Originally Posted by
Mobile 155
TP
We vote every time we spend our money. We open our wallet and buy a car. I do not agree transportation projects fund cars. And all you have to do to prove your contentions is get people to vote for them.
I am am willing to wager you lose every vote. It s you not me that wants to cut peoples pay and it is your idea that you have to sell. I don’t have to convince people of anything and as I said I am willing to let them make their own decisions. You not I want to control other people’s lives.
Everything funds cars as long as the price of a car and driving expenses are built into the wages paid.
Think about it this way: how much more would you have to pay employees for everyone to buy a Tesla or Mercedes or other expensive car instead of a Ford or Hyundai or whatever basic level car they buy? Hopefully you realize that employers don't want to pay all their employees at that level. Now think about how much less you could pay employees if they only took transit and/or rode bicycles and didn't even buy the basic Ford or Hyundai.
Hopefully that example makes it clear that every salary has a certain level of transportation costs built into it. Sure, people have some freedom to spend a little more on one thing by spending less on another; e.g. you could spend more on rent, food, travel, etc. by not having a car, which is what I advocate here sometimes; or you could buy a Tesla and live in a tent if you wanted to take your freedom in that direction; but the bottom line is that we all have budgets to work with and LCF makes more of your budget available for expenses other than driving; and likewise a business spending less on an employee because they LCF means the business can charge less in its prices, if that's how it chooses to spend its savings.
If you take this budgeting logic to the level of the overall economy, we are budgeting more on highway and road infrastructure than we need to because so many people drive. If a fraction of current drivers drove and used transit instead, congestion would go down and less lanes and parking lots would be needed. Reducing those infrastructure expenses would lower taxes, which corporations could pass on in the form of lower prices and rents. Likewise, if a smaller percentage of people drove, they could afford to work for less without giving up anything else in their budget, so that would also reduce costs for their employers, which could be passed on as lower prices, rents, etc.
The people who would lose out are auto makers, auto workers, and others who specifically make money in automotive-oriented businesses. Those people would have to look for other ways to make money. I believe you are on the side of such people, and that is why you always argue against anything I say about less cars being better.
And when all is said and done America has given up on mass transit in general. As the link I posted pointed out if you took the time to read it. About 5 out if 100 choose mass transit over all.
Only because the culture has been steered that way through the decades. When Rosa Parks refused to go to the back of the bus, the bus was full of people to sit next to.
And yes yes I think many of your ideas are almost evil. The ones restricting what people make to your standards bother me the most. Not that there is a chance in the world your contentions will come to anything.
Everyone is already restricted in what they make, simply because they could be making more but aren't. That's economics. If everyone could make unlimited amounts of money, money would lose its ability to regulate commerce. Money and budgeting are two sides of the same coin.
It's not evil to see that the value of money is relative to how the economy works. If the total overhead of an economy is less because of more efficient transportation/infrastructure spending across the board, that makes everyone's dollars worth more, i.e. because prices are lower for the same quality products. E.g. if you can buy a nice meal for $20 instead of $30 because the restaurant pays less for rent, less to workers, etc. then it's not bad to make less money. Then you say it bothers you the workers make less, but if what they can buy with their money is not less, then they aren't really making less in real dollars; the dollars they make are just deflated instead of being inflated by the widespread costs of transportation/infrastructure in an automotive economy.
I really think the bottom line is you are just afraid of losing the privilege of everyone having and driving their own car. You don't care that there are 6+ lane highways and clover-leafs and other over/under passes that waste land and create sprawl. You think it's good to keep the people you don't want to live near far away by having large amounts of sprawl between neighborhoods. These are all things that you value and so you consider it worth the extra cost to budget driving and infrastructure into everything. To me it is bad for the environment/sustainability, a waste of land, too much to pay for what amounts to walls throughout society, and it alienates people from the inherent human ability to use human power to traverse one's local realm.
It amazes me that you have spent so much time on a car-free forum arguing against LCF. It's like we've never been able to have an LCF forum because you and people like you keep making this forum into a debate against LCF.