> income taxes are not cost-of-living adjusted
Well, this is another issue. It's incoherent, honestly, that someone can be considered both rich and poor from the federal perspective. But in the end, a COL adjustment on income tax would be equivalent to the type of subsidy in question.
- The diplomatic, covert, and military apparatus which dominates the world to the extent necessary to secure the flow of cheap oil for your car.
lel. If that was ever true, which I doubt, it isn't any more. If there was ever a point that our military paid for itself (even on the margin) in terms of cheaper oil, I'll eat my hat.
> Welfare so that unemployed people can stay in dead-end towns, instead of moving to where they are needed.
This is really the core of it. If people are really needed, economically and relatively to elsewhere, in supercities, then supercities will pay enough for them to live there. Ergo, you are overstating how much they are needed. This is exactly analogous to employers claiming there is a "shortage" of programmers, but they aren't willing to raise wages.
Besides, am I to believe that there are no unemployed people on welfare in cities? I don't know what the relative rate is. I do agree people should be incentivized to move where they are needed. We may have different views on where that is, exactly. Any kind of welfare distorts economic "need" signals, which is a big downside of it.
Imagining welfare or wealth transfers didn't exist, I'd say that the place where people are most "needed" is a place where benefits of living - COL is highest. I have no data on where that might be, but I doubt SV ranks high on the list unless you are a programmer. By that metric I would imagine that there would be a dynamic equilibrium between urbanization and countryside, as there is now.
In some ways, SV programmers defending subsidies for service workers in SV sounds like "please subsidize my $10 latte and Whole Foods bill".
> the low-density regions they enable
This is pretty creative. If cities had to grow their own food and extract their own natural resources, I think they'd have quite a problem, yes? It may be fair to say cities & countryside are codependent, but the idea that cities are one-sidedly enabling everyone else is not credible.
It is quite likely that there is a net transfer of wealth from cities to the countryside. The reason I would argue this is "fair" is because people in the cities are also the primary beneficiaries of GDP growth.
BTW, I don't live in the country, I live in a medium-sized city. I am limiting my criticisms to cities that have so poorly planned expansion, or are so crowded, that the COL is sky-high, and they want a bailout from everyone else.