It’s just like taxes.

Especially as the N of datasets grows.

I guess busses run on fairy dust too?

Free public transit? KILL IT WITH FIRE!!! It will never work (those places it did are aberrations)

Go look up: 1. Jevons paradox (induced demand): More road capacity → more traffic. 2. Marchetti’s constant (30-minute city): Average commute time is stable; faster modes → sprawl. 3. Downs–Thomson paradox (transit sets highway speed): Car speeds improve only if transit gets better. 4. Braess’s paradox (network effect): Adding a new road can worsen traffic for everyone.

Free roads and highways: GOOD AND NATUAL

The political class are not typically utilizers of public transit: hence even the best attempts are structurally challenged from the outset.

If that isn’t factored into your analysis, you are missing a huge reason why it sometimes fails and sometimes succeeds.

Now it is lauded as one of the highest ROI investments the US govt ever made.

If you really want to do the math: if we value all urban land equivalently, what is the subsidy provided by free parking? In NYC, it’s astronomical.

Free transit is trivial to fund if you actually care about humans being productive.

Not everyone does: harder to capture rents that way.

Science is that which, despite your opinions, exists.

Pathogens everywhere are cheering.

We are rapidly replaying the worst of the Resource Curse.

Turns out the darkest timeline is also the dumbest.

https://www.nme.com/news/back-to-the-future-writer-reveals-b...

At the bottom of the article.

Because then you won’t go to jail.

See Santos.

Literally the CIO of a $20b/year ARR company said to me: “I was gonna send my kids to school in the US. Now? Never in a million years. Even I won’t set foot there.“

You can’t win in the global economy AND nativist white supremacist politics at the same time.

Yes: they reinvested rather than pocketed revenue.

Anyway, if did the research, you’d see the effective tax rate for the top income earners in US was 40% back then. Substantially higher than it is today.

And that substantially larger portions of revenue were reinvested rather than recognized as profit: high taxes, oddly enough, incentivize investment.

Do the math yourself: $1m in profit, 30% tax rate vs 1% tax rate: which rate incentivizes you to reinvest?

It’s really worth reading the South Korean perspective on the whole fiasco:

https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/english_edit...

Billionaires are a policy choice that starves children and stunts economic growth.

Any vote that is not proactively for the major party that is the closest to your political beliefs is effectively a vote for the major party least aligned.