De Blasio Postpones Work on Crucial Water Tunnel
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
> In one of the most significant milestones for the city’s water supply in nearly a century, the tunnel — authorized in 1954, begun in 1970 and considered the largest capital construction project ever undertaken in the five boroughs — will for the first time be equipped to provide water for all of Manhattan. Since 1917, the borough has relied on Tunnel No. 1, which was never inspected or significantly repaired after its opening.
> “When I came into office,” Mr. Bloomberg said, “I asked, ‘What could literally close down this city?’ And a water tunnel failure would have really done that.”
Manhattan is safe now, but eliminating the possibility of instantly plunging half of the most important city into the third world is more important than any of his other projects. This needs to cost him the election.
It's happened before when the issue was much bigger problem. Now it is less. I am sure it will cost him next to nothing.
http://gothamist.com/2016/04/06/de_blasio_diggin_tunnels.php...
In the wider context it comes down to politics. A congress critter can buy more votes per million in Georgia than New York. Thus, wealthy areas trade political power for money. Arguably, most people agree with this by caring less about a subway stop than healthcare reform or whatever.
Also from an economic standpoint shrinking NYC is a good idea. We are better off spreading investment to other areas than trying to build ever taller buildings and ever deeper subways. People look at the 'big dig' as horribly wasteful, but large projects in huge old city's are simply vastly more complex.
You could certainly corrupt some people randomly sampled from the American population, but you would also get the cops called on you, your face punched, sent to the ER with a cap in their ass, etc.
In the current system, you have to be the kind of person who can see the "clothes that belong to the Emperor" that are also "clothes that are invisible". If you pick out random people you will get some who call a spade a spade.
We trust it for juries, it's not too outlandish to think it could work for policy-making, too.
I would much rather change congress to be statewide elections to cut down on gerrymandering and make them proportional representation to put more states in play.
I don't think mixing across levels is a bad thing. I want the Senate to be answerable to the people in the state doing the budget.
> I would much rather change congress to be statewide elections to cut down on gerrymandering and make them proportional representation to put more states in play.
I strongly disagree with this one. You basically make sure no rural area has any representation again. Its like basing a Presidential election on popular vote, you get campaigns that run in 20 cities and tell many demographics to pound sand.
I want to make house of rep elections be fore an entire state too, this is one of the few ways to break gerrymandering.
They are swing states because of how the population votes and divides between people in the US. We are based on states and a direct vote would be a nightmare and go against the principles this country was founded on (Federal, State, People).
> I want to make house of rep elections be fore an entire state too, this is one of the few ways to break gerrymandering
At the cost of no actual representation for rural areas of a state, no thanks.
The whole point of having two houses in Congress is that they'll have a different dynamic. The Senate is supposed to be the more stodgy of the two that prevents crappy laws from getting passed, while the House is supposed to be the more agile one. The idea was copied directly from England's Parliament, with its House of Commons and House of Lords. The House of Commons directly represents the people and proposes most new legislation, while the House of Lords is full of unelected aristocrats who act like an overseer and limit what the other house can do. Over here, the House of Reps are directly elected by the people by "congressional district" and serve short terms, while the Senators were elected by state legislatures and served longer terms. The 17th Amendment changed it so Senators were elected directly by the people in each state. But the effect isn't that much different: they have longer terms, and they represent all the people in the state, not just a smaller district as Reps do.
Having the House members represent only their district is a good thing: if your district is a minority in your state (like if you live in rural, conservative California, or you live in liberal Austin, Texas), this means you're able to elect someone who represents you. If the reps were elected by everyone in the state, you wouldn't have any liberal Reps from Texas, nor any conservative ones from California. When you lump everyone together, it just creates disenfranchisement among minorities.
As for the prez, yeah, the current system with the Electoral College and first-past-the-post voting and party primaries is total crap. But personally, I think we should scrap the whole concept of having a President, and adopt something like Canada's system with a Parliament and a Prime Minister. With the PM elected by Parliament, there'd be little conflict between the executive and the legislative branches, and voters would concentrate only on voting for their own representatives and senators, and do a much better job of that than they do now.
But you're right, gerrymandering is a big problem. I wonder how other nations deal with that.
Of note you would still want more people in congess.
I feel fairly confident that the political industry would scale nicely to accommodate all those new puppets.
Instead of those population centers exerting their will upon the rest of the state, it would be better to have more & smaller political units that better represent their people.
What's needed is first to redraw the state borders. I have a post a little above this point outlining my plan for redrawing the borders in the northeast, which would effectively deal with the NYS-vs-NYC problem. Other state borders should also be redrawn. Metro areas should not span multiple states, ever.
For a good thought experiment on this idea, go read about "The 38 States" (google it). Some college kids in the 70s came up with this idea to redraw the borders more sensibly so that state borders reflected the local cultures better, and also to reduce the number of overall states for better administrative efficiency. It's only gotten worse since then, with metro areas getting so large and more urbanization of the population.
