Beyond intercity travel, good roads are necessary so that crops can be transported to grain elevators without waste due to otherwise bumpy and unmaintained thoroughfares. Likewise for the rail system network that delivers the products to the shipping terminals and processing mills from the grain elevators.
The USSR could not feed its population because the communist managers did not see the importance of good roads and did not allocate funds to keep them efficient arteries for the transport of goods.
I mentioned far more than roads.
I am not going to cite a claim that no one has made. No one has said that rural areas use city taxes. That’s not a thing.
Cites that have shown that rural areas receive more from state and federal subsidies than they pay in taxes, and that cities pay more in taxes than they receive from state and federal services have been given, repeatedly.
I don’t care about Texas. If you care about it, then do your own research.
Once again, not my job to hold your hand and spoon feed you and try to convince you to pay attention. At some point, you need to expend a modicum of effort on your own.
So many people are ignorant of what work is involved with providing sustenance to the country. People are needed to:
- drive the vehicles and machinery
- repair the vehicles and machinery
- handpick certain food crops
- tend the animals
- slaughter the animals
- provide living quarters for the people
- provide manufactured items for sale to the people
- Sustain the peoples need for medical care, schooling, and spiritual care.
- develop and sale the land to urban folks that decide to leave the rat race!
- provide temporary housing for @k9bfriender when he is willing to go see what goes on in rural areas before making additional judgements.
- to name but a few.
I will not respond to anything else that @k9bfriender posts for obvious reasons.
And all of that can be done with mega corporations, needing only a small fraction of the people currently living out there. Along with migrant workers to come through when there is demand for labor.
What we do not need are people living in little towns complaining that the local factory closed and moved overseas while they collect unemployment and welfare. We don’t need people turning to drugs because they have nothing else to do. We don’t need people complaining about how hard it is to make ends meet and that they are going to lose their farm unless they get another handout from the government. We don’t need people to provide services and education and medical services for all these people that we don’t need.
The reasons are obvious, yes. That you have no argument. Just analogies about cannibalism and assertions of what others know. No actual argument, no cites, just assertions and nearly as much straw as the areas that you so value.
The rural areas are subsidized by the urban areas, and they are done so at the expense of those areas, for the benefit of those living there. The urban areas get a warm fuzzy feeling knowing that they are helping these people to live their simple happy lifestyle.
But, it is the ruralites who are now upset with this arrangement, and if they don’t like it, if they don’t think that they are being subsidized enough, then we can come to a new one.