America’s forgotten towns: Can they be saved or should people just leave?

[nmoore63]

There’s that 0.001% of roads not built by government.

Wait.

Actually, it looks like the Russian government did fund the building of that road - the drug cartels only repaired it.

Still, I bet some of the streets on the Microsoft Campus were probably made by Microsoft. Like, maybe the one or two blocks between building 28 and building 10.
Maybe.

Or ... KING County might have billed us for those too. Hard to tell.

One could make the same case that most roads were simply built by people walking and then the government simply repaired them to make them paved or whatever.

[Speaker to Animals]

... or whatever...

[nmoore63]

Most Roman Roads were built over the footpaths already made by those before.

Some weren't.

Certainly modern American government and urban planning create brand new roads all the time.

[DBTrek]

If a footpath were a road, then Fife was on point when he talked about deer “roads”.
So ... you two enjoy your “deer road” civilization together and I’ll stick to the actual roads that aren’t lightly trampled grass.
Thanks.

[nmoore63]

The smuggler ones look quite nice.

[Okeefenokee]

They built a winn dixie with the parking lot right on top of a deer road back home. There was a deer traffic jam in the parking lot every morning at deer rush hour. They closed it down, and it's been sitting empty for like fifteen years.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Very simple to fix, but it will never happen.
Stop subsidizing Big Ag, and let people develop their own food business. Stop limiting opportunity for small farmers, and decentralize the food chain.

Rural towns need their own industry, for everything else to feed off of. Without that, they’re all just servicing each other right down the drain. The move to cities will have to continue, because there’s no other choice.

You work for the local farm conglomerate/mining concern, or you slowly die along with the town.

[Speaker to Animals]

Agreed. I think we need to stop the agricultural subsidies, but we also need to eliminate or provide exemptions to the inheritance taxes that make passing along family farms very difficult for families with small farms. We should also consider a homestead act that will purchase these huge farms from the corporations, divide them up, and work out some kind of mortgage system to provide to qualified applicants who want to start small farms.

Returning to a sustainable and robust agricultural system takes a lot more than simply ending the subsidies. This system has been going on for a century now. It's very difficult to undo the damage.

[SuburbanFarmer]

Agreed. I think we need to stop the agricultural subsidies, but we also need to eliminate or provide exemptions to the inheritance taxes that make passing along family farms very difficult for families with small farms. We should also consider a homestead act that will purchase these huge farms from the corporations, divide them up, and work out some kind of mortgage system to provide to qualified applicants who want to start small farms.

Returning to a sustainable and robust agricultural system takes a lot more than simply ending the subsidies. This system has been going on for a century now. It's very difficult to undo the damage.

Inheritance tax doesn’t kick in until $5m in assets. That’s way more than most small farms are worth. At that point, you’ve got enough to pay the tax anyway, and still take the farm.

[Speaker to Animals]

Agreed. I think we need to stop the agricultural subsidies, but we also need to eliminate or provide exemptions to the inheritance taxes that make passing along family farms very difficult for families with small farms. We should also consider a homestead act that will purchase these huge farms from the corporations, divide them up, and work out some kind of mortgage system to provide to qualified applicants who want to start small farms.

Returning to a sustainable and robust agricultural system takes a lot more than simply ending the subsidies. This system has been going on for a century now. It's very difficult to undo the damage.

Inheritance tax doesn’t kick in until $5m in assets. That’s way more than most small farms are worth. At that point, you’ve got enough to pay the tax anyway, and still take the farm.

It still impacts them because most farms are now operating as corporations that a small family wholly owns rather than a "family farm", and real estate speculation can raise the value of the land well above the exemption, especially when you consider all the capital assets associated with the farm. The land a farm operates on can potentially be worth far more than the farm actually produces annually.

This happens mostly near urban areas (like the outermost suburbs of a metropolitan area), which are exactly the kinds of areas we should be protecting as farmland in order to keep that metropolitan area sustainable. The pursuit of economic efficiency leads to fragility in some cases, and this is one of them.

The most economically efficient outcome is not always the rational outcome.