However, one big problem that would still remain is the urban vs. rural conflict. If we redraw borders so more city-dwellers are concentrated in their own city-states, this will give them less power in the Senate (their power in the House should stay the same as the number of Reps is assigned by population). Honestly, I don't know if that's good or bad. Sometimes I really wonder if we shouldn't just scrap our tricameral Presidential Republic form of government and switch to a Westminster parliament like every other advanced nation has. Those don't have the problem where the executive branch is at odds with the legislative branch resulting in a long government shutdown.
Another idea, Western oregon, Western Washington, and British Columnia should be combined into one state, or maybe their own country. We are pretty similar.
Yep, I've heard of that before. They call it "Ecotopia" or "Cascadia". I think the standard idea is to take northern California (probably not including the Bay Area, just wine country), OR/WA east of the Cascades, most of BC, and also some of Alaska and make that into an independent nation. Good luck getting both the US and Canada to agree to that though...
This is mostly wrong, but partly right.
In theory, larger cities are better: they have a lower carbon footprint, they're more efficient overall (people spend less time commuting when they're closer together), quality of life can be better (not spending all your time in a car, walking around a lot makes you healthier), plus economically you get big network effects from having everyone concentrated on one area. It's why Silicon Valley is so successful: all the companies are there, all the workers are there, creating a feedback loop.
Also, you can't just "spread investment" elsewhere. If you somehow convince one big finance firm to relocate out of NYC to Omaha, guess what? They're probably going to fail, hard. They need to be in that location because of those network effects I mentioned above. It's the same reason so many tech companies insist on staying in Silicon Valley: leaving causes them to miss out on the talent pool available there. For some, it's worth it: they're not doing anything all that cutting-edge, and the significantly lower salaries make it work. For others, it just isn't: they need the talent, no matter the cost.
However, you do have a point about "huge old cities". It's definitely much, much harder to build stuff in a densely-packed old city than just going somewhere unspoiled and building there. You have to secure rights to the land somehow (like eminent domain), you have to not mess up other stuff that's already there, etc. Unfortunately, though, "build it and they will come" doesn't work in real life most of the time. Sometimes it does, like in Oak Ridge TN with the Manhattan Project, but a normal city isn't like that where it's built solely to support some giant government project. Cities are organic in nature, and get that way mainly by historical reasons. There's no real reason so much of the finance industry needs to be in NYC, as opposed to Fargo ND. However, it's already there: all the buildings are there, all the people are there, all the computer systems are there, all the rest of the city needed to support all those people is there, all the infrastructure needed to support those people is there. Moving it all would be a monumental task. Even moving it to another large city that has more of the infrastructure in place would be a huge task, and would probably end up breaking things because so much of our economy is reliant on that industry and it can't handle being shut down for a year while we get everything moved.
Anyway, NYC is actually a pretty decent place to build taller buildings and deeper subways: geologically it's extremely stable and sits on a lot of bedrock, so you can build extremely tall, and dig very deep. Lots of places aren't like that; the ground isn't solid enough to do those kinds of projects. The main problem with NYC is that its elevation is very low and it easily floods in places. That could be fixed with some sea walls, plus maybe improving transit links to other places (like Brooklyn and Queens and Jersey City) so that more building moves over there where it's safer.
http://m.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/1-7b-streetcar-ro...
There are many theories of this, but I can tell you that if you had to page prevailing wage to build McMansions and you could pay a market wage to build optic fiber networks and roads you would find there would be a lot more fiber and better roads and that people would find they don't need a master bathroom that is 2/3 the size of the master bedroom.
The annual transit budget is immense compared to even the total cost of NYC Water Tunnel 3.
1. http://www.nyc.gov/html/nycwaterboard/html/home/home.shtml
If NY didn't exist, the same tax revenue would appear in some other city, whichever other stock exchange became dominant.
So it's perfectly fair that the tax revenue is reshuffled from NY back to the actual source of that revenue, in other states.
Do please note that income taxes don't necessarily fund water system improvements unless done with bonds. That imbalance of taxes between areas of NY is simply the result of concentration of wealth.
The question that should be asked, is the money that is being diverted going to truly more important use from a public safety concern and was the money allocated specifically for the tunnel or just into general?
New York City should absolutely be removed from the rest of the state. The "upstaters" resent NYC's large presence in state politics, and NYCers resent the upstaters for not being more concerned about NYC. However, it's worse: there's huge parts of the metro area of NYC which aren't even in the state! Tons of people commute every day from Connecticut or New Jersey. This is just a mess.
New Jersey, as a state, should simply be eliminated. Instead, it should be cut in half, as should Connecticut. Northern NJ and western CT should be combined with NYC, and also Long Island and a good chunk of NY state immediately north of NYC (White Plains, etc.) which is still part of the metro area. This should be formed into a new state (let's call it "New York"...). The rest of NYS, which has a large population base by itself with Rochester, Buffalo, Albany, etc., can then be a separate state whose population is more in-line with the average-sized US state, and in fact would still be one of the larger ones.
