How does all the food grown in rural areas make it into cities? Not by teleportation; by being loaded into semis, driven on roads, using gas. There's a cost. When roads get worse, when gas is more expensive; food gets more expensive; and it gets more expensive for cities more than it gets more expensive for rural areas.
That's... subsidizing. For cities. We live in an interconnected economic system. The fact that cities make more tax revenue, then export some of that tax revenue to rural areas to support their public infrastructure, does not mean cities are subsidizing rural areas. It means that cities need rural areas to survive, or at the very least, to keep costs affordable.
