With the reduction in car journeys, I wonder how much it reduces road maintenance costs and frees up budget for increasing road capacity to be spent elsewhere in the region.
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I’ve recently discovered that tax money is not actually used to fund government spending.
You might find this interesting:
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That link doesn’t quite work correctly, you’ll have to click on the 8th box yourself (“Doesn’t the federal government need to collect taxes before it can invest for public purpose?”)
a kind of nihilistic “in the long term we’re all dead” macroeconomics might not really be a good idea – that sort of thinking got us the climate catastrophe, after all – but progressives are sure as hell tired of “fiscal responsibility” only being expected of one side
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Honestly, I’ve tried to understand MMT and I can’t.
Given I’m pre-disposed to support it, my immediately response is to poke as many holes into it as I can. In trying to answer some of the questions I posed to myself, I unfortunately came across this article by Scott Sumner that just asked too many questions for which I could not find answers that worked for me.
Given that I don’t have the tools to decently evaluate the arguments (I’m not an economist by any stretch of the imagination - I’m out of there as soon as the models include differential equations), I’ll defer to the expert consensus, which is my default option about fields that I know very little about.
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Simplified, it’s pretty straightforward. First take the traditional view we all learned in school: the government raises tax revenues from citizens and applies the funds to various programmes and projects. MMT says that the government, as the sole issuer/“printer” of money, can start with the spending and inject as much money into the economy as it needs to cover the programmes and projects (if inflation threatens, the government withdraws money from the economy via taxes and/or issuing bonds).
It’s much more complex in the details, of course, and it’s controversial, but that’s the idea in a nutshell.
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True, but at that level, all I’m doing is choosing between narratives, one of which I would prefer to be true.
If I’m actually trying to determine whether MMT is true (for a fairly shaky value of determine), then I need to understand the actual math behind it. Given I can barely handle the math behind standard economics, and my difficulty in finding and then understanding the math behind MMT, I really don’t have the tools to even evaluate it or answer the questions posed by the article I cited.
While I don’t care for the conflation of modelling economic systems with prescriptive policies that some economists are prone to, conventional economics has shown fairly reasonable predictive power.
I need a pretty high bar for me to personally eschew conventional physics or chemistry theories for non-mainstream ones. For economics, my bar might be higher because I recognize my tendency towards motivated reasoning in such an area.
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No one really understands macro economics. The system is too big and full of tipping points and odd reversals and too many variables to pull out. The best we can do is try to manage it, and we’ve made a lot of progress in that area. MMT is basically an admission that, since we don’t know exactly what effect various money policies have, we might as well pretend we have infinite money to spend on whatever we want, and see if that works better than trying to keep the books in line.
I don’t think MMT is fully valid, but just stopping the GOP’s austerity-for-you-profligation-for-us policy we’ve been following for 50 years would help more than anything else.
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Our nation’s capital (Washington DC) also has free buses. There are 5 “circulator” routes that are free. Kansas City has a free rail line too.
The boys when he got it last year and the year before was good for the summer as well.
Also not only does Seattle have a lot of hills the snow tends to be a layer of ice covered by snow. It doesn’t take much of a hill to make that dangerous.
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You’re leaving out a couple very important things. I’ll assume it’s out of carelessness or ignorance rather than malice.
Without “handouts” - as if we’re all fucking beggars for wanting our taxes to benefit us - we don’t have a middle class. We have a few rich pieces of guillotine-bait and a bunch of proles. In this country the New Deal and the Great Compression created and maintained the middle class. Eliminating them, which we have been doing steadily for the last half century, has gotten rid of the middle class.
The other important one is that it’s not a tradeoff between helping the poor and helping the middle class. It’s between giving everything to the hereditary oligarch class - which is what we are doing - and making the system work for everyone. Shoveling money into the mouths of the wealthy in the hope that they’ll leave us a few crumbs hasn’t worked for anyone except the ruling class. By pretending that’s not what we’re doing you are setting up a fight between the victims of the system to distract them from the real problems.
Remember that famous joke about the boss, the worker and the immigrant/poor person/Black person/etc? There are ten cookies at the table. The boss takes nine of them turns to the worker, points at the other guy and says “He’s trying to steal your cookie!”
That’s what you’re implying.
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when your whole brand is being against the future, the more time passes, the more awful you look
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I’m sure the free buses have helped boost patronage - but I’m also pretty sure this has had an effect:
Dunkirk in northern France launched a revamped bus system last year …
The network connects Dunkirk to a cluster of neighbouring towns, with five express lines running [every ten minutes](http://www.dkbus.com/ftp/documents/Plan-verso-2020-BAT1.pdf) throughout the day, and a dozen other lines serving less dense areas. Altogether, it serves some 200,000 residents.
For some young people, the reliable bus service means they may not need to start driving at all. “My cousin started taking lessons to get her driver’s license, she failed, and she dropped it because she found a job and the bus takes her straight there from her house,” said Laure, another passenger.“
Reliable, frequent services that take people where they want to go. This isn’t rocket science for transport planners who have long understood it - but it seems to be very difficult for politicians who need to pay for services “but that meandering bus that runs every 43 minutes is always empty, why would we pay more for buses to run?”
There’s also another important point in here:
Expanding free public transport to the level of a major city like Paris poses a completely different set of challenges, says Huré. Before the network was revamped in Dunkirk, buses were often almost empty – a problem common to many small and medium-sized cities. Major metropolises tend to face the opposite problem: a public transport system that is saturated, especially at peak hours.