Now, for the rest of New Jersey: the south part should be combined with Philadelphia and a good chunk of PA which is Philly's metro area, and probably also a little bit of northern Delaware (Newark), and this should be made into a new state, just like we did with NYC above. The rest of PA still has plenty of population, not to mention land, by itself to be a viable state. It'll need a new name though.
The other half of CT should be combined with Rhode Island, and maybe even Massachusetts.
This would give us either 49 or 50 states (depending on whether CT/RI combined with MA or just stayed a separate state), but would serve the residents of this part of the northeast corridor much better. Just imagine how much better rapid transit would be in NYC for people living in northern NJ without a bunch of interstate politics getting in the way; the same agency could run the MTA subways, the LIRR, and also NJ Transit and PATH.
The same treatment also is needed for DC: make a new state that combines DC, northern VA, Baltimore, and most of Maryland around there. Give the western part of MD to WV, and give the entire "eastern shore" peninsula (which has all of DE and little bits of VA and MD on it) to Delaware. The people of southern and southwest VA will probably be happy to get the NoVAers out of their politics, and the NoVAers will feel the same. And finally, the people of DC will actually have representation in Congress.
Imagine if Google/Apple were forced to pay even 0.1% of their profits into local cities - Cupertino/Mountain View would look like utopias.
It's a bit of tangent but that's a regressive tax: It puts a greater burden on the poor than on the wealthy: $10 from someone making $8/hour and risking having their water shut off is a much larger sacrifice for the public good than $10 from someone making six figures.
The trendy idea that taxes in general and progressive (not in the political sense but in the technical sense) tax systems are somehow unfair is holding up important development in the U.S. There is a cost to failing to invest; we could never invest in anything and we'd be much poorer.
I would disagree.
The opposing trendy idea is that the eventual output of the tax systems are so filled with waste, fraud, and abuse that simply pouring more and more money, no matter the source, into politically-connected blackhole businesses contracted to perform some government sponsored task rarely if ever works and needs to much more carefully managed.
There are so many real-world examples of this (healthcare.gov comes instantly to mind, and the recent TSA app but there are many others) that I won't bother to list them.
A much greater level of transparency for all these deals would go a long way in helping fix these sensible concerns.
[edits]
1) The evidence is very much to the contrary: Almost all infrastructure in the country was paid for by tax dollars and built on government contracts. The entire highway system, the military, most of the health system, almost all education including public universities, most scientific research, etc. WWII was won that way. What would the country look like if there was no public investment? It would be a poor, undeveloped nation.
2) What alternative is there? Not invest in anything until we live in a perfect world? Again, it would impoverish the country. Blocking investment is a very unwise method of saving money for any institution; imagine a business which refused to invest in anything - it would be insane.
3) I agree there is corruption, and I agree more transparency would help, but every human institution has corruption (go ahead, name a large one that doesn't). If we're going to live with humans, we have no choices other than to move forward as we are or retire to caves.
I am for using modern IT practices to add transparency and accountability to the process.
No reasonable person objects to combating waste, fraud, and abuse. But it is certainly not as widespread as some people might believe.
[1] GAO-15-814, Federal Spending Accountability - http://www.gao.gov/assets/680/672473.pdf
[2] US Federal Budget 2014 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_United_States_federal_bud...
edit: a word, "it is not wrong, per se"
Why do you think their is such huge support behind political establishment outsiders such as Sanders and Trump?
Many people are simply exhausted by the lies and deceit that flows from elite Washington circles nowadays, and thinking that self-reported figures are going to placate them is wishful indeed.
The GAO is widely credited from all sides for its standout analysis and data gathering, independent of partisan affiliation or regulatory capture. Its methods are quite rigorous and indeed, if you read the report that I linked in my previous comment, you would see how some of the GAO's investigatory successes have come from comparing agency self-reports against independent audits.
As I said before also, nobody disputes that waste and fraud are bad and should be stopped. But the problem is not nearly as widespread as generally believed - and that is the problem, because it elevates an minor issue to an outsized status at the expense of other, larger issues.
Yes well we agree to disagree because I firmly believe, and my 35 years of experience following the issue closely prove to me at least, that not only is the problem widespread but is papered-over and much worse then will ever be reported.
There is a solid statistic that something like only 10% of crime is reported on and solved. I think this number matches nicely to the real damages, waste, and fraud caused by the issue.
If it's not reported, how do you know about it?
Makes me think of voter fraud vs electoral participation...
This isn't really a story about taxes. It's a story about risk tolerance.
UK: https://www.citizensadvice.org.uk/consumer/water/water-suppl...
I wonder what his constituents will say when they have no water to pay for.
It focuses too much on NYC for my taste, but that also means it can be really concrete in its examples.
And the water supply, especially the tunnels, were one of the most captivating chapters in there.
Does NYC have water meters yet?
There's a lot of spin going on in the local press (ie, Mayoral flacks claim there were no cuts, while other reports claim that the money was shifted elsewhere).
Water meters are installed in all new buildings and buildings which have been renovated. Allegedly the entire city should have had water meters by now but I think a lot of smaller residential buildings still get billed by hypothetical use, not metered.