyone in the country's throwing a $20 into a big pot to keep everyone else's phones working. So far so good. But now let's kill the subsidy, what happens? First, everyone's bill goes from "$localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge" to just "$localBase", since now we're no longer kicking in that $20. Keeping all assumptions simplistic, we will go with 60% of the country (just under that 2/3 living near the borders) were already paying full-freight on their base rate, and thus they're now $20 richer with no direct ill-effects. The remaining 40%, however, were paying a base rate that fell $7 billion short of what it needed to be--whence the subsidy we just threw out--and thus now it's up to ~140 million people to scrounge up that $7 billion shortfall. This isn't the end of the world--they're just going from "$localBase + $20" to "$localBase + $50 (== $realLocalBase)"--but it'd a big increase (their original contribution, that much again, and then a bit more). In this case I had to slant the #s pretty aggressively and for this specific subsidy the reality of the situation is more modest...but I worked through it b/c it illustrates the fundamental logic of such subsidies: you have a lot of people paying a little bit to save a smaller group of people from a large expense. Such arrangements are not, IMHO, intrinsically questionable...but it's definitely a bit questionable to conflate aggregate costs ($7 billion, cheap!) with the implicit per-capita benefit received (with my BS #s it's a net $30/head for the recipients). Having said all this I feel the need to point out that farmers proper are usually much more realistic; it's more the farming-adjacent (e.g. those who live in "rural" areas) who tend to think of roads as (literally) one way "food to town" transports and so on.
- hiram112 10y ago
  I agree with you. I constantly hear (especially during election season) about how the blue coastal states are basically 'subsidizing' the idiots from fly over country - some statistics about tax payments and farm subsidies tossed out to make the case. In reality, the situation is reversed. The US largest export, by FAR, is agriculture and meat, almost none of which comes from the coasts. If you want to count GDP, do you really think that the trillions of dollars of bank profits from lower Manhattan are really as important to the economy of the US as the trillions of dollars of corn, soy beans, wheat, beef, pork, etc that's produced in the Midwest? The former is just redistribution of wealth, the latter is actually traded to other countries. How bout all that energy produced in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas? Do you think the US would miss it more than they'd miss the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in DC on mostly dubious military spending or on the thousands of silicon valley companies finding creative ways to serve tracking ads? In reality, if the red states and blue states separated from each other, you'd have one nation with massive real exportable wealth divided by a small population, and another nation with mostly printed and worthless dollars backed by non exportable services, divided by a huge amount of people and their unfunded entitlements.
  - saycheese 10y ago
    Less than 1% of the GDP if you're being generous: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... What am I missing?
xherberta 10y ago
Because unskilled workers (and their children) fare better when uprooted and transplanted into cities??? Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs, so subsidies have already largely depopulated fly-over country. Are you thinking that these rural folk are getting more than their share of federal services? I don't see how... Interstates have to be maintained anyway, and schools are mostly funded locally. Are you worried about the cost of keeping all those small post offices open?
- mapt 10y ago
  Basically, yes they do. if you build the housing that the market demands, as happens in most cities on Earth, people tend to move there voluntarily. But we haven't. We've pretended that these urban engines of economic growth and fiscal productivity are simply an area of private real estate investments or money trees for state and federal governments to pluck to feed the less privileged. We've surrendered this massive amenity (the ability to move the jobless to places that can give them jobs) due to quirks of our electoral politics, quirks of our property law, quirks of our economy, and quirks of our welfare system. Instead we've propped up jobs and rural communities with massive subsidization, and watched as the very best that our economy can offer prices itself out of existence. The Bay Area is only the most extreme example of this; It can cost 20x as much to house someone there, as to house them in Topeka. This is a massive productivity & economic growth success story that we are holding back because we're choking off housing and driving up prices, preventing the population of Topeka from moving there. The concept of natural limitations ("The peninsula is only so big!") is absolute bullshit, because the population density is drastically lower than many far more economically marginal places have achieved. For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits.
  - saycheese 10y ago
    >> "For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits." Interesting, please explain or provide a link to an explanation.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

madengr 10y ago

Subsidize? Maybe those vastly unpopulated areas of the country ought to stop feeding those 100 miles from the coast.

