Americans don't wanna walk ten minutes though lol

yeah obviously they should build the cities shitty and then later maybe consider rebuilding them good but actually do nothing because nimbys would complain

Meanwhile, I can't even walk to the exit of my hellhole suburbs in 10 minutes

Totally agree. Isn't this one of the oldest instances? It doesn't really matter when it federated - that just means it had more time to get distilled into its own special version. But this is an OG strain - whatever else this is, this is Lemmy.

Edit - and I say this as a pretty new user to the instance. I wasn't here from the beginning, this is my take as an instance-hopping reddit refugee.

Except that taxes do not fund government spending. This is a neoclassical myth that needs to die.

The US government can literally give free healthcare to everyone and solve homelessness tomorrow without having to tax for anything, or having to “cut spending elsewhere to pay for it”, because the Federal Government can create whatever amount of currency needed to fund its free healthcare project.

Taxes come later to remove the excess liquidity from the circulation. Remember, the Federal Government has to spend the dollar first before they can be taxed back.

to the grasping petit bourgeois, any need fulfilled by the state is a lost profit opportunity

At one point you could say taxation was balanced. People at the top paid more and people at the bottom got services. Almost immediately after WWII, the bourgeois started rolling back on the services. They really hit their stride in the 70s and just started gutting everything. It got worse in the 80s and the in the 90s, Democrats became just as bad as Republicans. In the 80s you also saw taxes being cut for the top despite increased spending on things that benefited the bourgeois. So the tax burden fell upon the lower class. They saw increases in taxes while seeing fewer services than ever. Plus the libertarian propaganda pumped into education didn't help. Privatization is always framed as more efficient and cheaper for the public. So the question becomes why tax me for something I'll never use and if it gets built it'll be shitty and cost too much over time?

I guess, to be more succinct, they don't view it as a benefit to the community. Just a cost to them.

I think libs are under the (false) impression that roads are both completely mandatory in society AND somehow cheaper to build and maintain than public transit. Per person moved public transit is significantly more efficient per dollar but libs just don't want to know stats when they don't agree with their worldview

Liberals love describing basic public service concepts as if they're fantastical utopian fever dreams.

Things like free public transportation, or public zero-interest banks, or public grocers.

It's usually a "well that could never work" and refusal to elaborate on why. If it doesn't presently exist in America, it must be impossible and ridiculous, especially if there's no price barrier.

"Hey we should start sanitising our wounds and setting broken bones instead of just letting them poke through the skin and smell funny."

"Then build me a hospital fucker"

Vanguard Lemmy

They weren't even talking about battery electric trains, they were talking about battery electric personal automobiles