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Comment by seattle_spring | Hacker News Reader

In my experience, it's because people in the middle of nowhere are allowed to vote on infrastructure projects. They claim they don't want "their tax dollars" to pay for "them city slickers." The important bit they conveniently leave out is that cities majorly subsidize rural living through taxes.

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There is also rampant corruption (at least for cities in CA).

https://www.sfchronicle.com/crime/article/SF-corruption-scan...

https://www.sfchronicle.com/opinion/editorials/article/Edito...

https://www.kqed.org/news/11839531/report-corrupt-sf-officia...

https://la.curbed.com/2020/6/18/21279345/los-angeles-corrupt...

Local and State elections in the US are usually overwhelming dominated by larger cities and counties.

There is local representation but in many states legislative districts are allocated by population not geography so often areas with higher population density have more control.

And, State-wide elections, such as, Governor, Attorney General, state supreme court justices (where elected, such as, WA), initiatives, referendums, and so on, are often dominated by the high population centers.

It's my understanding that relatively few people live out in the boondocks. Is that an incorrect understanding? In a democratic system, how could such a small population be at fault for preventing infrastructure spending in population centers?

Electoral college. Boondock states get two senators each. Urban states get two senators each.

California's 40 million people have the same representation in the senate as Wyoming's 580 thousand people.

The Senate is required to approve city's road maintenance expenditures? I thought the US was more decentralized than that.

This is what keeps the federal government and federal politicians so powerful, most areas need federal funds to keep up with these expenses.

Now you're talking in circles. @seattle_spring's theory is that people in the "boondocks" keep voting against infrastructure projects, even though "cities majorly subsidize rural living through taxes." Now you're saying that "most areas need federal funds to keep up with these expenses."

Is California rich enough to pay for its infrastructure projects by itself, or does it need money from other states to do it? If @seattle_spring is right and California doesn't need the money, then the Senate isn't holding anything up. California can proceed unilaterally. Maybe they can even vote for Republicans at the federal level, who won't make them continue to "subsidize rural living" in other states.

But if you're correct that California "need[s] federal funds to keep up with these expenses" then why shouldn't the rural states oppose it when it won't benefit them?

The reality is two-fold.

1) People in dense urban states aren't actually willing to spend this money, they just want to use these issues to get votes for Democrats. That's why they never actually build these things when they have to do it with their own money only.

2) Dense urban states want access to the Federal government's money printing machine. States cannot run structural deficits. But the rural urban states will be on the hook for that debt too.

I was not talking about California, though.

Or New York or Illinois or whatever. The point is that you can’t have it both ways. If dense urban states have the money to pay for their own transit, they should vote Republican at the federal level so they can stop subsidizing Wyoming, and use those tax dollars to build whatever they want. But if they actually need federal funds to build transit, then Wyoming should be able to veto building transit in New York.

Blue states have all of the money. There is no reason for them to complain so much about the Senate. If they want a vast socialist welfare state with state of the art transit, they should be able to pay for it themselves.

'Vast' is a matter of scale. What seemed large when we were a manual-labor country of 100M people, and what seems large now that we're an automated-production county of 450M, are quite different.

Michael Dell wrote in his memoir, that each time Dell Computer doubled in size, he had to completely redefine their processes. Well, the USA has grown a lot. Trying to fit 50-100 year old processes into the modern economy is bound to fail, for lack of scale and imagination.

A public transit system is honestly cheap at the price. Kind of a enlightened-self-interest thing. It lowers the cost of working, lets people make more choices about where to live, and generally makes markets more efficient.

> they should vote Republican at the federal level so they can stop subsidizing Wyoming

Republicans being for states rights hasn't been true for my entire lifetime (30+ years).

We just had a huge battle where Republicans opposed Medicaid expansion in states. (Which would involve more blue state federal tax dollars going to red states.)

There are a couple of areas where Republicans support federal preemption, such as telecommunications (which falls squarely under even a narrow definition of the commerce clause, as “channels of interstate commerce”). But for the most part they fight federal encroachment in environmental laws (regulating infra-state bodies of water), health spending, etc.

When have Republicans had the federal government intervene to stop a domestic transit or health program that wasn’t reliant on federal dollars?

This is simply untrue, and it's enough to look at budgets of most places to see that.

Various reports show that the federal government picks up about a third of the tab for infrastructure spending, although it varies widely by state and type of infrastructure. This seems quite significant.

Federal government is typically shelling out money for things like interstates, major bridges and major water works. They give practically nothing for local roads and sewers. Additionally, federal government money comes from the people's income taxes anyway, and if federal government didn't tax people so much, the state and local government could tax them more instead, to cover bigger share of the costs.

