Making buses free is the opposite of public investment in transit. It's disinvestment. The NYC bus system collects just under a billion dollars a year in bus fares. If you eliminate the bus fares, you are slashing the transit budget by a billion dollars.

You misunderstand the point. You obviously can't cut $1 billion from the transit budget without finding $1 billion to replace it. Tax the f()cking rich. I think the public can find better use of Bezos billions than renting out Venice for his second wedding or sending a hen party to space. Poor people aren't the only source of revenue for public goods. We need to reverse the discourse around taxation and refocus it on public investment. Hedge fund and tech billionaires continue to destroy public goods by privatizing public spaces and defunding public investment through confiscatory tax policy (confiscating public goods by defunding public investments through tax givaways to billionaires). We should be tapping Ackman's billions for the public benefit rather than continuing to let him muzzle academic freedom because he's rich enough to muzzle academic freedom.

The democratic party lost its way in the 1990's when it abandoned the working class in favor of chumming it up with wealthy socially liberal elites. Once the party became dependent on the billionaire money stream it lost the ability to engage in a meaningful discourse around the root problems facing working people in America today--unfettered capitalism and the corresponding concentration of wealth. Not only is a discourse not possible, a political strategy for addressing the causes and consequences of the growing inequality has become impossible for the Clintonite wing of the party. You say so yourself with these ridiculous assumptions about user financed public transit systems.

Get your head out of Clinton's arse and see where the democratic party needs to go if it is to continue to be relevant, and help figure out how it's going to get there in the face of the resistance of organized billionaires. We are witness to a brutal class war in America today. The time for polite resistance is over.