And how much did the city originally "save"?
This affair should be poster child for being pennywise and pound foolish with our infrastructure.
This affair should be poster child for being pennywise and pound foolish with our infrastructure.
It was the institutional and regulatory failure during the switch away from Detroit city water that made the lead an emergency. Part of the reason that happened is that Flint had depopulated and was basically a failed city. It's not acceptable that it happened, but it didn't happen just because Flint was trying to skimp on infrastructure 40,50,60 years ago.
"By not adding a corrosion inhibitor, Flint was going to save about $140 per day. "
http://theconversation.com/the-science-behind-the-flint-wate...
"Replacement of Flint’s lead service lines, which is the only permanent solution to address its lead vulnerability, is estimated to cost up to $1.5 billion, according to Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver."
So, I suppose I agree with you that its institutional and regulatory failures in the most general of ways, similar to how Enron would have been considered "a breakdown in internal controls". And those responsible should go to prison and have civil penalties inflicted on them. Has that happened? I don't know.
Let's say that regulations dictated that they had to spend this money and they didn't have it. Add enough of such regulations and a shrinking tax base and eventually you have an insolvent city. What do you propose we do then?
Near as I can tell, it's reasonable to have such regulations so people don't get hurt by people making decisions with consequences they don't understand, but eventually this will lead to insolvency and we need to have a plan to shut down cities that become insolvent and support relocation efforts when that happens.
But if you want to erase your student loan debt with bankruptcy you're a lazy mooch who should just get a part time job to pay for college like I did back in the '60s. /s
Wisdom is multi-dimensional and holistic. Screwing over people and the environment is a loser move.
1: http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/2016/02/flint_wate...
In the US, cities manage their own municipal services including water supplies. The state only intervenes when the city runs out of money to provide basic services to their inhabitants -- and this happens very rarely.
If Flint had had a functioning government, the state appointees would have had nothing to do with the water supply.
It's a tragedy what happened, but at the point a city is unable to provide the most basic of services to its citizens like clean water, I think we need to consider whether it is worth pumping money into a city, or just call it quits and provide relocation funds to the remaining inhabitants, to get them to a region with actual economic activity.
All this talk of there not being any jobs is hypocritical balogne. There's clearly plenty of infrastructure work to do, not to mention basic life stuff, like raising and teaching kids, growing food, building community... But the global market has stripped life itself of its value for these people.
Your community and mine aren't far behind, from the looks of things!
If I spend $100 million to fund a trench that does nothing, it's a money sink. I've effectively thrown that money away. However, I have achieved however much employment that $100mm bought me. Until and unless that $100mm gets somebody some value, it isn't worthwhile, and as we've seen, there are very few people willing to fund completely pointless projects for no reason... even governments try to avoid it.
This is different than health care spending, or housing, or welfare -- those things (at least arguably) provide benefits. If I give someone health care for free, it's largely assumed that the cost of that health care will be offset in other ways. See the discussions on the Utah Unemployment article for examples.
But because governments are funded by tax dollars, and tax dollars are generated by earnings, until and unless people are earning moneys from outside the government that pays them, it simply isn't sustainable. Building infrastructure in the middle of nowhere is fruitless it is used as a lure for some form of money or productivity. The absence of said productivity means that, at best, you'll be revenue neutral on the funding projects and sustainable until inevitably inflation wipes everything away. Of course, to do that, the community has to be entirely self sustainable, which Flint definitely isn't.
In short, tax and spend can't work unless there's something to tax that isn't also part of the spend.
See, the thing here is that you and I are operating with completely different definitions of the word "value". I'm insisting to you that clean water is intrinsically valuable.
Yet you impose a restriction on the supposedly free market, claiming that: "a job rebuilding the infrastructure of an area is only valuable if there are other jobs from which you can tax to justify that".
But I maintain that it needs no such justification. It's clean water.