The big issue I see here is that where I live, and I think in many more rural areas, federal infrastructure constitutes a significant portion of the total infrastructure. A generous portion of the major city streets, for example, are US highways, and flood control was almost entirely built federally (and maintenance must now be funded by the local flood control district). This no doubt varies by region, but the portion of infrastructure which is federally funded is not small.

“ if federal government didn't tax people so much, the state and local government could tax them more instead, to cover bigger share of the costs.”

I upvoted you and agree.

This is exactly my point, the power is at the federal level, and the state and municipalities rely on funds from ‘above’.

Here are some EPA federal grants for municipal water systems:

https://www.epa.gov/ground-water-and-drinking-water/drinking...

Sewer overflow grant:

https://www.epa.gov/cwsrf/sewer-overflow-and-stormwater-reus...

I Googled “epa muni water grants”.

A lot of the discussion is about federal taxes and subsidies. The federal government funds a lot of local stuff too. It maintains a lot of control over cities and states through funding. For example, if your roads and schools don't meet federal standards, that's okay, but you're not getting federal funding.

Everyone opts for federal funding.

Thats true for the senate, but that’s why there is another branch that has proportionate representation. Both of them have important individual roles that the other branch would/could not do, due to political barriers.

> It's my understanding that relatively few people live out in the boondocks. Is that an incorrect understanding?

The majority of Americans live in suburbs. The majority of counties are rural. https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/05/22/demographic-and-e...

Rural/suburban folks tend to own homes, and property owners vote more than renters do.

They also tend to move less and stay in the same district for a large percentage of their lives. It's a lot easier to vote if you only need to sign up once and the same process applies. If you're young and mobile, you're changing cities/counties/states and therefore less likely to keep up with the different races.

Considering how much more locked in the are it makes sense. The stakes are higher for them.

Not sure if that explains potholes all over chicago.

Is Chicago really that much worse than other similar cities like milwaukee or minneapolis? whenever I go to those (which, to be honest, isn't often) the streets don't seem _that_ much better.

In Milwaukee there just isn’t enough tax dollars to pay to fix the roads, replace lead pipes, upkeep for museums, parks, police, fire etc. Some of this is pension problems, so of it is likely government spending more than they had in the 50s for large public projects that now need complete rebuilds with no funds to do so.

Infrastructure spending in Milwaukee is $70M/year, when fire department is $120M/year and police is $300M/year. That's where the real costs are, not where Strong Towns say they are.

I think the overall Strong Towns message doesn’t only speak about infrastructure. It’s generally an argument against spending large amounts of money today on projects that benefit the town of the future that will of course never stop growing; or that this fancy, expensive new project will stimulate the growth we need to pay for it later.

Milwaukee in the 50s and 60s is an example of this. They built a lot of amenities and expanded infrastructure with public funds.

The growth stopped or reversed and there is no money to maintain the same level of services and amenities today. Thus underfunded parks, roads, pipes and museums. Aka, not a strong town but one struggling along.

This entire article and every comment can be summed up with the following sentence:

"Women need to have more babies because our entire economic model is built on growth and doesn't function without it and one of the best ways to grow is increase the population so you increase the taxable base."

You can slice it up however you want. You can bitch and moan about feminism if you're a woman, you can bitch and moan about men's rights if you're a man, but the bottom line is we need a lot more people to pay for all the tab we've run up.

Freezing temperatures, salt, snow plow usage, heavy vehicles and more road usage, and inability to fix properly due to heavy road usage would explain that.

Does work in other countries with similar specs, so it's hardly a technical limitation. It's money, public money, and therefore politics.

I do wonder about US roads. Is it a reliance on the oil industry to build asphalt based roads?

Are they intentionally not meant to last?

Also, with regards to the US interstate system - why is it designed in such a way that any maintenance required a dramatic decrease in travel throughput?

Could it be designed to be functional in ‘maintenance’ mode?

America tends to like to do the cheaper thing and get the biggest number. Extra large pizzas made mostly with cheap vegetable oil and bread, lots of square feet with the cheapest drywall, materials and bad design, etc. Maintenance mode capable roads I would guess would cost as much as a road with one more lane, so they just build another lane instead of keeping one in reserve.

You either need to stop asking questions in bad faith or spend 10min reading about road construction on Wikipedia (hopefully the latter but this is the internet so...). The US doesn't really do things much differently than anywhere of similar climate with regard to road construction since climate dictates construction techniques. Asphalt is pretty universal.

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