It's worth reading up on Joseph Stiglitz's work in the 1970s that demonstrated how government spending in public goods is transformed exactly into land rents under many conditions.[0]
The author was addressing the opposite situation -- people using more than what they pay for.
> It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school"
A more similar analogy to what the author was pointing out would be that current taxpayers will receive more Social Security benefit over their lifetimes than the future value of their lifetime payments, meaning that the system is only financially sound if we assume the working population will grow at an appropriate rate such that we'll always have enough workers to pay for retirees.
Or, adjusting the analogies you provided: we are borrowing from other countries to pay for our schools and fire departments. This happens to be true. Is it bad? Unknown.
You could theoretically have one robot producing trillions of $ and tax that one robot and pay for everything.
That's one of the reasons why everyone's obsessed with growth, if the economy grows, the tax budget goes up without tax rates going up so the country can afford to pay for more stuff.
I think you (and probably the author) have got this exactly backwards. Sprawl creates blight when the rate of building outpaces the needs of population growth. The evil sprawlsters are creating new costs, but they aren't subsidizing old roads. The sprawl usually happens outside of long-ago drawn city borders, anyway.
If you have 5 families living in 5 houses in the urban core and you build 5 new houses for them to live in out in the suburbs, then population needs to double for there to be full occupancy.
As a case study, take a look at my home town of St. Louis. Much has been made about the city's population loss. But that's just in the urban core; the region's population has actually grown slightly over the last 40 years. It just hasn't grown fast enough to fill up all the new houses we've built out across the river.
The sprawlsters aren't subsidizing the old roads. They have completely abandoned them and are leaving them to nature.
At one point as our office space lease renewal was approaching I plotted all of our 100+ employees at the time on a map, almost all software engineers, about 2/3 of them lived west of the city and 1/3 lived east, and only a single one lived in the city, and he was in a temporary apartment immediately post divorce, didn't get the house. To me that says 99+% of professionals don't want to live in the city. Our first office plan had been to put one in the city, but the earnings tax on our side and the employee's side was a deal breaker for a business with payroll as its predominant expense. So instead we got an office on each side of the river and teleported across the city as needed with the interstate highway system.
Says who? I'd rather live on this street than anywhere in the County:
http://limitlessplanetstl.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/06/Laf...
More:
https://www.google.com/search?q=lafayette+square&espv=2&biw=...
St. Louis as a region has a problem with the sort of divisions that allowed you to avoid the earnings tax by locating outside of city limits that were myopically drawn in 1876.
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(But, if I must comment on the earnings tax -- and I really can't help myself -- I'll simply say that a 1% tax is not enough to dissuade a professional earning a professional's income from living where they truly want to live or working where they truly want to work. To the extent that a 1% tax actually is a deal-breaker, it's a symptom of a much larger disease.)
The government is not a bank. You're not supposed to "get out what you put in" or "pay for what you use." The government provides things for the public good: roads, education, police, military, etc.
Of course some government is a Ponzi scheme in the sense that some people "pay for more than they use." That's called progressive taxation. So if the evil sprawlsters are subsidizing the older roads...so what? The evil sprawlsters can afford it.
It would be just as ridiculous to write an article about how "people with children in schools aren't paying the cost of the school" or good grief even "people who have a fire aren't paying the cost of the fire department." Roads are provided for the public good.
So it really doesn't matter that the author doesn't even address the fact that many of these supposedly deadbeat property owners are paying a whole bunch of taxes that are keeping the city of Ames afloat, along with its supposedly inaccurate road tax scheme.