"When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money"
If there's industry enough in an area that there is some other way to pay for water extraction, production, cleaning (see Nevada) -- then water can be sold at a loss because it supports something else, and is sustainable so long as there a mechanism to keep it being so.
The problem in Michigan is that the other way to pay for it isn't working, and the government doesn't have the revenues or a profit model to keep it going otherwise.
Again, this would be true whether the government were capitalist, socialist, socially democratic, totalitarian or anything else.
Economics are true whether or not your ideology agrees, but it shouldn't be controversial to assert that trying to sell luxury goods to Liberia (the poorest area in the world, last I checked) is fruitless, it should be easy enough to replace "luxury goods" with "water", or any other product and still be true.
But I'm talking about ecological, biological sustainability, insofar as human life is concerned.
So yeah, I'm dodging your financial model of sustainability altogether, intentionally, because in this case my entire ideological basis is irreconcilable with your model.
water is not a product in my religion, as it is in yours
I see a fundamental viewpoint conflict between the concept
'what created Flint was a persistent course of governance action stretching way back to the 60s and only exacerbated by municipal choices to destroy the infrastructure, and this is basically criminal behavior'
and
'Flint is what it is because when subjected to natural law with all other things being equal, it was a big loser and never justified its existence. It atrophied rather than growing and thriving, and all such places should pretty much be disbanded, if possible before they deteriorate to such an extent.'
Depend on it, if places to live have to operate on the basis of 'outcompeting OTHER places to live' just to exist at all, everywhere will be Flint except for a few places that are San Jose and San Francisco, with comparable rents (that being the primary metric showing you how much they won!). As soon as you sentence locations to economic death for losing that game, that's the inevitable result.
This is because suffering or injured people, OR places, by definition are at a competitive disadvantage to places and people with no injury. It's redefining civilization as mercy killing, and this is a choice (and a choice that doesn't automatically have to be made in only one way).
Moreover, economic value can be created, and is not zero sum, meaning that two people, or two places may create value without being parasites on each other. The important thing though is just that somebody has to create some form of value -- value can be minimal, and value can be isolated, but there must be someone doing something of value for the math to work out, and for a variety of reasons, a tax-funded commune is very unlikely to work except in areas that are rich in resources, which Michigan is not known to be. (Though I could be very wrong on that)
This is not true. Hence the old name Political economy. There's no such thing as objective economics - much to the annoyance of usually libertarians.
And to add to this discussion there's no way that this would happen and not be fixed where I live no matter the profitability of the municipality itself. If the municipality couldn't pay for it, the state would. And the sustainability, or "is it worth it? profitable?", question would barely come up because access to clean water is culturally deemed more or less a right.
on the one hand, providing basic necessities which is deemed a basic human right, like clean water, is a no brainer. it should be done regardless, and if the city cannot afford it, it ought to be subsidized by an out of city entity like the state.
on the other hand, what's the worth of these human lives? if it cost more money to keep a city running than the productivity it produces, it makes sense to cut it out. it leaves the resources that would've been allocated to be used elsewhere.
However, if (in what I suspect is an extreme hypothetical) this $100 million dollars only guarantees water access for a few years, and they'll be asking for handouts when this money is spent, then the question of whether or not its sustainable should probably be asked.
My only objection to the OP's assertion is that you can just build infrastructure out of tax dollars and call that sustainable. You can't, and it's been shown time and time again that it isn't tenable without some very special circumstances or conditions. There are circumstances applicable to Keynesian economics, but just paying one group of people to shovel holes in the day, and another group of people to fill them back up in the night time just doesn't work unless somebody, somewhere is producing something of value enough that it can subsidize this behavior.
Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, or perhaps he's not stating his case clearly, but that seems to be basically what he's suggesting.
The city failed. It it's not financially feasible to fix it so it is self-sustainable at a level of investment that can be paid back in a reasonable amount of time, relocating is a perfectly acceptable proposal.