Which is exactly what Melbourne did when it introduced a “free tram zone” in the CBD. Busy trams got even busier, meanwhile that sweet sweet revenue that CBD trams generated to help cross-subsidise the less busy public transport in the suburbs got reduced…
I’m not against free public transport in cities with low patronage where fare revenue is quite low - but for busy cities, fare revenue does usually make up a fairly decent chunk of the operating costs (25-40% is pretty common in major western cities) - and if those services are already busy… making them free doesn’t help.
Putting on more services helps. Having bus lines that are rationale, easy to understand and are relatively direct along major arterial roads helps. Having a fare system and stop locations where it’s easy to get off a bus/tram/train and onto another bus/tram/train (without paying twice) helps… Making the whole thing free just makes it harder for the government to fund the system.
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What percentage of those budgets are for policing fare evasion, maintaining and installing fare-taking equipment, printing tickets or card systems, advertising fee schedules, etc.?
Fare-taking generally covers fare-taking jobs and infrastructure, just as toll roads generally support the operators of toll booths.
Except that it would eliminate a lot of costly and unnecessary friction, in a way that reduces stupid traffic on the road.
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Munich has been playing with doing this as well. The main holdup is that the subway lines are already running at capacity, and making the rides free would potentially cause chaos, according to the experts. So instead, they are making it more and more likely that every registered resident will get a ticket, so that tourists and out of towners will still be required to pony up. Really, the main problem Munich has is that it’s been almost too successful in getting people to use public transportation, though the Middle Ring is still a nightmare of congestion. Mostly because it’s the main artery for so many working at the main BMW works, or making deliveries, or simple commercial traffic.
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In a recent election here one of the candidates wanted to make the public transit free and I really loved the idea (even though, sadly, he did not win). Especially since Salt Lake City has a lot of issues with air quality and pollution (sometimes it’s bad enough to reduce visibility!) and they beg us to use public transit, but I feel like they could be doing more to entice greater ridership than simply noting that it’s a bad air day on social media and suggesting more people ride the bus.
I think in addition to all the obvious benefits it’d also just be nice to make it so there’s no barrier at all to people who find public transit weird or scary or disgusting - if it’s free, and everyone who feels less strongly than they do uses it more often, then the only thing stopping them from having their preconceptions shattered is themselves. Sure, many will continue to be that way about it but some will give it a shot just because the stars aligned and the restaurant is too far to walk and everyone else is getting on the bus or the car is in the shop or the spouse needed it or whatever and they can’t bow out by saying they don’t have any quarters on them.
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I don’t know what the numbers are in this case; but it would definitely be worth knowing what the transaction costs are of handling fare collection and the hypothetical plan to hand out means-tested free passes.
I’d hope that they aren’t nuts enough to be charging fares that don’t cover the cost of collection; but some nontrivial amount of the intake is definitely covering the collection rather than funding the system; and administration of the means-tested passes would similarly not be free.
There are also the slightly curious economics of mass transit offerings: if you don’t cover enough places at enough times you get no riders because you can’t be depended on to make useful trips; but if you run a vehicle along a given route much of the cost is fixed(slight decrease in fuel economy if mostly full; but vehicle and driver regardless of fullness.)
You reap the greatest benefits, at the lowest cost per ride, if you have enough riders to keep vehicles mostly full across a comprehensive coverage area. Less full vehicles mostly just drive up the fixed costs per trip; and we excessively empty vehicles push you into the unhelpful spiral of cutting back routed and times, which makes you useful to fewer people, which makes it harder to keep routes full enough to stay open; and so on.
None of the above necessarily means that it’s definitely a great plan; just that there are costs(potentially nontrivial) to collecting fares or ensuring that only some people ride for free; and there are advantages to greater ridership that you don’t get with transit specifically dispatched on request.
(Edit: in the vein of ‘dispatched by request’, at least some, I suspect a lot(at least in theory, wouldn’t be a total surprise if actual service is quietly allowed to suck in some cases) of public transit entities have some sort of specialist quasi-cab service; and that usually does have eligiblity requirements(example) because it does have the economics of a dispatch-on-demand service; and also because it’s deeply unlikely that they can afford to just hand out can rides on accessibility equipped vehicles at rates substantially below market to anyone who asks. Presumably these exist because they are cheaper than retrofitting the entire system to meet ADA spec or local equivalent.)
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Some people think that the solution to famine is to put dirt on all the food so they can then argue the demand for food is decreasing.
A lot of transit policies are based on discouraging use, and those policies are never going to solve bigger problems.
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Name one major city where the cost of running a ticketing system is the equivalent of even 10% of running a public transport system and I’ll eat my hat.
I mean consider this, trains, trams buses all require: drivers, huge amounts of power or fuel, stabling yards, maintenance crews, maintenance parts, station infrastructure, station staff and a bureaucracy to run the show vs. ticketing systems, some printing and a few enforcement staff.
The same is true of toll roads. Toll roads are generally roads paid for by private companies that figure they’ll get a return on their investment by recouping charges on users. Sure some toll roads don’t make money (most do…) - but that’s because the roads cost more than expected for a lower number of vehicles than expected - not because staff sitting in a toll booth earn the equivalent of the user charges!
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Melbourne (home) is a good example. The ticketing system was notoriously expensive to implement. $1.5billion for 10 years. One of the most expensive ticketing systems anywhere in the world. Absolutely a terrible investment (compared to other "of the shelf ticketing systems, not scrapping tickets).
That’s $150million a year. Add in an outrageous amount for enforcement, say $10million a year. That’s $160million.
There were approx 580million trips on PT in 2017. Even if you assume only 1/5 were discreet individuals that have paid a fare, that’s still 116million fare payers. The cheapest you can get a 2hour ticket (concession) is $2.20 - so a total of $255million revenue.
Did I already mention all these figures are wildly conservative towards the “fares don’t pay” argument?
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