And rural areas subsidize cities calorically. You can't eat money. And all the money is useless if you can't buy anything. Cities are great at churning throug

And rural areas subsidize cities calorically. You can't eat money. And all the money is useless if you can't buy anything. Cities are great at churning through money in services but they don't actually produce most of the things that they use. So yeah if you look just at dollars, cities produce more. But they would fail utterly without the rural areas, I don't think cities give enough credit to that. Strong towns is very myopic in what they focus on. They are not considering the second order of effects of things like reducing the scale of the interstate system.