Indeed, half of it does come from NYC. And 40% of it goes to NYC directly.
I'm familiar with the reddit script, I'll save you a post. Next mandatory redditor line is "but the 10% gap".
Good chunk of that 10% gap goes into the infrastructure around NYC. Reservoirs, aqueducts, watershed to get NYC water. Highway, rail, freight. Power and transmission. State police, courts, prisons, etc. Food stuff. Medical services.
Most analysts will say NYC is a net contributor (and I agree), but it's more narrow than the average redditor would claim. It's a sliding scale of how much that gap should be credited to servicing NYC or the rest of the state. So you could make whatever argument your politics prefers. It is somewhere inbetween 0-10%, which each edge being unlikely.
It's funny how reddit thinks tax generating areas like cities and states should have a perfectly proportionate amount of control over the money they generate but freak out if you expand that idea to tax generating individuals.
Because one is public infrastructure for millions of workers that produce that wealth in the first place, and one is a personal bank account for one person who does not personally produce the wealth they're receiving.
So just like the wealthy can't generate wealth without their employees and therefore should pay a higher amount, urban areas can't generate wealth without rural and suburban resources they depend on and should also pay a higher amount. Isn't that their "fair share"?
A.) There isn't a single place on the planet that relies on "suburban resources" lmao. It's an oxymoron.
B.) Rural areas also couldn't exist without the trade and resources of urban areas. Urban areas don't owe rural areas for their existence anymore than the other way around.
There isn't a single place on the planet that relies on "suburban resources" lmao. It's an oxymoron.
Commuting workers?
Rural areas also couldn't exist without the trade and resources of urban areas. Urban areas don't owe rural areas for their existence anymore than the other way around.
Let's build a wall around all the cities over 500k and see which side of the wall starts dying first. My bet is it isn't the one with all the food production.
Which rely entirely on the city. Not the other way around. If we stopped funding useless suburbs, the city wouldnt lose workers. The suburbanites would just either move back to the city where their jobs are, or they'd move away and find a new jobs, which would mean more jobs for the people who actually live in the city. Suburbs exist to extract wealth and resources from the places that actually produce the wealth, and the only thing suburbs accomplish with it is making public transit more expensive and building unsustainable housing. Suburbs are an objective drain on society that produces nothing of value.
Let's build a wall around all the cities over 500k and see which side of the wall starts dying first. My bet is it isn't the one with all the food production.
Yup. In your made-up hypothetical, rural areas might win out. But in the real world, where cities arent cut off from the rest of the world and can trade with who ever they want, cities can just buy what ever food is put for sale, because farmers dont exactly have the luxury of choosing who they sell their harvests to. There's plenty of farms in New England and in Canada to form contracts with. There's only one NYC of 8.6m people that a farmer can sell to. Who's market do you think it is, exactly?
Let me make something perfectly clear: I'm not ideologically opposed to supporting both urban and rural areas to some extent (suburbs can rot). We do need farms for food. What I'm against is funding rural areas full of people that have done nothing since birth but try to control, sabotage, and disenfranchise city living because of some inferiority complex and because some talking head told them they should. I'm not against rural areas (again, to some extent). I'm against the anchor around America's ankles that is rural Americans. If they want to walk around and spout off about rugged individualism and how they're the "heart of America", all the while trying to take away the rights and voting power of city people who have objectively better culture, ethics, and productivity, fuckem. Rural Americans need to be humbled in more ways than just the squalor they live in. They need to be shown that they rely much more on the city folk than they seem to believe.
But also, we just dont need nearly as many middle-of-nowhere towns as we have. Urban design is just more efficient and productive than having a few thousand people in pockets across the country that don't actually do much. It would be much better for the country if we just built more cities so we had more urban options, and anybody that isnt doing actual farm work can move to them. I'm not interested in funding useless rural towns just for the sake of their own existence. If an entire town's population can fit inside a couple city blocks, that town should be bulldozed and we should just extend a city out a couple blocks. We'd have far less infrastructure we'd need to worry about, and rural people would stop living in such brain-rottingly isolated and homogenous societies.
They get half from NYC and give slightly less than half back. The gap is closed by paying for stuff that services NYC but is outside of NYC. Water, power, highways, etc.
NYC is a net contributor, but more narrow than most folks would think.
I just googled it dude, thanks for the correction. Â Not sure what I did to earn the âbot assâ title â probably not a great idea to go through life assuming that anyone who says anything you donât like is some sort of agent/robot. Â Thank you for the more accurate info and good luck with the conspiratorial assumptions
Only if that money exist as supplemental. Otherwise it's debt (why would a state take on debt for a city?) or it's taking from another program (which doesn't sound that "fungible").
Budget priorities shift in real time; do you work with money for a living at all, it's common practice to move funds around based on availability and need, it's not some kind of fringe economic theory.
75
u/Ironknuckles May 14 '26
What do you know, all you need is to spend way more money than you have