A short walk between residence and work confers a total range of benefits that are hard to quantify. To the point of the post, it facilitates employees in being more reliable in attendance, even in the face of bad weather and infrastructure failure. Regardless of mode, moving people long distances at speed is very expensive and fragile. The current equilibrium is a failure of business and political policy, and of culture and individual choice. Policy does not facilitate many opportunities for proximate lifestyles, and few people seize the opportunities when they are available.
I would go so far as to say that car dependance makes America less industrially competitive on the world stage.
Since vehicle ownership is basically a requirement just to participate in the economy, that means that even baseline wages need to be higher to facilitate that.
And while higher wages sounds good at first blush, if they're only higher to address a higher overall cost of living, even at the lowest rungs, then that prices out Americans from the global labor pool while not even conferring as high of a quality of life as it could.
It's highly distorting. And that's not even factoring higher shipping costs, as well.
Do we really have higher shipping costs? I expect freight cost within the corporate supply chains are cheap here, but only because corporations are skimping on service on making the customer solve the last mile problem. But now Amazon and other on-line retailers are improving service by delivering to doorsteps. I don’t understand the economics of this, but it certainly solves the last mile problem for the customer.
Regarding the wine making section, it seems to me that most of the dustup is due to taxing classifications. To me, that's a big downside to a lot of our tax system, in that it creates all these weird plateaus and corner cases due to classification. Something that a land value tax is much better at addressing, since it only really cares about land value and nothing else.
A short walk between residence and work confers a total range of benefits that are hard to quantify. To the point of the post, it facilitates employees in being more reliable in attendance, even in the face of bad weather and infrastructure failure. Regardless of mode, moving people long distances at speed is very expensive and fragile. The current equilibrium is a failure of business and political policy, and of culture and individual choice. Policy does not facilitate many opportunities for proximate lifestyles, and few people seize the opportunities when they are available.
I would go so far as to say that car dependance makes America less industrially competitive on the world stage.
Since vehicle ownership is basically a requirement just to participate in the economy, that means that even baseline wages need to be higher to facilitate that.
And while higher wages sounds good at first blush, if they're only higher to address a higher overall cost of living, even at the lowest rungs, then that prices out Americans from the global labor pool while not even conferring as high of a quality of life as it could.
It's highly distorting. And that's not even factoring higher shipping costs, as well.
Do we really have higher shipping costs? I expect freight cost within the corporate supply chains are cheap here, but only because corporations are skimping on service on making the customer solve the last mile problem. But now Amazon and other on-line retailers are improving service by delivering to doorsteps. I don’t understand the economics of this, but it certainly solves the last mile problem for the customer.
Regarding the wine making section, it seems to me that most of the dustup is due to taxing classifications. To me, that's a big downside to a lot of our tax system, in that it creates all these weird plateaus and corner cases due to classification. Something that a land value tax is much better at addressing, since it only really cares about land value and nothing else.