How America Bankrupted its Cities [video]

So, these municipalities, acting independently and without coordination, and have arrived at the same state. Because they are all currently incentivized to.

The Strong Town books also discusses what happened with a lack of regulation throughout almost all of human history: everyone lived in rural areas to work a farm, or else lived and worked in dense urban areas. American suburbia happened in large part not due to a lack of regulation at the top, but federal money being spent on roads, highways and infrastructure at the top.

Also, Colorado is expecting one of the biggest economic and population booms in America, so people’s incomes are going up and thinks are looking pretty good. Try the same in states with stagnant economies and job markets, and even schools won’t get the votes for tax increases.

And the nuance of the statement, of course, is people won’t vote for tax increases for things that won’t benefit them. Roads benefit all car owners, so car owners don’t mind voting for roads. But taxes for public transportation won’t be voted in. And people will vote to increase taxes for their own school district. But not to help subsidize other cities’ schools.

Decades of Republican propaganda have led the average right-of-center voter to believe that higher taxes, for any reason, are a) stealing their hard-earned money, and/or b) a socialist plot to turn America into either the USSR or Venezuela.

So basically what I'm saying is... the POTUS doesn't need to do song and a dance in order for taxes to increase for people. For a lot of states, as long as the value of the property keeps increasing, the residents are paying more and more taxes every year. And if the income from your job doesn't increase at the same rate as your property taxes... it can put a lot of financial strain on you (my relatives in NY moved to a different state because the property taxes in Albany were eating them alive)

Example:

https://www.baltimoresun.com/business/real-estate/bs-bz-tax-...

> Why can't we tax the property owners (I am one) benefiting from proximity to the train stations?

don't you pay property tax based on the value of your home? if so, this is already happening.

At the local level, we see pretty regular tax increases here in the midwest. There's a lot of resistance to increases in federal and state-wide taxes largely because federal and state spending is really hard to directly connect to a benefit to the payer (i.e. home value increases, better commutes, a fun local park). On the other hand, a ballot initiative to fund an improvement in roads or sewers is pretty easy to get through.

Have you seen the Big Dig? Look at the size of the check we wrote for that one. Now look at the kind of houses all the people who got to work on that project (whether in the office or in the field) in their mid and late careers (when you can make real money rather than be schlepping supplies around a job site for a "you haven't put in your time yet" size check) are living in.

Waste like that is why nobody wants to increase taxes. Pretty much anything more than the bare minimum seems to just slowly evaporate. The money goes poof before it trickles down into programs, infrastructure and services that actually provide benefit to the taxpayer. People would rather ride on a crappy T and pay marginally less tax than pay more tax to ride on a crappy T that has a handful more spots in the org chart for politicians to fill with people who won't show up.

Look at the semi-annual (well, let's be fair and give them credit, it's more like 3yr) state police "fraudulent overtime" scandal. It goes way, way back. Remember when the Probation Department got caught paying salaries to political appointees who didn't show up and didn't have any job duties? Remember when there was that enforcement/compliance arm of the Dept. of Elder Affairs that didn't actually exist like it was supposed to because the money was redirected to pay for more (politically appointed) middle managers who just forwarded emails all day? This is what "raising taxes" looks like in Massachusetts. For every $10 spent you'll be lucky to have a buck actually be used to run a bus, patch a pothole pay for healthcare, etc. etc. It's no surprise that people don't wanna pay for that.

People will pay for public services. Nobody really cares whether the garbage truck driver gets his pay stub on private letterhead or government letterhead. Nobody really cares whether they have public or private EMT services so long as they show up with equal promptness. What people won't pay for is public leeches and Massachusetts has done a very good job cultivating the perception that you can't buy one of the former without getting ten of the latter in the deal. No surprise that people don't wanna take that deal.

The Red Line was going to extend out to Arlington and then 128... but Arlington blocked it. You'll see several rationales listed, but the big one was racism: Arlington (now a liberal bastion like Cambridge) was afraid that "those people" would come to their town.

What Massachusetts needs is a coherent state-wide plan that handles transit on a public-first rather than car-first strategy. What we've got is a set of non-cooperating agencies all trying to deal with local problems.

Personally, I think tax increases would be much more popular if the government showed the money would be spent efficiently. Cost+ contracting and endless cost overruns have eroded public support for government projects.

I think you are misunderstanding something. It works just fine. The problem is that there are these "waste" humans that nobody knows what to do with.

There is also a glaring flaw in your comment. Automation increases economic growth. If a single worker is 10 times more productive he can ask for 10 times the salary. A lot of low income jobs pay badly precisely because there is not enough automation to turn them into productive high income jobs.

Ok, back to the waste humans. The default answer to a surplus with no buyers is to just let the wealthy hand out a loan so that those with no possessions can buy the surplus and use it productively and earn money. For obvious reasons interest rates are down to 0% so this is not a viable strategy. However in principle it works the same with automation. Humans with zero net worth cannot work because robots are doing their job can instead borrow robots and use those robots productively. Debt is just a way to convince people to work today so that their productive output doesn't get lost.

The borrowing strategy works out if there is enough demand for the robot labor, but what if there is no demand at all? You can just create demand out of thin air. Let the government print money and use it to buy consumer goods and services or let the government invest into domestic jobs that would otherwise not be done. Again, it's just a trick to make people work today so that their productive output doesn't get lost. The benefit from working is higher than letting the money sit around.

Why? Because that's the policy. 2% inflation is a target. Your money gets increasingly less valuable so you cannot sit on it. You will have to do something with it. If you put your money in gold you are doing so with the expectation that society as a whole is doing productive work. If you put your money into stocks you are doing so with the expectation that this individual company is doing productive work. Yes, these assets are inflation proof, but only because someone is actually working. If everyone put their money into gold the assets would just become worthless eventually because society as a whole is not doing productive work.

If CPI inflation is driving asset inflation then you simply cannot sit around and do nothing. Unfortunately the Fed is driving asset inflation directly and completely skipping over CPI inflation. At that point the system is built on circular logic without any connection to productive work. Capitalism without the capitalism.