[dustintrex]

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.

[ant6n]

46ppl/km/day on a 38km line do not fit on a single minibus.

[TheOtherHobbes]

I assume the Japanese have heard of MMT?

[kwhitefoot]

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. "

By Deborah D'Souza, https://www.investopedia.com/modern-monetary-theory-mmt-4588...