I am SOOOOO P.O.'ed at the people in the county I work in right now! Because our fine legislature failed to pass a transportation bill that would’ve funded our local public transportation agency said public transportation agency put funding themselves to a vote in the county that it serves the most and last I heard that proposition is failing. Routes will be reduced or cut and traffic will increase if that measure doesn’t pass. I don’t live in the county in question (although said public transportation agency actually serves three counties so I’m not sure why the vote was put to people in only the one county, unless it’s because said public transportation agency figured that their best chance of getting the measure passed was to put the vote only to the people in the county which it serves - d’oh!) so I didn’t have a vote in the matter but as of right now I am NOT happy with the situation. Sefish S.o.B.s!!!
I should pay $240 more a year for license tabs to finance a transportation system that benefits me in no way whatsoever? :dubious:
And how does heavier traffic help you?
Also increased wear & tear of the roads, higher gas prices, worse air pollution, more traffic accidents, more drunk driving…
That (the post you were replying to, not your post) is fairly typical financial shortsightedness. Few are immune to it. The majority of people prioritize immediate costs over long term costs, and there are very, very few who never make that choice.
Where do you live in the US that has noticeable public transportation anyway?
My taxes pay for a fuckload of roads I never get close to. Your point is bad and you should feel bad.
Can’t speak for the OP, but I live in NYC (Queens County). We have noticeable, frequent, around-the-clock public transportation.
At the times and routes that I commute, the buses are irrelevant. The traffic is minimal.
I’ve used the bus system maybe four times in my entire life, when I had jury duty and needed to get downtown to the courthouse. It was great then; I would have cheerfully paid much more to use them than I did.
But in my daily life, $240 a year spent on buses is wasted money. That’s not to say that there aren’t lots of people who depend on buses. Perhaps they could raise fares, instead of taxing someone who doesn’t even use the service.
I’d have trouble voting for it as well, because our bus system here is fairly worthless. And our government has shown an unusual talent at wasting money.
You still get the benefit of their existence; the whole American economy depends on roads and motor vehicles.
Anyway, so what? Your taxes also pay to station troops in countries you’ll never get close to. Most tax expenditures are on things that do not benefit or involve you directly; that is no grounds for objection to them.
That was their point, Brain. That was their point.
But you benefit from it even if you don’t use it. If everyone benefits from something, everyone should chip in.
Your complaint sounds whiney because everyone is paying for something they don’t use. The people who take public transit, who walk, or telecommute are paying for roads they don’t use. Do you think it makes sense for them to whine about how their tax bill is "wasted? money?
You fail to comprehend, apparently, that one of the functions of taxation is precisely to spread the burden of certain services more broadly throughout the population, on the understanding that even people who don’t use those services directly often benefit from them in a variety of ways.
I have no children. Why should any of my taxes fund schools?
Do you believe in a basic, user-pays system for everything? Do you think, for example, that all roads should be toll roads? If so, we have little to talk about.
If not, where do you draw the line between appropriate and inappropriate use of taxpayer money.
That was the proposal? An extra $240 a year on auto registration? That’s nuts. How did they ever think that would fly?
I certainly support government subsidization of mass transit, but the tax hit needs to be spread far more widely. And, sadly, if the political will is not present to do that, and so between federal, state, and local money the transit system doesn’t have enough to operate–well, cuts are necessary. Perhaps the effects of those cuts will cause the politicians to rethink.
It would be harder to spread it much more widely than “all car owners.” America has almost as many registered vehicles (~250 million) as people (~310 million).
Oh you benefit from the service, alright. You benefit by there being other people employed at places you want to patronize (or perhaps need to patronize) who could not have gotten to work otherwise, or school to be able to eventually get a job (that you in some way need done), for instance.
Your contention is like thinking that you shouldn’t have to pay for public schools since you don’t have kids of your own (“Y’all think I give a fuck how dumb your kids are?”). But the fact is that we are all better of for having a literate population, and in many ways we are all better off having a population that can afford some form of reliable local transportation.
“Routes will be cut and traffic will increase” is not a valid cost/benefit analysis. In this thread, there is no evidence that the proposed cost actually drives benefits for society.
God, I sound like a Republican.
What would be?
I assume the OP was about King County, Washington (where Seattle is.) The proposal was a car tab of $60 + 0.1% on sales tax. Perhaps Rocketeer owns 4 cars?
As a side note, while the majority of the tax proposal was to support Metro (the bus system), somewhere around a quarter of the money was actually for road maintenance.