Jose wrote:

Costs [of public infrastructure] are only half the story. Benefits
are the other half. There are invisible benefits to the system (any
system) which also need to be figured in.



Such as?


I'm not going to answer specifically, because I can't prove them. They
are hidden - that's what hidden means. But consider the following.

Where I live we recently discussed (with great heat) attracting
corporations to move into our town so that we would get a bigger tax
base. The more taxes paid by corporations, the less we'd have to pay in
property tax. The arithmetic is quite simple and very compelling. It's
also wrong. However, while we can all speculate as to why, it is
virtually impossible to prove. The only verifiable numbers are the tax
rolls, and they clearly show that corporations would pay tax that would
otherwise have to be paid by homeowners.

Nonetheless, looking at neighboring towns and graphing the mil rate
(homeowner tax rate) against the corporate percentage, those towns with
the highest corprorate presence have the highest mil rate. They have
the highest traffic density, the worst schools (schools are supported by
corporate and property tax), the highest prices in the stores... stuff
like that. The reason (I speculate) has to do with the impact of the
corporations on daily life - more cars parking, more roads to be built,
slower speeds, everything takes longer, wealthier people move out...
things like this that don't show up on the balance sheet.


Those costs aren't hidden at all. It is fairly easy, admittedly very
tedious though, to figure them out. And, as you said, it is easy to
simply look at a town that looks like your town would look after you
attract large corporations. I don't see much hidden here. Large
companies need lots of workers, better fire fighting equipment,
hazardous waste response teams, etc. The cost of these is pretty easy
to figure out and, as you say, tends to offset the taxes that the
corporation pays.


I have no children, but it benefits me to have a good school system.
I'll leave you to figure out why (and it has nothing to do with my
screen name). Therefore, there is a benefit to non-users of the school
system.

If you are benefiting, then then you are a user of the system and should
help pay for it. :-)


The benefits to reliable mail service, reliable transportation (air and
otherwise), reliable telecommunications, extend to people who walk to
the store, don't have a phone, and burn all their mail. It means that
when I walk to the store, they will have what I want. OK, that makes me
an indirect user, but there are lots of indirect users of infrastructure
that are not tracked, but benefit from it.

Yep, same thing. You are still using the system, albeit it somewhat
indirectly.


We all benefit from our water system (unusual in the world in that even
our wash water is potable) because it reduces disease, even if I don't
use water from the system. It is not just the people with the tap that
benefit.

Street lighting could be seen as benefitting the drivers, and so should
be paid by the drivers. However in reducing accidents it also reduces
my health insurance premiums, and it reduces robberies to boot. These
are "invisible" benefits which accrue to non-drivers.

They aren't invisible. It isn't that hard to compare crime rates in
areas with street lights and those without.


It's little things like this that add up all over the place, just like
little costs also add up all over the place, that make a strict "user
pay" accounting problematic.

Yes, I agree it would be an accounting nightmare.


Matt