Make [Some] Commuter Pay Their Share "New York City subways are falling apart. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority has a $38 billion debt and $18 billion in unfunded health-care obligations. Governor Andrew Cuomo and Mayor Bill de Blasio spend most of their time blaming each other for the region’s transportation woes. More below. The New York Times thinks it has a solution: “Make commuters pay their share again.” That sounds like a great idea! The people who ride the trains should be the ones to pay for them.
But that’s not what the Times means. Instead, it wants people who live outside the city to pay a commuter tax to work in the city." People feel entitled to receive "free" services. With the costs of services provided by government at precipice levels, and the value of those services dropping, the entitled feel cheated, and those paying are losing patience. New York City is wealthy but in a precarious position. It exists due to a thin veneer of financial businesses which provide their employees the high pay which makes New York City viable. Should these financial companies decide to diversify, geographically New York will come to earth in a hard landing indeed. The user of a service needs to pay for that service, if that is not possible with the highly inefficient government providing the service, then the private sector should provide the service or another service which is more desired. Taxing those outside of the taxing jurisdiction for the service is a recipe for Detroitization of the city. No city needs or wants that outcome. The city was a mistake. It is likely that the American city will continue to decline except for the cities which are supported by urban growth boundary's and those will be buoyed, for a while. But in the end, they too shall crash, spectacularly. The self-drive car, the Uber/independent contractor economy, work from home, increasing wealth, and the desire of individuals to live in small groups (100 or so) of people they know well and are likely related to, will drive a renaissance of lifestyle in America, and ultimately, the world. The San Francisco Bay Area and all of the rest will also have similar problems. Some of us are old enough to remember back to the hoary days of yore when the tech boom made modem manufacturers kings. The changing technology made any modem producer with faster speed more valuable, but eventually, that ended, and modems became a commodity. Then the modem manufacturers fell back to earth. When mono-industry regions suffer the fate of having their industries become commodities, not only will the businesses fall to Earth, so will the region economically, so, it will be with New York's financial sector, so, it will be with San Francisco's high tech industry. This spasm of change will likely be triggered, and the near perfect triggers today are the looming state and local pension/health care/benefits payments; transit operating costs, and maintenance; and state and local budget crises.
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