It’s not a weasel word, it’s a word used to describe any program provided by the government that does not bring in enough revenue on its own to pay for itself.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.
> The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation. Yet rail is expected to not just stand on its own two feet but to yield a profit. Both facilitate commerce and improve a regions productivity (rail inarguably does so with greater efficiency, especially when integrated into a public transport system) - why is rail treated so differently?
Because there's a huge ecosystem that is substantially dependent on private use of roadways - car manufacturers, sellers, insurers, storage facilities, cleaners, and repairers; petrol extractors, refiners, transporters and sellers; and so on.
Each of these parties has a vested interest in maintaining the perception that driving is the baseline mode of transport and anything else is a deviation from that which requires extra consideration before it should receive any resources.
On the one hand that's also a lot of jobs and profits, but on the other hand if all this activity is in service of a mode of transport that causes considerable short and long-term damage, and is less efficient for many journeys, then it means we're wasting labor and resources that could be put to better use.
There's also a large percentage of the country that simply wouldn't benefit from rail in their day to day lives, because most of the country doesn't have the population density to make rail make sense. It would at best be an alternative to flying, assuming it didn't take longer.
These are the same people for whom owning a car is an essential part of life.
And all those people are going to look at proposals for rail spending and say "what's in this for me?" This will produce strong headwinds to any rail expansion proposal.
> It’s very weird how people talk about roads as a sort of universal public good whose construction and maintenance needs to be financed by local authorities and taxation.
Because you need roads to e.g., get produce from a farm to the grocery store. You can’t have a functioning society that doesn’t involve roadways for moving people and goods the “last mile.”
roads are much cheaper per mile than rail, so you can have more roads than you can have rail.
you can also have lower grade roads, which is once again, cheaper (so you can have more of it). You cannot have lower-grade rail - the train will crash.
Therefore, to provide a massive network of transport, roads are the only option. Rail provide cheap point-to-point transport, but only make sense between heavily populated centers, and therefore, you can expect to make back the cost of the rail from this dense usage.
In the US, we see many places where rail has been abandoned. In the place I live (upstate NY, Finger Lakes) there are multiple walking trails that were previously locations of rail lines, which shut down more than half a century ago. The rails themselves are long gone. In some places you can see where earth was moved and concrete structures were installed to allow drainage. Maintaining these lines made no sense with the existence of a road network carrying motor vehicles. There are also abandoned canals from an even earlier time.
People certainly didn't complain about having paved roads, or being able to buy their own automobiles. I understand it's frustrating when the public goes charging off in a direction you don't want them to.
Another bad-faith argument. A built-up railway network is not incompatible with a built-up road network. Many countries have both working together (each serving use cases with their own strengths).
>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, when you try to internalize the cost you cause a shitstorm. Look at how well surge pricing or road toll debates go over in most places, or how sensitive people are to fuel prices.
Rail transport be it commercial or individual despite the fact that it's so much cheaper (in particular on emissions as well) is always one political decision away from being privatized or culled.
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.
Oh please, far-right? It is leftists, that sees everything beside them as far-right. I would call it conservative. Something the 'left' forgets, that there are also some real people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld. Yuck.
> people, who do not want to pay for the leftist dreamworld
Except that time and time again, it turns out that the "leftist dreamworld" is actually cheaper.
Providing subsidized housing for poor people costs less in the long run than dealing with homelessness.
Providing nationalized or strictly regulated healthcare costs less than fully privatized systems where healthcare operators do as they please.
Facilitating active transport such as bike lanes costs cities less, and moves more people more quickly, than focusing exclusively on cars.
What these people actually want is not to save money, but to carefully ensure that any money spent suits only their preferences and identity groups rather than benefiting society as a whole.
The thing is, it is never enough and ends up usually in a disaster and people lose their life, because their opinions get in the way.
Subsidy kills innovation. There is no incentive anymore to make things better. You always must know someone, you can bribe, so that something gets done.
I get it, hackernews is flooded with well meaning people making way more money than normal people do. They see, how 'unfair' the world is: why am i making so much more and they so little. It is the ground, where this despicable left mind virus can grow, and then they start to steal people's money for their grandiose ideas.
I don't see how any government, regardless of location, that spends large sums of taxpayer money on a construction project could ever be considered to be "right wing" in any way, let alone "far-right".
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.
Sure if you define terms in your own strict way you can write a long comment on how everybody else is using the term wrong. Why should people use your definition though?
Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism, minimal to no taxation, minimal to no government spending, and privately-controlled infrastructure.
That's just the fundamental nature of a two-dimensional political spectrum. It has nothing to do with me.
