For 4 years. Then it halves again. And again. People have this distant figure of "2140" in their head as when the subsidy goes to zero and we can just kick the can down the road and we don't really need to care about fees until then, but in reality most people using bitcoin today are going to live to see the point when the subsidy becomes negligible. It's only going to take 20 years for the block subsidy to fall below 0.1 BTC. Even if we think bitcoin will be $100,000, then you are down to only $10k per block which is around 2-3% of what miners are earning right now per block. And it only goes down from there. Unless you believe bitcoin is going to be worth $10 million or more within in the next 20-30 years, we need a competitive fee market.
That's true but we should discuss that and the options to increase miners revenue when the issue arises in 10-30 years from now. If by then we decided that turning Bitcoin to cloud storage and to increase the fees by a spam attack is the way to go, then so be it. It would be trivial to loosen the policy rules to allow that.
Today and in the near future we don't need that though. And that's why I disagree with bringing up miners revenue at this stage.