People have every right to stay there if they can afford to do so, but if they are going to ask others for financial help bailing them out, it's not in the least bit unreasonable for those spending the money to do so to dictate how that money is spent. If the city has no hope of recovery, then saying the money can only be used for relocation is perfectly acceptable. What's not acceptable is expecting others to support your unsustainable city in perpetuity.
You can't drink money.
The point being argued is that rather than spend $100M to fix a broken city, spend it to relocate the former residents elsewhere.
1) money spent on defense is orthogonal to the argument being made. Your point is a good one, but it still doesn't refute the point that it's good money following bad money.
2) While I don't think it's the best industry that we could be investing in, many people see defense spending as investing in the American people. One of the chief exports of the US is war, defense and weaponry. Lots of countries our customers of the US and there are lots of towns and cities that would be economically hurt (to the point of dying like Flynt) depending on how our defense spending was cut.
Money is nothing but abstracted power and there's no such thing as 'good money', only the ability to wield power. As such you're effectively saying that it's morally wrong to use power to keep people in a wrecked city that they did not wreck, because while it's their home they are not themselves powerful enough to merit having one.
The whole 'good money' thing is a neat exploit on Western civilization as it began with the Magna Carta (admittedly a bit of an out-of-date concept now!). It's the idea that if power is abstracted into money, all of a sudden it can't be questioned again. By contrast, being able to set societal expectations for ultimate power turned out to be, by definition, civilized.
Translating your statement gives us 'if people without power dare to ask others with all the power for help, it's not the least bit unreasonable for those with the power to have total control over how those people live and what they do. What's not acceptable is to help people who will always lack power, because that's just wrong'.
And while this has been tried over and over in history, again: Magna Carta. This touching idea that everything has to ultimately serve money, has got to go. Anyway it's only an abstraction papering over the simple reality that if you accumulate enough abstracted power, your whims are more unquestioned than those of Kings… because 'good money'.
They are real people who are fucked because they were born in a dying city which relied on a dying industry. They aren't plaything for your anti-financial philosophy.
In most of the country, if the city runs out of money, the city runs up a debt. And if the city can't pay the debt, the city goes bankrupt.
No state intervention to protect creditors. They took on the risk when they lent the money. And it is only money.
The idea that muni bond holders are so important that cities should have fiscal solutions forced on them from above to prevent a debt default?
That's a Michigan thing.
And now we know what that Michigan idea can lead to.
In my view a city is not a sovereign nation. The political and financial structure of cities is decided by the states. If a city isn't providing basic services, it means that the state isn't providing basic services in geographic pockets of the state.
On the other hand, if this structure is really the best way of delivering municipal services, so be it. But I'm skeptical.
I see no reason why something like water service has to be managed at the municipal level. There could just be a state water service, and it could decide to manage itself by creating regional services. So far as I know, the cities aren't expected to manage delivery of electricity or natural gas.
Maybe Michigan is a failed state.
What do you think It was the institutional and regulatory failure during the switch away from Detroit city water that made the lead an emergency. means?
Or in a sibling thread where I say it shouldn't have been a financial decision?
What does the party affiliation have to do with this particular statement? Additionally, your citation doesn't seem to link to a corruption case.
If a Governor is corrupt, just say 'corrupt governor' and provide a link (e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rod_Blagojevich).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Detroit_Water_and_Sewerage_Dep...
I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and we got Detroit water. This is no accident -- Lake Huron is some of the cleanest water in the world. Had my town even considered switching from Detroit water, there would have been an uproar.
This is a resource that has no reason other than historical accident, for being a responsibility of the City of Detroit. It looks like it was mainly a way to burden Detroit with more debt.
> That option was projected to save the region $200 million over 25 years, according to City Council meeting minutes.
Flint has already taken $250mil in state funding, and it will be taking another $120mil in fed+state funds now. So I guess that this whole thing will break even in 45 years?
It's not even clear it represented real savings. This article is written sort of after the fact, but it sounds reasonable to me.
http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/flint-water-c...