This weekly roundup thread is intended for all culture war posts. 'Culture war' is vaguely defined, but it basically means controversial issues that fall along set tribal lines. Arguments over culture war issues generate a lot of heat and little light, and few deeply entrenched people ever change their minds. This thread is for voicing opinions and analyzing the state of the discussion while trying to optimize for light over heat.
Optimistically, we think that engaging with people you disagree with is worth your time, and so is being nice! Pessimistically, there are many dynamics that can lead discussions on Culture War topics to become unproductive. There's a human tendency to divide along tribal lines, praising your ingroup and vilifying your outgroup - and if you think you find it easy to criticize your ingroup, then it may be that your outgroup is not who you think it is. Extremists with opposing positions can feed off each other, highlighting each other's worst points to justify their own angry rhetoric, which becomes in turn a new example of bad behavior for the other side to highlight.
We would like to avoid these negative dynamics. Accordingly, we ask that you do not use this thread for waging the Culture War. Examples of waging the Culture War:
-
Shaming.
-
Attempting to 'build consensus' or enforce ideological conformity.
-
Making sweeping generalizations to vilify a group you dislike.
-
Recruiting for a cause.
-
Posting links that could be summarized as 'Boo outgroup!' Basically, if your content is 'Can you believe what Those People did this week?' then you should either refrain from posting, or do some very patient work to contextualize and/or steel-man the relevant viewpoint.
In general, you should argue to understand, not to win. This thread is not territory to be claimed by one group or another; indeed, the aim is to have many different viewpoints represented here. Thus, we also ask that you follow some guidelines:
-
Speak plainly. Avoid sarcasm and mockery. When disagreeing with someone, state your objections explicitly.
-
Be as precise and charitable as you can. Don't paraphrase unflatteringly.
-
Don't imply that someone said something they did not say, even if you think it follows from what they said.
-
Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.
On an ad hoc basis, the mods will try to compile a list of the best posts/comments from the previous week, posted in Quality Contribution threads and archived at /r/TheThread. You may nominate a comment for this list by clicking on 'report' at the bottom of the post and typing 'Actually a quality contribution' as the report reason.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
A Live Fire Experiment in UBI
This is a link to the 2026 Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority (WMATA) Budget.
Note: I'll make number page references to it throughout this post. This means when I say "p. 6" I mean the page that has "6" in its lower left or right hand corner, not the page number in your browser's PDF viewer.
1. WMATA is not self sustaining.
WMATA annually serves 268 million riders and makes approximately $2.03 in revenue per rider. Their revenue is ~$545 million, which is 1/10th of their budget. (p.1) By comparison, New York's MTA makes up about 35% of its operating budget via fares and tolls. 23% is from fares alone. (Note: I'm pretty sure I'm doing a mostly apples-to-apples comparison here. I'd be thankful if anyone finds that I am not and can point out any error.)
Public transit in the US is always a money losing operation. Everywhere, it is existentially dependent on taxes for basic operational support, let alone capital improvements or system expansion. The idea, however, is that providing a low cost transportation system "pays for itself" (indirectly) by providing more economic dynamism and potential for growth in a given area. Therefore, at best, and most charitably, public transportation is a public good in the textbook economic theory sense.
There are, however, economists who would debate the ROI of public transportation and more still who would question the efficiency with which the tax dollars that fund public transportation are spent. This leads us to;
2. WMATA cannot pay its own employees
ALL of WMATA's revenue can only pay for about 31% of personnel costs (p.6). Total personnel costs for FY2026 is forecast at $1.746 bn (compared to a forecast revenue of approx $545 mm). This personnel cost is separate from "services", materials, fuels, utilities, casualties and liability, leases, and miscellaneous. It is, by far, the single largest expense. "Personnel" is 6.6x the size of the second place "services less paratransit." Combining the two different "services" line items, Personnel is still 4.16x the size. Personnel expenses represent almost 70% of operating expenses for WMATA, whereas NY's MTA (link above) pegs theirs at 58% of operating expenses.
Grim, to say the least. To keep this post focused, I'm not going to go into a detailed analysis of WMATA's performance. Suffice it to say, however, that it is notorious for being late, delayed, always running incomplete or rerouted service due to maintenance and repair issues, and highly vulnerable to fair evasion. For a while over the past 5 - 10 years, WMATA stations were notorious for often catching on fire.
3. WMATA's tax based funding is pure redistributionism
Page 10 shows the operating subsidy for the key areas that support WMATA:
For some context, with the exception of Prince George's county, all of these municipalities have median household incomes well over $100,000. The Virginia counties (not cities) rank in the top 10 of income for the entire country nearly every year.
The net operating contribution of all of these subsidies is about $1.996bn, about 14% more than the $1.746bn necessary to meet the "Personnel" operating budget.
