Sure, you can’t completely disentangle those things. But providing services to far-out communities takes a disproportionate amount of resources; if we pretend that it doesn’t and make it seem just as cheap as living in urban areas, we’re just encouraging more people to move out there who don’t need to. We’ve already got a ton of crumbling infrastructure and that’s in part because we’ve built too much of it to possibly maintain and it’s catching up to us.

I’m not saying I have all the answers, but something has to give.

I'm not sure "we built too much of it" as much as we failed to anticipate or account for trends such as urbanization. Anyway, it's probably more productive and less prone to chauvinism to frame it as prioritizing high value/cost infrastructure rather than morally upright urbanites subsidizing lazy, freeloading rural people (I'm exaggerating here for effect, but that's often the tone that this framing conveys whether or not it's intended). That said, I fully support gradually decommissioning the lowest value/cost infrastructure.

Does the argument require all this bellyaching when it seems as simple as “only urban residents should pay for urban services” and “only rural residents should pay for rural services”?

Yes. Because it's just not that simple. Society requires interplay among individuals. That's the entire idea behind a society. We work together for the greatest good for the greatest number of people. We don't splinter and ignore the needs of others.

In theory, urban pays for theirs and rural pays for theirs is fine. But how do goods get between urban centers? Is it magicked there, or is it brought via rail and road that goes through rural areas?

And then what is my incentive, as a rural resident, to listen to the voices of the individuals in the urban areas when it comes to matters like state laws? Why not get rid of those, because the impact of people who have zero input into my life is wildly disproportionate because there are so many of them? They don't pay for anything out here, so why should they get to tell me who is in charge?

Again, there isn't a clean way to do this, because we are all connected, and we are acutely aware of it. I would argue that's what separates us from animals.

I assume you don't actually think our taxes should be binned into distinct "urban" and "rural" pots, but are rather advocating for moving the burden for services away from the federal level and towards the local level? If so, that sounds like a fine idea but you might have a hard time getting Democrats on board.

In general, I would like to see money and decisions moved as local as possible; however, doing so can have some obvious efficiency and collective action problems. As the other poster refers to, slicing the pie on shared/interdependent resources also is a challenge.