Comments by "Nunya Bidness" (@nunyabidness3075) on "Why do people commute by airplane?" video.

  1. Love the thumbnail picture. đź‘Ť Hate the government intrusion suggestions. Instead of more government market intrusions layered on the mistakes of yesterday (which much of your channel is based on complaints about), how about first phasing out all the regulations and programs that are making problems? This is like taxing big sodas while we still subsidize sugar. Crazy!
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  2. Maybe if people are flying to jobs for some reasons it is wasteful. Most coach travel is wasteful anyways. We can’t really tell, but we would get much clearer guidance from the market if we were more careful about the way we tax and spend. If everything were done with fuel taxes based on fleet carbon output and infrastructure needs then we would be getting clear signals. Our current , complex government systems makes it so we cannot know.
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  3.  @goldenstarmusic1689  High speed rail isn’t a real solution for commuting either. It’s a slightly better than airline solution. Maybe. The infrastructure involved is serious and must be maintained. If you want a solution, you look into all the reasons people are commuting. Most of them involve bad and unnecessary government. Don’t get fooled by shiny trains where people use other peoples money and take credit. It’s those people’s hubris that’s causing the commuting in the first place.
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  4.  @goldenstarmusic1689  Whoa. Let’s get a couple things straight. Let’s stop subsidies for any of it. I’m in agreement. I’m all good with that. YOU’RE the one wanting government action to create high speed rail. If you think subsidies are bad, don’t ask for one. Next, we are talking about commuting. There’s no need for commuting by high speed rail if you don’t want the luxury of living a long way from your work. Why should the tax payers pay for that? I suppose it’s so you can get a beach house with flood insurance from the Feds? Or, do you want your kids in a lily white school while you work downtown in a corrupt city you escape every night? Nope, nope, nope. You are NOT going anywhere with me with that strategy. I’m perfectly happy to stop the subsidies. Especially at the national level. I pay taxes, taxes, and more taxes. I’m not now, nor since I’ve been an adult, been a commuter who helps clog the freeways. I’m not the traffic. If someone wants to commute, I see no need to make the train high speed. If you, or someone else is willing to make a high speed train with private money, that’s great.
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  5.  @goldenstarmusic1689  No, I completely understand. You missed the point. Living far from your job is a luxury, period, full stop. I’m not going to count the one super hard case in a thousand which you want to use to justify wasting money on government buying trains. If the market will not support the train, no train. And, while we are stopping things, let’s stop talking about freeway subsidies. I’m against those as well. I want the fuel taxes raised to cover all the costs. The highway trust fund ran a surplus for a long time, but I no longer think it does. The whole point of a market economy is that people pay for their choices. Living far from work is usually an arbitrage of sorts to get the value of working in one place (likely undesirable to live in due to cost or conditions) and living in another where a similar job opportunity is not available. I cannot see why the government should pay for the cost of people grabbing that value. I can see the environmental, social, political, and informational value in making them pay for their own choices. Besides that, having the government choose where the trains go is fraught with all sorts of problems and inefficiencies. In our current political environment, I don’t see it going well at all. Also, as a veteran, there are all sorts of ways trying to use veterans to get your trains built is offensive. If you are really concerned with veteran’s issues we can have a whole other story about the “bad gubmint” of the VA and how it would be much cheaper and better for veterans to get reform it by getting rid of half of it. Let’s start with living up to our promises to service members and veterans and work from there before we go building trains if we really care.
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  6.  @goldenstarmusic1689  I can guarantee you that every veteran in my weekly group, disabled and not, opposes spending federal funds for your train. Your small town destruction hyperbole is ridiculous. The small town community where I go each summer recently ripped up its tracks because, after a public and private investment, the train project that used the pre existing tracks and was still much faster than the highway, went bust for lack of ridership in just 3 years. Passengers will now have to use alternate means. I can guarantee you that had all the people working on your project been doing so with the goal of making a sustainable train project instead of competing for government funds, there would be, and will be, less wasted and valuable effort. The wasted and even counter productive effort put into getting other people to pay for things in this country is easily enough to save every small town you are worried about. It’s a true tragedy because we know better, yet keep getting misdirected by romantic and antiquated notions kept alive by Marxist academics. At any rate, small towns will fade away either because they are not truly sustainable or because government policy tips the scales against them. There are few other reasons. Throwing multi billion dollar train projects at the problem may save a few on the tracks, but likely at the expense of ones not chosen among other things that will be drained of resources. So who chooses the lucky winners? Will it be the most sustainable towns, or the ones with the most support among elites? You do realize every dollar spent on a government funded train was sucked from it’s likely best use to be thrown at your best guess of its best use? And finally, you do realize that turning a small town into a suburb of the big city down the line has all sorts of other problems it creates? If people really do use the train, your small town could get destroyed by tract homes, big box stores, and auto traffic. Coulda just let the people move to suburbia and saved the effort.
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  7.  @goldenstarmusic1689  one other thing. Why is the project du jour always the most important thing to fight poverty? It never fails!
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  8.  @goldenstarmusic1689  I have no problem with agreeing to disagree though I debate your reasoning on why it’s a good idea. I do understand, I argue in good faith. My argument is based on principle. My principles help me to avoid a lot of those romantic notions I mentioned earlier like thinking “this plan is different”. I sure am not changing my mind, and we disagree on some facts. Our country recently surpassed yet another dangerous debt threshold. We do not have plenty, and we are very over taxed. Most voters could not tell you how much their labor alone is actually taxed. If the cost of our debt goes back to historic averages, there will be much hardship both here and abroad. Our economy will go into an actual depression as evil people will be emboldened by our weakness and perhaps invade their neighbors. If your train project were such a great idea, a private firm would risk building it like is being done in Texas with private funds. I hope you find wisdom before spending money we do not have on projects so speculative that knowledgeable people will not risk their own money them. Adios.
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