Anyone claiming that a government exhibiting decidedly left-wing traits is somehow "far right" is simply making a wrong analysis.
> Left-wing ideologies inherently promote concepts like collectivist big government, high taxation, massive government spending, and government-controlled infrastructure.
Incorrect. Left-wing ideologies promote downward distribution of power from established elites; one particular subset of left-wing ideologies (socialism) promotes labor control of the means of production, and one particular subset of socialism promotes a situation in which the working class controls the state which then acts as the vehicle through which control of the means of production is exercised (but libertarian socialism, for instance, also exists.)
Right-wing ideologies instead promote systems which concentrate power in narrow elites; different varieties of right-wing ideology justify this based in various mixes kf views of inherent merit, whether based on sex/gender, race, individual bloodline, “revealed merit” in notionally competitive environments where capacity at time t is heavily influenced by success at t-1, or whatever else.
You are confusing the left-right axis with the libertarian-authoritarian axis, which is a different axis of ideological (or sometimes merely praxis) variation.
> Right-wing ideologies, on the other hand, inherently promote individualism
Right wing promotes authoritanism, which is pretty much the opposite of individual rights. Right wing governments stand for strict laws and strong enforcement, where the people must obey or else.
This is observably false. One observation is that the US government debt grows more quickly when the Republican party is in power.
What is true is that left-wing ideology promotes taking a bit from everyone to give a lot to everyone, while right-wing ideology does not promote giving a lot, or anything, to everyone, but often still promotes taking a bit, or a lot, from everyone and funneling it to places that do not benefit very many people.
Leftists will promote plans like: tax carbon emissions and use the money to subsidize clean power plants. Rightists will enact (without promoting) plans like: give a lot of taxpayer money to this company for unclear reasons, and don't worry about how to raise the money - make it the next government's problem to deal with the debt pile. The latter is, of course, individualist.
Destroying "degenerate" cultural institutions is very much right wing; so is giving taxpayer money to cronies; so is overloading the government with debt.
This entity you're describing clearly isn't "right wing" if it uses left-wing practices like taxation, public debt, and government-funded "cultural institutions" (whatever that actually means).
Taxation is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there would not be any taxpayer money to give "cronies" because such funds never would be collected from taxpayers in the first place.
Public debt is inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, there wouldn't even be any government entity capable of incurring debt.
"Cultural institutions" involving the government are inherently a left-wing concept. Under right-wing ideologies, the government simply wouldn't have the resources to create "cultural institutions" and any such entities that did exist would be created, funded, and operated by the private sector alone.
If you're truly upset about the things you just described, then it's because you dislike left-wing ideologies, even if you don't recognize it.
Unfortunately right wing parties throughout the West have been taken over by grifters, and anything like traditional conservatism has been tossed by the wayside.
You're absolutely right that some political parties wrongly use a term like "conservative" in their party name, or otherwise incorrectly portray themselves as being "right wing".
Ultimately, though, they're still left-wing parties in practice, pushing left-wing ideologies, regardless of the facade they might try to put up.
A party doesn't just become "right wing" because they claim to be, especially when their actions and policies are decidedly left-wing.
Left wing, due to the use of large and intrusive government, collectivism, government-run make-work projects, government-run infrastructure projects, central economic planning, conscription, a disregard for individualism, and other policies that are inherently incompatible with right-wing ideology.
Or it is something that provides a benefit to society as a whole and therefore deserves to be maintained by the institution established by society to do such things, government, without assuming economic efficiency is 100% correlated with societal benefit.
If I tell you that the air is clear, and you respond "That applies to all air on earth", you've provided no additional information.
If I tell you that humans are generally between zero and 120 years of age, and you respond "That applies to most humans", you've provided no additional information.
If I tell you "most comments on HN are well-written and thoughtfully constructed" and you respond "That doesn't apply to yours", you've provided some additional information.
Or maybe, governments have programs that are funded by all to benefit all, because they are onlt beneficial when they are society-scale? 1/350,000,000th of the US army won't be very useful to any individual American on its own.
There seems to be, implict in the term "subsidy," the notion that it is government largesse. My notion is to rebut that pointing out we do not expect a positive ROI on most government expenditures.
Most of the value created by public transit goes into the land near the stations. Employers want offices near stations and employees want homes near stations.
You can recover as lot more money from taxing the land than from fares.
The same word applies to roads that do not pay for themselves through gas tax and/or tolls.
If the government pays for something through a general fund from income/property/corporate taxes, it’s subsidized.
It’s important to call these out whenever they are because it means the program is not sustainable on its own and that puts it at risk during austerity, etc.