The left assumes the government could be competent, but only if everyone tries to make it so, and they know what the right is doing (all of this policy is completely aboveboard and public).
Net result, everyone can safely assume the government is incompetent. It is much easier to prevent it from working than to make it work. We'd have to have bipartisan interest in making it work effectively, and we do not have that.
There's no right crafting policy to kneecap the city's ability to function as a city.
I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
City run trash collection is totally a thing in some areas, and it actually makes sense if done well. I once lived in a conservative city that had it (and did it well).
Where I live now, we have private trash collection. That meant we had dozens of garbage trucks from different companies driving through the neighborhood on every trash day, until one of my neighbors organized everyone to switch to one single company.
We've got 25 million to build a bridge to a sports stadium. Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
>I do wonder why your city government is in charge of yard waste, though? I've lived a lot of places, mostly very liberal, and it's always been a private company hauling away trash/recycle/yard debris.
Because my city is not good at being a city.
TBF this one isn't government specific. It's often easier to fund a debt instrument for a big initiative than to find a revenue stream for a small obvious win. This happens in large companies, too, btw. You argue for years to consistently invest a small amount in something, the investment is never made, and then the company ends up acquiring to save itself from that exact underinvestemnt.
Sports stadiums are massive sources of revenue for cities.
> Think we could find $100 a week to pay someone to pick up trash for 4 hours.
It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
That's not true. They're almost always a net loss and either way I'm not talking about the money that went to the stadium. I'm talking about the money spent on building a single pedestrian bridge to that stadium.
>It takes more than one person working four hours a week to collect garbage for an entire city.
Obviously I meant 4 hours a week picking up trash in a single park.
I’m up in a small town in British Columbia, population circa 40K. Our compost is collected weekly; our recycling and garbage biweekly (garbage used to be weekly but they’ve supplied us with humongous wheeled bins now); our landfill separates trash by kind, sells what can be recycled, and keeps track of where it buried the rest; we have a massive composting facility that sells its end product; our sewer treatment plant sends its output to ranchland spray irrigation and golf courses. In the spring and fall, a chipping truck comes along and mulches any tree trimmings.
We maintain our infrastructure. Old underground services are regularly upgraded on schedule. Roads are resurfaced when they’re worn. Our downtown core was beautified a few years ago, with new trees, brickwork, etc. Down at the beaches, cottonwood trees are removed when they become hazardous; new trees are planted. Our parks are clean, despite the homeless living in them. Heck, we built several apartment buildings for those homeless that have their life together enough to qualify for residency (though provincial funding assisted on this.)
Over the past twenty or thirty years we’ve build a new swimming pool/rec centre; a multi-sheet ice rink; a truly excellent performing arts centre; acres of new park; a new track-and-field venue; removed a decrepit and failing arena; and are in the process of building out a new arena/outdoor sports centre. The only thing we’ve completely failed to implement is a new art gallery.
We do have a homeless problem (our weather is very nice) and there is a heck of a drugs problem (a lot of weed was grown around here back in the day, and there’s an undercurrent of gang activity involving the hard drugs). But on the whole, it’s a very laidback, safe, well-run community of caring people.
It’s sad that your town is a failure. It must be corruption, because surely you have people who can administer with competency comparable to my town.
They probably do have people who can administer with comparable competency, but I think the competency required to manage a town of 40k is very different from the kind of competency you need to get those results in a much larger town.
At small city scale, administrative layers can be thin and infrequent because of the smaller scale. Changing collections to be every other week could probably be a meeting with a few dozen workers. In a major city, that could be hundreds or thousands of workers, requiring administrative layers to handle rescheduling, handling concerns, etc, etc.
Small cities also generally have to develop smaller portions of their budget to dynamically adjusting to shifts in the city. How often do you have to build new roads and expand existing ones to handle shifts in traffic? What's the worst case scenario for traffic in a city of 40k, vs a city with millions of people? The major cities I've lived in are constantly having to build new roads and expand existing ones, and they're barely making a dent in the traffic problem.
Stuff like taking down trees and cleaning parks is pretty easy when the town is small enough to have a half dozen people do it. You need a whole administration layer when you can't have 6 people that just wander around parks fixing things that need to be fixed.
Like many things, I think complexity and cost of those services tends to scale exponentially with population rather than linearly.
Yes, it's a pretty astoundingly corrupt city. But stamping out corruption is one of the fundamental components of good governance.
Even the brightest among the HN crowd can fall into the trap that "The other side is incompetent." There are geniuses and idiots on both sides. If your city is poorly run, its not because your city is run by one party over the other. It's because the people running your city is competent at running a campaign and incompetent at running a city. There's not much more to it than that.
BTW, the people picking up trash in our neighborhood are bleeding heart liberals.
We needed healthcare reform. What we got was the ACA.
What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Average peoples' material conditions are getting worse and worse. They need some kind of simple universal assistance. They don't need yet another way of getting means tested.
> What we needed was them to bring back Glass-Steagall in the wake of sub-prime crisis. What we got was ?????
Wealthy powerful interests who fund politicans on both sides ensure those reforms fail or are watered down to nothing. This is not about complexity. It's simple corruption.
The only real net beneficiaries of the ACA were the insurance companies. People are compelled to get high deductible insurance. And that's enforced through the tax-code for some reason???
They made a minor concession about denials for preexisting conditions. But, now they just claim everything is 'not medically necessary' instead.
People need healthcare. Not 11,000 pages of more bureaucratic nonsense.
I still remember Obama having a televised meeting with Republicans from Congress and each of the Republicans had this big stack of papers next to them as a sort of prop to suggest to the folks at home that it was some bureaucratic government takeover. What nonsense. The U.S. government is a complicated thing, so is healthcare, and put it all together and yeah it might take a few pages. Bills like that get passed all the time. And even as careful as the authors were, Republicans were happy to read the law closely and take advantage of every loophole they could, with the Medicaid expansion nonsense and the endless lawsuits on technicalities.
The inability to come up with simple reforms stems from they see themselves as uniquely qualified to manage the affairs of state. They went to the best schools. They have all the best policy positions. If you have any disagreements about policy, it's simply because you don't understand. This is the prevailing attitude despite an abysmal performance over the past 40 years after they completely abandoned the New Deal.
The concept that government is there to help is taken like a conspiracy theory and slowly 'Starving the beast' provides ample opportunity for failure that only furthers anti-federalist mentality. Or as some should be saying as they campaign, "Government doesn't work, elect me and I'll prove it!"