You distinctly referenced age thirty, at which age a large proportion of working age passengers never had access to a railcard discount.
No you chose 30 as the starting age for your proposal.
I find this line of argument completely meaningless as a way for arbitrarily deciding a railcard boundary.
All boundaries are arbitrary, a line has to be drawn somewhere.
Infact, if you're helping people with a cost of living crisis, it makes sense to provide that support to areas with lower growth.
No it makes sense to support people on the costs that are causing the crisis, does a person heat or eat? Can they afford to get to and from work?
The support for areas with lower growth needs to go on improving their growth.
They are two different objectives.
In an unequal city, there will be many people just about managing for whom a railcard will be more useful than a £2 bus fare. They may have relatives elsewhere in Anglia for example.
Some may have relatives elsewhere, but, even if they did, a railcard won't be more useful than the £2 bus cap.
If you take your argument to its extreme, no blanket railcards make sense. There will be some wealthy pensioners with a fixed income who don't need a discount. Similarly, there will be people in their fifties struggling to find additional employment.
By contrast, I and most sensible people recognise that a blanket railcard holds various advantages in terms of reach, simplicity of administration and product understandability
In many spending decisions there is a balance to strike between universality and means testing, with politics and economics both coming into play. Economically there may be a case for means testing, but that has economic costs, means testing needs bureaucracy, and political costs, as winter fuel allowance demonstrated. However desirable it might be to means test the senior railcard, it would be a brave politician to try to implement it, and the savings would probably be less than the cost of the means testing. That's why the original July 2024 winter fuel allowance proposal used a pre-existing means test.
So for something like a railcard, it makes economic and political sense to offer it universally above an arbitrarily fixed age, and not at all below that age. That keeps the economics costs down, and the political costs down too. It is the way government works.
Blanket railcards do offer the advantages that you describe, those are necessary conditions but they are not sufficient. Most sensible people don't support a railcard for 30-60 year olds because it is a cost on the taxpayer that the country can't afford, and targeted on a group of people who need it least. The winter fuel allowance saga also demonstrates that, once a concession is given, it is very difficult to remove, so, in the current financial circumstances, the government has to be very cautious about offering any new concessions. PIP and SEND are classic examples of what can happen if a policy has open ended cost implications that turn out to be bigger than forecast, but very difficult to remove.
Ah there we go - a few posts ago, you were celebrating the variety of passengers using the train, now we're back to rail users being rich and bus users being poor.
This whole narrative is grossly over simplified and is nothing but an excuse for those who want to justify sky high rail fares.
I don't pity Cambridge at all - it's got plenty going for it. I just recognise that a lot of its residents would benefit more from a national railcard, than they would from failed kitchen sink economics.
There is a mix of bus users and a mix of rail users, nobody is excluded from either. But more people squeezed by the cost of living crisis are bus users than train users. In Cambridge that's clearly obvious from the postcodes: the poorest parts of the city are on the bus routes and not near the rail stations. The people in Cambridge squeezed by the cost of living crisis in Cambridge will benefit far more from the £2 bus cap than they would from a railcard.
It is you who thinks that the railway is a rich man's toy: if that's the case, then it is those rich men who would most benefit from your proposed railcard.
And what is kitchen sink economics when its at home?
You love repeating this, but it does not mean what you think it does. I could equally say that people pay almost exactly the same tax rates across all of England and Wales, and yet far more public spending goes in the South East of England than anywhere else. Arguably the subsidy is economic not financial, and is flowing the opposite way to the way you think.
No. London produces far more GDP per head and has many more higher rate taxpayers than elsewhere. Remember that 75% of the tax take comes from income tax, NICs, corporation tax and VAT, all of them taxes on economic activity.
Everyone receives almost exactly the same NHS services for example no matter where they are in the country. People are entitled to them, because it's been paid for with their money.
Rail and the NHS are not equivalent. The NHS is a universal service free at the point of use, the railway is not. People are only entitled to a rail journey once they have bought a ticket.
The money from the current budget would simply be banked and spent elsewhere, not on transport.
Which is what needs to happen, the government has higher priorities than transport.
that many European countries also recognise.
What other European countries do is irrelevant. Their financial circumstances are different, in particular they have the advantage of much lower interest costs through being in the Euro.
But I am saying that you are mistaken about borrowing and growth. Expanded capacity is urgently needed. There's no possibility to offer this without big spend on infrastructure. There's no viable funding model for that other than government borrowing secured against future growth.
And this is what we should be discussing. The railway has almost no part to play in the cost of living crisis, but it has a huge part to play in loosening the shackles on economic growth. Part of that is big Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects, like Trans Pennine Route Upgrade and East West Rail, but now there is also greater prospects for smaller projects prioritised locally.
Provided the borrowing is spent on generative pursuits. Decades of deficit spending above annual economic growth rates suggests this hasn't always been the case. Capital markets have now lost confidence hence government borrowing at 5%.
Which is why the railway needs to reduce its operating costs deficit. The bond markets need to be convinced that the borrowing is for capital projects that deliver future economic growth, not cack-handed schemes that only show that the railway and the government don't have current spending under control.
Do you have some data sources for that? And what exactly is meant by "earning potential"?