I’ve always been weary that we have solely relied on the incredible infrastructure investments of our ancestors. Time to build some of our own.
How do you land on trusting the municipality?
If Pittsburgh pays for its own infrastructure (or potentially if it's done at the state level) then voters are far more likely to care and to hold their elected representatives to task.
A separate reason is that a sizeable chunk of people want their tax money to mostly go towards supporting their own city/county/state. They don't want tax money from taxpayers in Mobile, Alabama funding bridges in Vancouver, Washington or vice versa.
Edit: Also if they were federally managed that would likely mean the feds giving that money for the states to manage, and that always comes with strings attached. See, for example, highway funding to states being dependent on raising the minimum drinking age to 21
> Also if they were federally managed that would likely mean the feds giving that money for the states to manage
It is done that way today because no state collects enough gas tax to actually fund their own roads and bridges. All money comes with strings attached, it's one of the characteristics of money.
If you want to go all in on the eliminating the Federal government, you’d have to also go after the Military, Federal Courts and the Department of State.
A republic union in military protection and legal/political bridges/agreements.
If the fed is in charge of everything, then there is no union, just a large federal state. This is what we're becoming as everyone places their hope in Congress for solutions.
Like most large countries with a single rule instead of unified states, we're going to regret this more as time goes on. (Excluding countries smaller in population than a single US state)
Building bridges to nowhere in Alaska or fancy bridges/tunnels in places with zero population density is extremely unlikely to make these areas a net contribution to the federal budget over the long term - just the opposite.
Arguably extremely rural areas are already oversubsidised and will be never self-sustaining in terms of infrastructure, in terms of just meeting the cost of maintaning roads, power, water, mail delivery infrastructure...
Congress as a whole? Not so much.
Perhaps you built too many bridges and some of them don't service enough people to warrant replacement or repair. If you're getting free federal dollars, people don't tend to ask about it. High power people might divert funds to their preferred projects. Or maybe the spending is just outright careless.
By keeping the money local, you tie it to local spending and local opportunity cost. There's more oversight, more deliberation, and more care as to how the money is disbursed. They become political talking points, and there's accountability.
Not that there isn't a time and place for federally funded projects, but small town bridges probably aren't it.
> If you don't even aim at having your democratic institutions cooperate, then what are they for exactly.
I think they can cooperate, but I don't see why that means everything needs to be pushed to the federal level? It seems pretty reasonable that local infrastructure should be managed by local governments, state infrastructure by state governments, and federal infrastructure by federal governments.
That said, I'm particularly confused by why you think that the purpose of democratic institutions is "cooperation" rather than something like "maintaining the rights and upholding interests of the public". Cooperation is just a means to that end.
States, however, don't have a money printer. Every dollar they spend, they do have to tax or borrow.
Some questions arise in my head: If local infrastructure isn't being maintained, is it because it's not worth maintaining? How would we measure that? Does the stochastic nature of the problem make it intractable for local/state governments?
For example, if I have 4200 bridges that are in need of repair in such a way as I can expect two to fail this year, and I am unable to predict which two, does preventing two collapses necessitate addressing all 4200? Is that scale entirely too large for my local government? If it is, is that because those 4200 bridges serve too few people? If not, is that situation unprecedented (can the local government adapt to address a problem that it hasn't had to before)? What if the local government is unhealthy (ideologically opposed to service, disenfranchised citizens, perhaps a southern state)?
> What if the local government is unhealthy (ideologically opposed to service, disenfranchised citizens, perhaps a southern state)?
Yeah, that's a general argument against giving any government any kind of responsibility (for any issue, how do you know that the government in question will be healthy enough to manage the responsibility?). But I think we can agree that some government should do this, and given the choice between state and local governments which might be dysfunctional (but which have collectively outperformed the federal government for the last two decades) and the federal government which we know to be completely dysfunctional, I would pick the former.
Unfortunately the only way out of this mess is to extract wealth from those same Boomers, but as long as their stranglehold on political power remains - and let's face it, they are not even done ascending into power, considering that people like Feinstein, Biden, and Pelosi are even older than them - it won't happen. The nation will continue to fall to pieces.