[lbo-talk] A Case for a Higher Gasoline Tax

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Thu Jan 12 08:10:52 PST 2006


Matt wrote:


> On Wed, Jan 11, 2006 at 04:44:30PM -0500, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> > Gar wrote:
> >
> > >We live further from work and that is not something that will
> > >change in the short run.
> >
> > That's exactly what needs to change in the United States, and it has
> > to change soon, or else humanity won't have "a long run" to look
> > forward to.
> >
> > How do we change that? By moving businesses as well as workers back
> > to cities. How do we move them? There are essentially two ways:
> >
> > The government will move them, by employing eminent domain.
> >
> > or
> >
> > Businesses and workers will move on their own, motivated by higher
> > transportation costs.
> >
> > Neither way is painless.
>
> We are talking about the United States, right? According to this
> data:
>
> http://nhts.ornl.gov/2001/pub/STT.pdf
>
> The average commute trip distance in 2001 was 12.10 miles. So if
> you want all the factories and farms that feed and serve the cities
> (and landfills that take their waste) to be *in* the cities, so the
> average drops to 6 miles, where are they going to go?
>
<snip>
> The complaint was that people live "too far" from where they work.
> The average commute distance does not support that.

You misunderstand the problem. The problem is not that workers moved away from cities while businesses stayed put, making commutes long. The problem is that both businesses and workers moved away from cities, decentralizing both production and reproduction.

Much of employment in the United States by now is in the service sector (retail, office work, education, etc.), and that's what needs to move back to cities first and foremost.

Yoshie Furuhashi <http://montages.blogspot.com> <http://monthlyreview.org> <http://mrzine.org>



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