destructdiscZohran Mamdani, in the New York City mayoral debate: "Free buses would cost $700M. Cuomo gave more—$959M—to Elon Musk for a failed Tesla factory."
Uh oh. If people realize that 700M in subsidies is the same amount of money as 700M in free buses, it’s all over. You’re supposed to act like one of them is cheap and the other is expensive. There’s not supposed to be math involved /s
To be fair, 700M in subsidies was supposed to have a return on investment. Though, it didn’t.
700M in free busses would not bring a return on investment except for just generally improving the quality of society. Which I still think is better, but we do have to consider that from their point of view.
You’re just trying to be intellectually honest here, by recognizing that in theory subsidies are supposed to bring jobs and economic benefits to a region, whereas public transit is seen as a cost center. And I think you’ve been sufficiently rebuked on that point.
Anyway, upvoted because I appreciate the attempt to engage conservative fiscal policy on its own terms. It’s easy to frame it as “rich people good, poor people bad,” but occasionally we need to debate the internal logic of it so we can properly pull back the curtain and see it for what it really is, which is in fact “rich people good, poor people bad.” You started that debate, and as a result the consensus here feels more like a good-faith rebuttal and less like a sarcastic shot from the hip (which my original post definitely was).