Looking at the contributions by municipality, and without digging into service levels (i.e. number of trains and buses) versus population and/or tax base in each one, it doesn't look like anyone is getting "hosed." The only thing that sticks out to me is that metroBUS subsidy in Prince George's County seems meaningfully higher than elsewhere.
Staying focused on personnel, however, it is remarkable how close the local area subsidy is to that personnel budget figure.
** 4. Analysis and Opinion **
I think WMATA can best be thought of as a jobs program that redistributes tax money from several local jurisdictions to its 13,646 employees (p.19). That's an average "personnel" cost per employee of about $127, 949.58.
Then, using a combination of federal grants, about $800 mn of debt issuance, and its modest $545mn of revenue, it then actually finances, you know, running the trains and buses on time. Except that service, as stated before, is notoriously sub-par.
As an interesting comparative, the DC localized Federal Gov't Pay Scale link here would put $127,000 towards the lower steps of the GS-13 level. For anyone who has had exposure to Federal Contracting in the Northern VA, Southern MD, DC area, a GS-13 is pretty much where a white collar professional with anywhere from 5 - 10+ years of experience ends up depending on technical skill, advanced degrees, security clearance level, etc. It isn't a particularly special pay grade. GS-14 is where the "adults" live and GS-15 is meaningful (it's the equivalent to a colonel in the U.S. army in terms of seniority alone).
Now, to be fair, the $127k cost for WMATA employees is almost certainly salary plus benefits, whereas the GS scale is straight salary. Also, I will note that my $127k calculation is an average instead of a median. A WMATA bus driver isn't going to be anywhere near $127k. Still, I think the rough comparison is still informative.
WMATA is a jobs program for 13,000 people. It sinks tax dollars from some of the most wealthy parts of the country - and Prince George's county - into a workforce that fails to perform the basics. Its operating model - I hesitate to call it a business model - is so poor that it can only generate 1/10th of the revenue needed to keep itself afloat. The positive externalities it generates for the DC area economy are questionable because most of the local economy is inextricably tied into Federal dollars already - mostly through direct federal contracting. For the outer suburbs - Northern Montgomery County, Fairfax County, Loudoun County, Falls Church, western Alexandria City - Metro stations and bus stops are so spread out and so infrequently serviced that people living there will definitely have a car. Traffic on 495, 66, 270, and 50 are testament to this.
Thinking ahead to discussions about UBI, I think that the WMATA example is a far more accurate preview of what a UBI program would actually look like; horribly inefficient government allocation of capital for do nothing jobs but at a level of "basic income" that is actually quite high.
A simple plan like "government check for $1k shows up in your bank account every month" is still a very shaky proposition. The quick math there is something like 220 million working age adults x $1k per month x 12 months = $2.2 trillion per year. This is about 1/3rd of the total federal budget. And this is assuming incredibly minimal overhead. Would that be the case, or would the "Department of American Income" be staffed with, oh, let's say about 13,000 "administrators" who each make between $100k - $125k? The IRS has about 90,000 employees, for reference
Furthermore, the WMATA example is also an example of the PMC-Bureucratic machine carrying out its mission perfectly. That is to say invisibly. Who really cares about a $5bn budget of a regional transit system besides turbo autists on internet forums? Ho-hum. Boring. But then you dig in and see that this is $129k/employee being siphoned away from the tax payers in suburban areas. It's wealth redistribution in exchange for political patronage and non-productive labor activity. It's a serfdom of laziness and fealty at the ballot box. And that' the end state for UBI in the American political-economy.
Further a substantial portion of their fare revenue is federal government transit benefits. It's standard for federal agencies to reimburse transit costs.
More options
Context Copy link
Does this show the weakness of UBI or weakness of American administrative capacity? California can't do HSR but HSR is still possible. In many countries public transport is perfectly usable, respectable, junkie-free...
Also if we're talking about UBI how hard can it be to get a robot to drive the buses and trains and cut down labour costs? I agree that UBI in the current American political system would be a giant mess. But that's not so much about UBI but about the American system.
More options
Context Copy link
You're confusing UBI with "Bullshit Jobs" both of which are actually quite different. In bullshit jobs the workers still need to show up to the office and pretend to work in order to collect a check, while in UBI people can go out and party and still collect their check.
With regards to cost, having a metro train is a special case, but you can compare wmata's cost per revenue mile to what it would cost to outsource it to some contract operator like veolia or whatever. I wouldn't be surprised if they are horrifically incompetent but I'd imagine the numbers are not as bad as you think.
In terms of profit, buses aren't meant to make a profit, for better or for worse. We don't live in ancapistan so we have to accept some government services given away at below market rates, such as buses, running water, streetlights, roads, etc.
As a side note, society might be much better off if the UBI laws required that people had to do some kind of busy work in order to collect their check.
