Tag Archives: socialism

Thinking Out Loud about Measure RTM

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I have lived in a city where public transport was as ubiquitous and as thoughtless as it gets. People owned cars in that city only so they could travel beyond the umbrella of the transport. The bus, the metro, the tram, just part of daily life. Millions of people moved every day at minimal cost.

I now live in a region with transport that aspires to that goal but has absolutely fallen short. Understandably; this is California. The car rules. But I do take the bus to work sometimes, and there are trains to take me farther if I ever had a reason to. The tech companies also have private mass transit.

Apparently BART and CalTrain have never recovered from COVID, and are going to have to seriously cut services without a bailout. I am about to vote on that.

Top line: people should not be required to have a car to have a job. Beyond that, it is cheaper for everyone if there is healthy public transit. Gas prices and time wasted in traffic are the most measurable costs of loss of public transport, but there is also air quality and insurance costs and road repairs (somehow the cost of adding lanes to freeways doesn’t come up in these conversations). Public Transport saves everyone money. Public transport could be completely free, no cost to riders at all, and it would still save everyone money.

Importantly, the tech companies have their own transport systems because current services are inadequate, but many, many well-compensated people ride from towns fifty miles distant, rather than drive. They moved there precisely because there was a BART station. Transit is not only for the poor; it benefits all.

So RTM is almost a no-brainer, except for one thing: it’s funded with a sales tax, the most regressive tax we have. The aforementioned poor will be paying a larger share of their income to keep things alive, subsidizing the wealthier riders. That’s backwards!

Were I King of the Bay Area, I would be adding trains and busses to existing routes and not adding any more lane-miles to the freeways. Those are expensive! I’d focus transit improvements on places where traffic jams occur every day. There are plenty to choose from. And I’d make transit completely free, always, to everyone.

How to pay for it? The obvious target is gasoline, but you can’t just charge every vehicle. The gasoline tax would ideally apply only to commuters who chose to drive, rather than use transport. But when framed that way, the answer is pretty simple: vehicles certified as work trucks for a particular purpose are exempted from the tax at the pump*. José’s landscaping truck does not pay the tax, Karen’s death mobile she parks in two spaces at work pays.

Leave the roads for the people who actually need the roads to move goods and get their tools to a jobsite. Public transport is for the rest of us.

* \* Bureaucratic Nightmare!” people shout. This is the mantra of the corrupt, who don’t want oversight. Work-truck certification would be simple, gas pumps already read cards, and there would be fraud but it would be small next to the net benefit.

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Thanks!

Bernie and Socialism and how to Pay for that Stuff

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First off, let me say I’m glad Bernie is running for president. Even if he doesn’t win the nomination, it gives the grownups a chance to talk about substantive issues and debate what economic path the US could pursue if it wasn’t being run by crooks and about to be overrun by crazies.

Bernie likes to talk about the ideal socialism, which is, more or less, everybody in a group making sure that everyone else in the group is taken care of. Families do it all the time. It’s not inherently a bad thing. But it’s expensive from a traditional government-does-it point of view, and we have to figure out how to pay for it.

Also, Everybody Knows™* that Socialism enables lazy people. More on that another day. Bernie’s supporters point to reasonably successful socialist governments over in Europe and say that it could be that way here, too. After all, they seem to be able to afford it. What’s the difference?

There’s something no one mentions. Not even Bernie. Your tax dollars and mine are supporting those lovely socialist nations in Europe. We pay for much of the defense and security of Europe, top to bottom, east to west. We took on the burden in a grandiose, “I am the king of the world!” period at the end of World War Two. And we did a damn good job of it, too. When was the last time Europe went seventy years without a major war? Never, that’s when. Seriously. Never.

Mission accomplished. You’re welcome, Europe!

But now as the economies of Europe become ever more integrated, maybe the mission isn’t the same as it was. Maybe those happy prosperous nations can pay for their own defense. Maybe we can turn some of that military money to achieving our own paradise. The simple fact is that we already help fund prosperous socialist countries. They’re just not this country.

I propose a fundamental change in mission for our nation’s military. For the last seven decades we have tasked ourselves with maintaining world peace, and we’ve done a pretty damn good job, overall. There are exceptions, but remember: seventy years with no major war in Europe. Boo-yah! High-five, all you who have served. But it’s time to let Europe and Japan look after themselves. It’s time stop subsidizing Toyota and Hyundai and Mercedes-Benz by lifting a load off their governments’ obligations. The money they don’t spend on tanks is money they spend on day care and gaining an advantage in the marketplace.

So we stop paying (as much) for their security. We take the money we save on tanks and airplanes, and spend it on day care, and health care, and veterans’ benefits. We have the money to put everyone through college. We can get homeless servicemen, the ones who achieved this incredible period of peace, and find shelter and medical care for them. The United States is wealthy enough to give everyone health care. It’s just that right now we spend the money on other stuff. On an obsolete military mandate.

But Bernie, EVEN BERNIE, can’t bring himself to suggest this out loud. He can’t even suggest that we might cut our losses on terrible weapon systems whose only mission is to cost money. (Watch this space for a special feature on the F-35 ‘Flying Turd’.)

And that’s why I have a hard time contemplating voting for Bernie. If he was really who he says he is, he’d have the balls to take on the completely corrupt defense procurement machine. If we only paid for the weapons that worked, we could cut our budget by hundreds of billions. HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS! And our military will still be just as mighty, because it would be using functional equipment! And Bernie should have the huevos to suggest that maybe Japan could pay for its own army. But he doesn’t. And until I find a candidate who has that resolve, I can’t take any of the other social reform promises seriously. Because until we stop spending so much on defending other countries, and we stop pouring money into flawed weapons, we simply can’t afford the other stuff, much as I wish we could.
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* Many of the things that Everyone Knows are in fact false.

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Thanks!