dao- 10y ago
Automation is a thing, fewer and fewer people work in farming, and those who do spend less and less time doing manual labor. I'd rather support this trend and work towards full automation and remote control.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
trashtoss 10y ago
It is subsidization, on too many fronts to name. If anything it has been too effective because it is quite invisible and taken for granted by the recipients, which then allows them to see their own life narratives as stories of succeeding in the market economy due to hard, honest work. The work may indeed be hard and honest, but it only succeeds at the costs and prices it succeeds at due to vast subsidies, which again are taken for granted (if even seen as such--or seen at all). The worst part is that even with this heavy subsidization the cost difficulties of modern infrastructure under sparse settlement leave non-urban residents feeling shortchanged despite the disproportionate spending they receive. Here's how that usually goes: basic infrastructure (roads, power, water, communications) has costs that scale roughly linearly in terms of how much you build: your build and maintenance cost are roughly proportionate to how many miles of road or miles of pipe or miles of wire, and so on. Thus as you have a population that is more widely spaced-out your effective per capita infrastructure costs go up: you have more road per person and more wires per person just to deliver the same level of capability. You often wind up, then, needing as much as 5x or more the per capita budget in a sparsely populated area to build and maintain infrastructure at a comparable level to a denser area (whether this is done or not is about administrative competence but that is a separate issue from the cost themselves). At a state level, however, it is hard to have wildly disproportionate per capita spending: you can maybe get away with spending 2-3x per capita on infrastructure in non-urban areas versus urban areas, but not 5-10x. But this spending-effectiveness discrepancy means that even with heavy subsidization--eg non-urban areas effectively getting 2-3x the infrastructure spend of the urban ones on a per capita basis--the spending outcomes will likely be better in the urban area because the cost efficiency is that much higher. This thus leaves the non-urban areas feeling neglected--the infrastructure isn't as well maintained etc--even though they are in fact already given disproportionate resources...they just aren't given resources that are disproportionate-enough! Ironically the "decaying small town" is the best proof of this effect: you go from comparatively well-maintained state highway to a city of 10-20k with crumbling streets and broken street lamps, etc., back to well-maintained state highway...because the state highway is subsidized by the entire state (and often federal funds), but that small town is on its own fundingwise, and reveals what the surrounding area can actually afford, sans subsidization from outside money.
- msandford 10y ago
  The modern infrastructure that you're talking about, is that phone and electricity and water and sewer? Because most of the small town inhabitants pay for that themselves, or get small subsidies through federal programs. For example, the "much" higher cost of bringing phones to rural areas is a surcharge on your phone bill. In 2014 it was about $7 billion. That's a lot, but a complete joke compared to the federal budget. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Service_Fund Rural electricity is often run by co-op because the big power company doesn't think it's worth spending the money to string the power lines to everyone. So those folks are literally doing it themselves. And they pay for it in their power prices. http://www.electric.coop/our-mission/powering-america/ http://www.electric.coop/our-mission/powering-america/ Rural water and sewer often doesn't exist again because the houses are too far apart for it to make financial sense to run the pipes. So people have wells and septic systems. That they pay to have installed and maintained out of their own pockets. You can argue all you want about the road subsidy for state run roads and I'm sympathetic to it, to a point. But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities. You might be able to make do with less rural roads, but certainly not none. I suppose you could argue that trains are all that's really needed (private investment) and that farmers can make and maintain their own gravel roads. But now we're just talking about funding the road maintenance in a different way, through higher food prices instead of taxes. But for that to really work, everyone in every city would have to be willing to forego fresh vegetables and all collectively be OK with the corresponding health outcomes that would result.
  - trashtoss 10y ago
    The point I tried--and failed!--to make is that in general the recipients of these subsidies have very simplistic and one-sided views of them (if they even see them as subsidies). I'll pick on this statement of yours: > But eventually all/most/some of those roads do in fact have to exist to get the food from the countryside into the cities. ...it's not wrong, but it's incomplete: you forget as well that for modern farming, you also need all/most/some of those roads to get tractors/fertilizer/pesticide to those farms so they can actually have surplus food to bring to the city to sell (and presumably the farmers would like clothes, housewares, televisions, and so on...). Sure, at an aggregate level the numbers wind up the same--you save some on roads but fresh produce has a higher sticker price--but it's grating that the recipients of said subsidy consistently take such a one-sided view of the implicit transaction. Sticking to just the roads, it's also very partial-equilibrium: stop funding those roads (e.g. so they devolve to dirt or gravel) and what happens to the cost-effectiveness of those electrical coops? Maintenance and repair gets pricier b/c it becomes harder to get where you need to get...and depending on how crappy we're letting our roads get in this thought experiment we're maybe having a much harder time getting the generating and related equipment to where it needs to be in the first place. Moving on a bit, when you dig into things like that universal service fund it's IMHO a mistake to take it at face value. The first issue is assuming the surcharge is the only form of subsidization; this isn't generally true. It's quite common for e.g. telecom utilities to charge roughly uniform rates over surprisingly wide geographic areas, with surprisingly wide operating costs "under the hood". There are a lot of reasons behind this pricing uniformity, but regardless of why it exists it's effectively a second layer of (hidden) subsidization (b/c the residents of lower-cost-of-service areas are effectively contributing funding to the residents in higher-cost-of-service). There are enough reasons for this uniformity it's hard to imagine it disappearing...but it's still important to be aware of b/c otherwise you assume that that subsidy is sufficient to cover the true cost-of-service differential. A second issue is mis-understanding the incidence. Let's use pretend #s to make it easy: everyone's bill looks like $localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge (so the subsidy is collected from everyone and then redistributed as-needed). We'll use that $7 billion / year figure as the total subsidy collected, and as a nice round # assume 350 million people paying, so basically everyone in the country's throwing a $20 into a big pot to keep everyone else's phones working. So far so good. But now let's kill the subsidy, what happens? First, everyone's bill goes from "$localBase + $nationalSubsidySurcharge" to just "$localBase", since now we're no longer kicking in that $20. Keeping all assumptions simplistic, we will go with 60% of the country (just under that 2/3 living near the borders) were already paying full-freight on their base rate, and thus they're now $20 richer with no direct ill-effects. The remaining 40%, however, were paying a base rate that fell $7 billion short of what it needed to be--whence the subsidy we just threw out--and thus now it's up to ~140 million people to scrounge up that $7 billion shortfall. This isn't the end of the world--they're just going from "$localBase + $20" to "$localBase + $50 (== $realLocalBase)"--but it'd a big increase (their original contribution, that much again, and then a bit more). In this case I had to slant the #s pretty aggressively and for this specific subsidy the reality of the situation is more modest...but I worked through it b/c it illustrates the fundamental logic of such subsidies: you have a lot of people paying a little bit to save a smaller group of people from a large expense. Such arrangements are not, IMHO, intrinsically questionable...but it's definitely a bit questionable to conflate aggregate costs ($7 billion, cheap!) with the implicit per-capita benefit received (with my BS #s it's a net $30/head for the recipients). Having said all this I feel the need to point out that farmers proper are usually much more realistic; it's more the farming-adjacent (e.g. those who live in "rural" areas) who tend to think of roads as (literally) one way "food to town" transports and so on.
hiram112 10y ago
I agree with you. I constantly hear (especially during election season) about how the blue coastal states are basically 'subsidizing' the idiots from fly over country - some statistics about tax payments and farm subsidies tossed out to make the case. In reality, the situation is reversed. The US largest export, by FAR, is agriculture and meat, almost none of which comes from the coasts. If you want to count GDP, do you really think that the trillions of dollars of bank profits from lower Manhattan are really as important to the economy of the US as the trillions of dollars of corn, soy beans, wheat, beef, pork, etc that's produced in the Midwest? The former is just redistribution of wealth, the latter is actually traded to other countries. How bout all that energy produced in Oklahoma, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, West Virginia, and Texas? Do you think the US would miss it more than they'd miss the hundreds of billions of dollars spent in DC on mostly dubious military spending or on the thousands of silicon valley companies finding creative ways to serve tracking ads? In reality, if the red states and blue states separated from each other, you'd have one nation with massive real exportable wealth divided by a small population, and another nation with mostly printed and worthless dollars backed by non exportable services, divided by a huge amount of people and their unfunded entitlements.
- saycheese 10y ago
  Less than 1% of the GDP if you're being generous: https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistics-charting-the-essentials/ag-and-food-sectors-and-the-economy.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/data-products/ag-and-food-statistic... What am I missing?

