You can't discount Baumol's cost disease. While it's true that government regulation is some part of it, like real declines in home building productivity in the previous decade or two, that certainly is not the root of the problem.
Beyond limits to theoretical growth in productivity for these areas, there absolutely are perverse incentives in all of those industries.
For example, 40% of corn in the US goes towards <10% of of gas via ethanol. Even without subsidies, refiners would likely use some ethanol because it's a cheap octane booster.
Insurers weren't regulating healthcare prices before the ACA and now face a profit limit tied to payouts -- which creates another perverse incentive. Doctors are incentivized to specialize instead of entering family medicine. They're also incentivized to run more tests defensively because they charge more and it reduces liability for malpractice.
Even in areas that are more builder-friendly, there is still incentive to build denser housing (which is more efficient) that maximizes return per sq ft. So you get studios, 1 bedroom, and 2 bedroom homes. And larger homes (built outside of onerous zoning areas) that more amenable to raising families end up creating unsustainable costs for local municipalities through sprawl.
Some of these areas can be addressed by a free market but maintaining a healthy market that minimizes perverse incentives requires significant tweaking (i.e. regulations)
I don't think building homes is really prohibitive due to regulations. I know it varies a lot by region of course. But I'm in an area that isn't really effected by earthquakes and has no frost line/need for basement/etc. I've built a few houses as a GC. It's land more than anything that's gone up in the past ~15 years since I first started in it. That's purely a market force. Second is skilled labor, even unskilled labor honestly. There's just a massive shortage of people doing manual labor/sweaty work, and I typically have access to a major pool of immigrants as we border Mexico. In terms of materials, there's some regulated things we have to do more of now, like insulation and other energy efficiency things but it's rather small in the scope of things. I currently own a 1950s built mid-century modern that was built in a time of low regs here. If I were to build it exactly as it is (to past codes) and simultaneously build it again (to current codes), the current code version would only be about 10% more. Likewise, if I demolished it and just sold the land, I'd still get about 90-100% of what it's market rate is right now. That market rate has ~quadrupled in the 15 years I've owned that house and to reiterate, the home itself is nearly worthless. I'm not in a fastly gentrifying area either. I'd say it's affluent but it always has been since I owned it, it's become more common to just knock down the original homes and build new.
This completely ignores Friedman's concept of the velocity of money (MV = PY). If that $15k is being saved by someone versus immediately spent, that has a different effect. A transfer isn’t neutral if the two parties have different propensities to consume (marginal propensity to consume).
Similarly how quickly and what the money is being spent on will have an effect.
Most money (M2) is not created directly by the treasury but rather indirectly from large banks lending against fractional deposits. This is money created on the balance sheets of banks but has real effect on the economy.
It's likely correct that mass transit is directly subsidized at a greater percentage than any specific aspect of private car ownership. However, there are significant indirect subsidies due to the centrality of private cars that not only dwarf transit subsidies, but simultaneously make transit less economical.
A simple example is minimum requirements for parking. Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up. This means less people in catchment areas for different types of transit.
>Almost every home and business is paying more for additional space that cars take up.
Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers, that's being paid by people that want cars to be at their house or business. I suppose you have some argument that the legally required minimums might be more than necessary but generally they reflect the need as it exists, not what we want it to bed. Allowing businesses to not have to supply parking wouldn't force people to use mass transit, it'd just force them to park further away in a space not paid for by the business they are frequenting.
> Sure but that's not a subsidy being borne by tax payers
When the cost is being borne by every single tax payer, then it's functionally equivalent.
Cars are easily one of the most subsidies goods in America. It's absolutely absurd how many trillions of dollars we dump into making automobiles work, even if they make no sense.
No - it is a subsidy to make life more convenient than either the purchaser or shop is willing to pay for. If the shop needs people to arrive in cars, then it’s worth it to them to put in parking.
And parking minimums are constantly criticized for being higher than necessary. How could they possibly not be higher than necessary in a significant percentage of use cases, when they don’t allow anyone to say “we don’t serve people who arrive at my locavore socialist workers co-op by car so we don’t need parking” - instead they get the same amount of parking as any other restaurant, which is too much.
Transit agencies are also capable of demand response. For example, you'll see more articulated busses at peak times in Austin. Also, large transit stops are used as queues to maintain consistent headways.
A great example of this in action happens each year for the Austin City Limits Festival [1]. A few routes have substantially more busses during those two weekends to deal with a couple hundred thousand extra passengers.
Yes. Buses are great at scaling up (much better than trains) for special events. They are bad at scaling down. A bus with less than a van-full of passengers is a huge waste of resources and roads space. In times of low utilization, buses shouldn't be blindly running their routes.
A bus route needs to run reliably all the time so that people can depend on it. There is little difference in the cost of running a large vs small bus so running a large bus all the time is almost always the best answer. And cities around the world discover that running reliable all day service means that you end up with more than enough passengers all day as to be worth it.
I'm not sure if that applies to Fiber connections. I had my own fun with a firmware update causing latency issues with ATT Fiber's gateways that was fixed several months later [1]. I was using the combo ONT + Router originally and had to switch to dedicated ONT.
I ended up extracting 802.1x certificates with this[2] or a similar tool and interfacing directly with the ONT using OPNSense [3]. I was so angry I filed an FTC complaint because I had to do this bypass to do my job (the latency was so bad).
This is a perfectly reasonable response during normal presidential administrations. However, this administration is credibly[1] accused of avoiding due process via the current deportation process.
I'll include a quote from the (9-0!) April 10th Supreme Court ruling[1] concerning the removal of Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from the United States to El Salvador.
> The Government’s argument, moreover, implies that it could deport and incarcerate any person, including U. S. citizens, without legal consequence, so long as it does so before a court can intervene.
Without a chance to demonstrate that someone is in the US legally (i.e., Due Process), the defense of this action can be that it's necessary to prevent the rendition of US citizens to El Salvador or elsewhere. That might sound crazy, but we already have an example of a US citizen being held in custody per an ICE request, despite having proof of being born in the US[2]. If both practices continue, we'll ultimately see the intersection at some point.
I’m pretty sure the conventional wisdom suggests inflation happens when countries don’t pay down their debt.
Increased money supply isn’t the only cause of inflation (e.g., stagflation). Uncertainty about how to price goods—especially for goods in the middle of supply chains—could cause supply disruptions. It’s a self-inflicted version of the Covid supply disruptions.