For example, suppose one way you could get your UBI was by playing Fortnight for 6 hours a day. The requirement would arguably give people a much greater feeling of meaning in their lives (even if the work is ultimately meaningless) and it would also keep them off the streets.
More options
Context Copy link
A fun thought experiment is analyzing everything concretely done in an economic sector and redoing the cluster analysis. Existing clusters (companies) should be profitable and do many unprofitable things along the way (which they might argue ultimately help the bottom line) but you can reslice in different ways to share some services or remove things which merely compete without value add (e.g. advertising to counter the competition's ads). It's a bit difficult to determine what's ultimately accreative economic activity, just looking at the current clustering.
In a different world, with better policing/less crime making public transit more user friendly and with some union busting, to allow low hanging cost savings like train automation, the relative subsidies could fall while the social benefit grows - and the overall economy would waste less on transportation: roads are one thing, but car's depreciate quickly. Just imagine where we'd be with 7 decades of compounded investments instead!
Beware. If you do such analysis thoroughly with full historical perspective, if you follow all tracks and climb through all rabbit holes, you find out that not only our current system has nothing in common with "free market", that corporations and state institutions are just different tentacles of the same monster, and it has was always that been that way in all recorded history.
Persevere enough, and you will see yourself swiftly moving from right bottom corner to left bottom corner of political compass, you will be throwing away black-gold flags and portraits of Ayn Rand and replacing them black-red banners and pictures of more imposing Russians
Except then you'll know you screwed up massively somewhere along the way, because empirically Communism fucks up everything it touches. And regardless of the economic system, Russia is always fucked up.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
There are different kinds of not making a profit. If the expenses are reasonable, but the government wants to give it away at below expense, that's one kind. If the expenses are unreasonable, though, that's a "not making a profit" which should be unacceptable even for government services. Paying people to do nothing useful is in the latter category.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
That link technically doesn't claim anything was on fire even once (although the headline says a smoke scare) and certainly not twice (it says that an earlier "possible fire" was reported but that no fire was actually found.
You can actually check https://ismetroburning.com/ to see if it's currently on fire. Looks like no fires today!
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
Comparing this to UBI seems weird to me. My understanding is the point of UBI is that it's approximately unconditional. You get the money whatever your income or whether you have a job. By contrast, according to your budget link, the WMATA provided something like 268 million trips for its budget. Maybe you think the $19 or so per trip that works out to is not a good use of money, but it seems pretty far from the "nothing" the government gets in return for UBI! Maybe a better comparison would be some kind of guaranteed job program? No idea what the economic efficiency of programs like that work out to.
The thing you have to understand is the WMATA jobs aren't real jobs. They are UBI. Nobody there actually works. There was a major accident maybe 10 years ago. When they went over the inspection logs, they discovered that the same log had been photocopied for decades. I don't think they even updated the dates on the forms. It was shameless, haphazard, and nobody caught it, nobody cared, even after there was an accident and people died, nothing changed. A few people immediately responsible got fired. But then, bafflingly, they sued and got their jobs back.
If The System Is What It Does, WMATA is UBI with a rotting piece of infrastructure from the 70's attached as a hostage.
Well, I suppose it also lets criminals from DC spread throughout the countryside and victimize more people.
I mean, some of them presumably do their jobs. If I go to a WMATA operated stop a bus or train will come. With an operator who is a WMATA employee.
Based on reading your two links I don't think this characterizes the situation accurately? According to the second link:
1. Not updating measurements when the new measurement was within 1/8 of an inch was standard practice going all the way back to the 1970's.
2. The issue that ultimately lead to the train derailment was flagged by inspectors and had been for years.
3. They did change their training and practices after the derailment to improve them.
More options
Context Copy link
If you read your link it explains that measurements did not have to be updated if they were within 1/8 inch, so copying the old measurements is permissible.
That's their side of it.
What actually happened was a railroad tie was ignored until it was completely rotted out, and then a train derailed and people died.
"Within 1/8 inch" my ass. Just because that's the preposterous excuse they offer doesn't mean you have to believe it. Too much charity.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
UBI is definitionally giving income to people without conditions. Requiring them to work an (even fake) job is a very different thing, proponents of which (a "Job Guarantee") have a long history of feuding with UBI advocates. You might as well say any form of redistribution is a UBI.
I think a fake job that you never work and are entitled to no matter what and UBI are the same thing. What possible difference can you point to? They are both entitled to your money, do no work, and the right can seemingly never be revoked. The only difference is that one is a fiction to trick you into it, and the other is just straight forward. But since nobody can agree to UBI, the liars version gets rolled out instead.
That sound more like a standard Communist job than a UBI
"We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us".
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
The "U" in "UBI" is Universal. Not everyone can become a no-show WMATA employee.
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link
More options
Context Copy link