xherberta 10y ago

Because unskilled workers (and their children) fare better when uprooted and transplanted into cities??? Farm Bill subsidies have incentivized modes of agriculture that minimize labor inputs, so subsidies have already largely depopulated fly-over country. Are you thinking that these rural folk are getting more than their share of federal services? I don't see how... Interstates have to be maintained anyway, and schools are mostly funded locally. Are you worried about the cost of keeping all those small post offices open?

mapt 10y ago
Basically, yes they do. if you build the housing that the market demands, as happens in most cities on Earth, people tend to move there voluntarily. But we haven't. We've pretended that these urban engines of economic growth and fiscal productivity are simply an area of private real estate investments or money trees for state and federal governments to pluck to feed the less privileged. We've surrendered this massive amenity (the ability to move the jobless to places that can give them jobs) due to quirks of our electoral politics, quirks of our property law, quirks of our economy, and quirks of our welfare system. Instead we've propped up jobs and rural communities with massive subsidization, and watched as the very best that our economy can offer prices itself out of existence. The Bay Area is only the most extreme example of this; It can cost 20x as much to house someone there, as to house them in Topeka. This is a massive productivity & economic growth success story that we are holding back because we're choking off housing and driving up prices, preventing the population of Topeka from moving there. The concept of natural limitations ("The peninsula is only so big!") is absolute bullshit, because the population density is drastically lower than many far more economically marginal places have achieved. For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits.
- saycheese 10y ago
  >> "For $2M in _construction costs_ to house each family you could house the population of the entire world, 7 billion people, comfortably in a place the size of the SF city limits." Interesting, please explain or provide a link to an explanation.