The tax base in the Japanese countryside is rapidly collapsing and the public money used to prop up railways at the end of the day comes out of the same pot of taxpayer money that's used to fund schools, hospitals, etc. Personally, I'm a huge railfan, but it's still absurd to spend $3m/year to serve commuters that would easily fit in a single minibus.
The Japanese might have done but I hadn't so i looked it up. Here is a summary in case anyone else was in my position:
" Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is a heterodox macroeconomic framework that says monetarily sovereign countries like the U.S., U.K., Japan, and Canada, which spend, tax, and borrow in a fiat currency that they fully control, are not operationally constrained by revenues when it comes to federal government spending.
Put simply, such governments do not rely on taxes or borrowing for spending since they can print as much as they need and are the monopoly issuers of the currency. Since their budgets aren’t like a regular household’s, their policies should not be shaped by fears of rising national debt.
MMT challenges conventional beliefs about how the government interacts with the economy, the nature of money, the use of taxes, and the significance of budget deficits. These beliefs, critics say, are a hangover from the gold standard era and are no longer accurate, useful, or necessary.
MMT is used in policy debates to argue for such progressive legislation as universal healthcare and other public programs for which governments claim to not have enough money to fund. "
Surely you agree that public service should deliver good service to as many people as possible ? Burning resources on a service from which very few benefit (that's what low ridership means) is not conducive to that. Those resources should be deployed elsewhere.
It’s easy for this example but usually the line is way more blurry
Currently richer areas already subsidize plenty of things like roads, airplane routes and many other services. It’s figuring out below what number of users it is when it is no longer appropriate