Toast Easily

Shame is the worst.

Discuss.

Not all cities and towns are created equal.

At some point, hard and tough choices will need to be made about where all of our money goes. Policies of equity should be directed at citizens and not municipalities. But then, cities are people so it complicates the issue a great deal. How do you decrease/increase incrementally in a way that isn’t a shock but also consolidates the population? Sort of how more federal money goes to red states with lower economic output and less federal money goes to blue states which generally have a higher economic output.

I would imagine much of that federal money goes towards infrastructure. The money tied to social services is, I would hope, linked to the citizen and not the municipality or state. It’s a mix though correct? Services like Medicare/aid are partially funded by the federal government and states have to pick up the rest of the bill. Wow. That is really inefficient. I think I just thought my way through the argument for a single-payer healthcare system. 

The primary goal going forward, besides increasing density and lowering the amount of car trips per person and length, should be how to bust up the zero-sum game going on with cities and states in relation to businesses. Centralizing businesses more and reducing the number of competing interests that our current sprawl policies encourage would do alot to eliminate the job-poaching that is so prevalent now. Cities and states should not be paying large corporations to relocate anywhere. So reducing the number of choices would hopefully do something about our current embarrassing culture that applauds cities and states for grovelling at the feet of private business. Perhaps cities and towns don’t respect their citizens because they don’t respect themselves? I think that is a thought worth exploring further.