this post was submitted on 08 Aug 2023
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That's not really how that works.
When it comes to public transportation, they rarely pull a profit on their own. What they do is drive the economy in the places they go, make a city more accessible to everyone (further driving the economy), and cut costs for the city in other places. They're a loss leader to save money and improve quality of life in a multitude of other areas by huge margins.
Everything is profitable if you raise prices. In a way you're just offsetting a certain segment of the populations transportation costs to everyone else under that system. Maybe you could privatize the roads too and use the tolls to fund more buses which operate at a profit. Its fun think of insane libertarian free marker solutions to such problems :) Cars might be less appealing if people had to pay the associated infrastructure costs on a per km basis.
The US government subsidizes farmers by a huge amount because for every dollar they spend they get a dollar and some change back in value. This happens all across different sectors and is beneficial for everyone involved. The farmers get a new pond for free and everyone else in the US gets a reliable, cheap supply of food. It's a win/win.
Public transport is the same way. It needs to be cheap so everyone can afford it, otherwise you leave huge swaths of the population without access to their basic needs, or you cut their already short supply of money even shorter. There's a reason progressive tax rates are ubiquitous across the world. By supporting public transport, you send people to places they produce value or spend money, increasing taxes earned across the board, while simultaneously reducing the cost of maintaining the roads because there's significantly less wear and tear. It's also CHEAPER to use public teansport. Cars are goddamn expensive! Repairs, insurance, the cost of it in the first place! A ride on the bus is like $2. You'd have to TRY to ride it enough to make it more expensive.
I digress. The point is that you indirectly get more out of it than you pay into it.
We're at a point (and have been for a few decades) that just taxing cars isn't going to fix the problem. We've demolished cities to replace them with vehicle infrastructure. If you tax cars without fixing the walkability, all you've done is make people pay more in taxes. You have to have the infrastructure before you can incentivize using it.
The reasons for farm subsidies are.. Debatable. If you keep food cheap people don't notice currency debasement as much. Personally I think it might make more sense for prices to rise to a point where farmers are profitable without subsidies. Those subsidies are value extracted from the tax payer anyway.. You're paying for it.
You're right too in that buses and trains are a lot cheaper and should always out compete cars. How much do you think fares would have to rise to make public transport self sufficient ? Make it so it funds its own expansion and service improvement.
The Toronto Transport Commission is my local example. From what I can napkin math they get about 1 billion dollars in subsidies per year from the city (maybe some provincial and fed money too.. I rounded up generously). They collect a little over 700k fares a day. Wouldn't take much of an increase with like almost 250 million fares a year to close that gap.
Privatize the roads and have cars users pay their share of that infrastructure cost and get the burden off of working people and I bet a small share increase would be pretty affordable.
The farm subsidies are to ensure enough farms are profitable enough to have an excess in the event we lose a ton of farmland or crop. If something happened we would not bounce back fast enough if we did not have excess, and excess would not happen if the free market pushed prices so high or low that the change in demand caused people to stop farming.
On the subject of bus fares, it's not that simple. If bus fares increase, some people will stop riding the bus and switch to cars or other forms of transport (or not go at all) which will likely reduce fares and possibly increase congestion which would slow down the busses which would cause less people to ride them which would...
I'm not saying that's exactly what would happen, I'm just saying you have to be careful. People only ride the bus when it's more affordable or more convenient
Ideally taxes are progressive, whereas food price increases are always regressive. That is to say that taxes affect the rich more, and food prices affect the poor more.