291–300 of 910 posts
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There are generally taxes (e.g., car or gas taxes) that cover the costs. I don't know about Germany's situation, but it is not impossible to make that net zero.
In Australia, petrol tax raises ~18bn. Cost of road infrastructure is ~36bn.
I really really would like to see Labour in the UK to use their sizeable majority + Parliamentary sovereignty to upgrade the UK’s infrastructure, including more train subsidies, but they seem very cautious and also terrified of raising taxes. Such a waste that the UK is one of the few places where Parliament could just ram shit through and yet building anything in the UK is so hampered by self-imposed red tape.
15 years of all major parties supporting hs2 and it couldn’t be rammed through Want to improve things for people in the UK, ram through massive new housing akin to the newtowns of 50 years ago.
New towns will just be full of commuters and have no life in them. We need to build high rises in cities, and give people living in apartments real rights - the leasehold system is feudalism.
And give Manchester and Birmingham real metro/tube systems!
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies? EDIT: Oh and hospitals!
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne. I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externa…
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> requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn I suspect the key is to find ways to run railways cheaper. It has been a long time since railways were under severe cost competition encouraging people to look for efficiencies. I think the main one would be to find a way for railways to operate with no staff. Just like a typical road operates most of the time with no staff. That means you need to redesign everything that c…
> That means you need to redesign everything that currently uses people to not need people Simplest redesign is running longer trains - they still need just 1 driver. Britain’s trains are sometimes comically small (3 carriages) and overcrowded. French trains are 2-3x longer, Russia/China even more so. Second is standardisation - all of Uks train companies run different stock and it’s ovsoleye
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Maybe we should work on making one vote to be equal in the nation.
This is a boring trope. Whether it’s a group of United States or a single State is a debate as old as the country. You’re going to need really compelling reasons for states to give up their representation and participate in the state vote required to amend the constitution to remove their rights.
> their rights
You talk about states as if they are people. But they are not. States are a fiction invented by people (and let's be honest, by rich and powerful people), and so they can be torn down by people (likely not the rich and powerful).
"State representation" and "states' rights" are not compelling to most people, other than via some vague appeal to "isn't it great that New Mexico can do one thing and Maine can do something else?", which by itself does not require "state representation" or the current ideas of "states' rights".
Am i a communist when i prefer a government to operate and provide basic services like the public transport system, the postal system, the telecommunication/internet service or prisons either paid by taxes or by fees, that don't generate profit beyond paying the costs, instead of using taxes to rescue bankrupt banks and companies? EDIT: Oh and hospitals!
Even if you were, is that really a bad thing? Why do we demonize communism (and socialism ) so much ?
Poor implementation in Soviet Union or in PRC that is only seen through the color of propaganda with the inherent cultural and ideological biases is hardly a good basis for judging a movement that was a response to centuries of extreme worker exploitation in direct result industrialization and raise of machines.
Are there really bad ideas in socialism ? yes of course, there are bad ideas in late stage capitalism or in any free market system or any system.
We learn and try to take to best from all economic systems not demonize any of them.
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"I LOVE the German transit system" I have some experience with the public transport systems in Germany, Austria, Switzerland, France and Belgium. In my opinion Germany's is the worst. Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. The tariffs (apart from the Deutschlandticket) are overly complicated and suffer heavily under the common balkanization. The DB Navi…
> Everything seems to be stuck in paper based processes, only occasionally and very listlessly digitized. That's nonsense. Most public transport is digital by now. > The DB Navigator is so terrible It's not terrible. I managed to book all my train travels just fine with it, also using a business bahncard which gives me a 50% discount on all trains.
SNCF, SNCB and EuroStar let me manage my tickets digitally in my digital wallet. That is super convenient if you have more complicated itineraries because you have all the tickets handy in a single app, when you need them.
With Deutsche Bahn it is either their app or a PDF to print.
For local and inner city transport you usually don't need a ticket a all, just swipe your card or phone at the beginning and end of your trip.
You can forget about that anywhere in Germany. It is paper tickets everywhere or a gazillion of different apps, because every city and network has their own.
That is very much not my understanding of public transport being digital.
Providing these €49 tickets requires an annual subsidy of around €3bn, on top of already substantial subsidies for the rail industry. If we accept that it reduces carbon emissions by 6.7 million tonnes per year, then that works out to €447 per tonne. That really isn't good value - most carbon abatement methods cost well under $100 per tonne. I do recognise that modal shift towards rail may have other positive externa…
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>The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls. I'm German and I can tell you it really does not. Like in a lot of countries car infrastructure is treated like the state of nature, it's just somehow there, and the infrastructure burden of parking, road construction and what have you isn't a topic. It's the 'default culture' and the support it gets is just the status quo, w…
The far-right Berlin government is currently doing its darnedest to build the most expensive highway in all of Germany, that nobody actually wants, through a cultural area. Probably because their friend owns the highway construction company.
Such behaviour fundamentally contradicts even the mildest of right-of-centre ideologies.
An actual right-of-centre government would never even consider starting such a project.
If a right-of-centre government happened to inherit one that had been started by a previous administration, for example, such a project would be immediately terminated, any assets liquidated, and the proceeds directly returned to the taxpayers.
The only way that such a project would ever exist under a right-of-centre government would be if it were initiated, funded, built, operated, and maintained solely by the private sector, without any government involvement at all.
Practices such as the collection of taxes, raising public debt, and government built/run infrastructure are part of left-of-centre ideologies, and certainly not right-of-centre in any way.