Love me a good argument to absurdity.

Budget plan takes the edge off.

Well-known state where you get a return on your taxes, West Virginia

This is the most infuriating shit. We were promised 10-12 years ago that we'd have nearly free heating gas forever if we just let these companies fuck up our water and air. Now they're selling it all to Shell or compressing it and sending it overseas, and we get the awesome cancer risk with no upsides.

 
They promised us a bunch of good-paying jobs and they all went to road warriors from Texas and Oklahoma.

 
They promised landowners that they'd get lucrative lease agreements and they spun off their pipeline operations and charged themselves fees that they could take out of leaseholder payments.
 
I don't know how many times extractive industries have to shit on us before we figure out that they're all snakes, now and forever.

This is what happens when people complain about their taxes so much that the municipality starts cutting services out and/or privatizing them. The stuff your taxes used to cover turn into use fees.
 
City of Pittsburgh charges 1% EIT but you can throw damn near anything on the curb on trash day and they'll take it. In McCandless you're paying $70/bin every four months because they privatized that shit.

To be clear, higher education is good for society and good for everyone.
 
Gatekeeping access to the middle class by requiring people to go into six figures of debt to make $60K a year, not so much.
 
We need to make higher public education free for all who want it and be done with it.

California's prices are irrelevant to whether or not Washington state's prices went up after the state system was privatized.
 
No business is going to charge you less than you've already proven you'll pay.
 
Privatization has been a massive failure everywhere it's been tried, but this time it'll work for real.

Yes, the state fees in Washington are making it more expensive to buy booze from the businesses than it was to buy liquor from the state itself. That's definitely it, and not just businesses colluding and taking profits.

 
Businesses will never charge you less for a product than you've already shown a willingness to pay, and you're a fool if you think privatization will bring about cheaper liquor.

The companies will just pricefix and collude just like companies collude on everything else, and the state will do nothing about it.
 

Washington privatized their liquor system and prices went up.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2017/dec/13/5-years-after-privatization-washington-liquor-sale/

Yeah, traveling to spite buy doesn't save these people money any more than driving to West Virginia to fill their tank does for people in the western part of the state. It's just performative BS.

If they ever privatize, the businesses that replace the state stores will have no pressure to reduce prices, either. Why charge you less than you've already shown you'll pay?

You're aware that downtown Pittsburgh is the second largest concentration of jobs in the state, with Oakland representing #3, right?
 
If you're driving out to Butler County from the city every day for a job, you are doing that by choice, not because there are no other options. You have chosen to take a job so far from where you live and you choose to drive 50 miles a day.

 
Building society around supporting the poor choices is a recipe for failure. As we can see with the current state of carcentric development, sprawl, pollution, etc.
 
People who choose to drive fifty miles a day when alternatives exist get zero sympathy from me when they complain about how expensive the life they've chosen is.
 
> It sounds like you’re either independently wealthy or a rich kid who doesn’t need to worry about balancing income to cost of living

 
There are neighborhoods on public transit lines in the city with median house costs under $200K, "everyone who isn't commuting 50 miles a day like me must be rich" is a lie you tell yourself to feel better about your choices.

 
According to your post history, you own a lot of guns. Guns are expensive. If you bought fewer toys and lived within your means you wouldn't have to commute fifty miles a day.

"Everyone should drive a car forever and there are definitely no downsides. Gasoline and other resources are unlimited!"

 
The personal automobile is a dead end. The sooner we move away from it the better.

Automobiles and the gas that fuels them are tremendously destructive and should be taxed as much as the market will bear to discourage driving.

😂😂😂😂😂

Today I learned that the only jobs to be had are in Cranberry.

 
Living far away from your job is a choice.

Did you watch that documentary yet?

 

The electorate has a whole host of problems that we'd like to see addressed. This incoming House of Representatives is going to spend two years talking about Hunter Biden's dick instead. What the people vote for and what the people get are two very different things.

Medicare for all and legal marijuana are two of the most popular policies in America, across all sides of the political spectrum. They're never getting instituted because Washington represents the rich, not you or me.
 
The choice to strand white people out in segregated, car-dependent country estates was a deliberate policy decision that has been incredibly destructive to the American countryside and American way of life, but it benefited the right people and that's why it was done.

 
When you've got a spare hour or so, watch this:
https://www.kpbs.org/news/2022/01/24/independent-lens-owned-a-tale-of-two-americas

Nobody owes you a free superhighway to make your poor life choices easier to bear.
 
If you can't afford it, don't use it. No one is forcing you to use it.

A few months back the news had a huge guy in a huge truck complaining about the cost of gas. He pointed at his similarly oversized son and said, "gas is so expensive I can't buy him a bag of chips anymore!!!" I don't think his kid needs more chips.

The US is a plutocracy and always has been. Decisions are made with a mind to how the rich benefit, and autocentric development has worked out really good for them.

In the post-WW2 era, the United States (via FHA) made a conscious decision to channel white people into artificial car-dependent country estates, and channel non-white people into city housing developments like Cabrini Green.
 
The United States also made the decision, via tax policy, to incentivize businesses to relocate near these artificial housing developments at the cost of cities. Surburban shopping malls were an accelerated depreciation scheme.

 
People did not choose to live this way and drive 40 miles a day organically, the government made it happen.

The cool thing about the phrase "virtue-signalling" is that you can safely assume that anyone using it is a psychopath and ignore them.

Maybe she'll do 45 mph next time.

We're about fifteen years into nationwide oppositional defiant disorder, too. If someone with authority says that we should maybe cut down on the amount of gas we consume, 30% of the country will buy extra gas to pour into a ditch out of spite. Great country we've got.