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It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
by kortilla 2y ago
It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
- eschaton 2y ago> not sustainable on its own Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.
- kortilla 2y agoYes, that’s the argument for all subsidized things.
- Barrin92 2y ago>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices. Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.
- immibis 2y agoThe far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.
- okr 2y agoOh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.
- nerdbert 2y ago> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper. Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness. Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please. Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars. What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.
- okr 2y agoThe thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way. Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done. I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y ago> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. More or less all non-toll roads (and a few toll roads too). Which makes "applies" seems a bit pointless.
- kortilla 2y agoI don’t think you know what the word “applies” means.
- PaulDavisThe1st 2y agoIf I tell you that the air is clear, and you respond "That applies to all air on earth", you've provided no additional information. If I tell you that humans are generally between zero and 120 years of age, and you respond "That applies to most humans", you've provided no additional information. If I tell you "most comments on HN are well-written and thoughtfully constructed" and you respond "That doesn't apply to yours", you've provided some additional information.
- ClumsyPilot 2y ago> the program is not sustainable on its own So arrest, investigation prosecution and imprisonment of anyone who steals from Amazon is a massive subsidy, since Amazon pays no tax.
- reshlo 2y agoNot to mention the money spent on funding food stamps for Amazon’s underpaid employees.
- immibis 2y agoYes. The government massively subsidises owning physical property.
- kortilla 2y agoAmazon collects sales tax and most certainly pays property taxes that fund the law enforcement you are talking about.
- klipt 2y agoMost of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations. You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.
- Sabinus 2y agoI read about train infrastructure development that was privately funded and built from the profits from land speculation near the new stations.
- smcl 2y ago> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?
- nerdbert 2y ago> why is rail treated so differently? Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on. Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources. On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
- zdragnar 2y agoThere's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer. These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.
- pfdietz 2y agoAnd all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.
- drawkward 2y agoThs US military is not sustainable on its own... Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.