Recently Hillary presented a small part of her stilted economic plan. In the plan she proposed a tiered form of capital gains with a high initial tax declining over several years. She was ostensibly mimicking the few above average IQ people around her who complain that corporations don’t have long term thinking. ‘Corporate goals are only quarterly earnings.’
I know of nothing with the short term horizon of government. Government is always trying to institutionalize the past into rigid concrete. That is why unions and the Democrat Party are so compatible.
The blatant issue that confronts me today and raises this issue is the government of San Francisco and many other cities where the planners see a transportation future consisting of bicycles, buses and other forms of public transportation. The advantage of public transport is the efficiency of large numbers of people moved over a narrow space.
It is typical in these overplanned environments to reduce the number of parking garages and space to store autos.
In San Francisco, a new downtown residential building might have 200 units and less than 180 parking spaces. The building will probably have over 380 residents. That means the people buying the multi-million dollar units have to rent parking spaces at $10,000 a year nearby.
The real short term problem is that when a workable taxi system, like Uber, comes along to offer a dramatic new way to transport people without adding cars to the City, the City fights it. The same is true for Car-to-go a system where you pick-up a nearby car, drive it and leave it at your destination. Banned in San Francisco. Private buses in the City have been banned. They were introduced to service people who are dressed for work and don’t want to sit next to a smelly indigent. The same is true for all the hourly and short term car rental services. Little or no accommodation in providing spaces in good locations.
Worst of all, the long haul private buses to take people to work outside the city on routes where there are no public buses and no rail lines, are being taxed and harassed. These buses allow the city to grow with internal residential population while businesses and giant facilities located outside the cramped city.
The very technologies that reduce the public need for private cars and enhance the future with fewer autos is precisely the technologies that governments and planners thwart.
The government really has no capacity for seeing their own best future interests.