Anti-municipal broadband budget amendment gets nixed in New York
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There is literally an entire govt department in the US whose core job is to unbiasedly keep the politicians informed on the expert details of the areas they're legislating.
Specifically, the Library of Congress (this is why the US Congress has a library), and it's Congressional Research Service.
Bringing up inefficiency seems wrong because the goal is a subsidy not acting in the interest of the general public.
That’s an extremely defensible policy goal.
Politicians aren’t stupid, when your argument only works if you assume stupidity then you’re likely misunderstanding something.
We’re still going to still be importing chips after spending this money. So by your reasoning this is a failed initiative.
Frankly if it’s pure protectionism then slap a Tariff on them.
It's good when we do it, it's bad when China does it
> Trying to manipulate markets via subsidies is horrifically inefficient
By what means should markets be manipulated?
Legality aside, there are a not insignificant number of people who truly believe that private industry is invariably better than government at providing virtually any good or service, and that government involvement in anything that could be done privately is by definition harmful.
I actually had a conversation about this exact subject with a family member just last week. We live in a rural area and have awful service from Spectrum. He opposes plans for better cheaper muni internet because “The county government can only do better because they get to cheat - they don’t need to make a profit, but spectrum does.”
I personally think that a hybrid system is best. The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
Amazing... they're so close to realizing. :)
Given the type of government service they’re going to get—one run by New Yorkers, not Swedes or Japanese—are they wrong? Their frame of reference is the MTA (which runs subways that are late 15% of the time), the NYCHA, which runs some of the worst slums in the country, and NYC DOE which has a graduation rate worse than the subway’s on-time performance.
Maybe there’s a reason there is a market for the message “hey, however bad Spectrum is, imagine the city government running your broadband.”
You won’t hear me argue the NY state legislature is not deficient and/or corrupt. pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
What makes you think that’s the problem? The NYC school system, for example, spends $38,000 per year per student. Thats about triple what Japan spends per student. What else can the legislature do? And do you think the NY or NYC legislatures are any more corrupt than those in Japan or Germany or Sweden?
To me, the problem seems to be the workers running who are running the system, not how the system is designed on paper or how it’s funded.
> pushing back against monopolies writing their own legislation to kill competition is definitely a part of how we begin to fix it.
How does that follow? Say you defeat this legislation and NYC adopts community broadband. Will that system be fast, affordable, and reliable? That seems like putting hope over experience.
I wanted to ask if you were joking, but that wouldn’t be productive.
What else can the legislature do? Figure out why throwing money at a problem isn’t working. This is the point someone above made about private vs public industry. Private can’t operate at a loss. The federal, state, and local governments can, and generally do. I’m sure I don’t need to point out the federal budget deficit.
If a private company was given the same 38k per student with the mandate “fix the graduation issue or you’re fired” the graduation rate would absolutely change.
There are plenty of examples of mediocre public services getting privatized and becoming even worse, from a capital-efficiency perspective (e.g. UK railways, UK water...). Private companies are out to make a profit, and efficiency is just a mean to it; if there are other means, even to the detriment of what should be their core mission, they will pursue those means.
The real objective is both empowering, motivating, and holding accountable the middle-management layers of essential public services: administrators, teachers, railway workers, etc. Privatization doesn't magically do that. Creating a competitive system doesn't require corporate profits.
[1]: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/apr/24/learni...
And every time it happens and the people are ripped off, the answer is always “even moar privatization.”
Often when an ultimatum along these lines happens, whether public or private, the problem winds up being "fixed" in large part by some combination of double standards, gaming the metrics, and outright fraud. Some number called the "graduation rate" would surely change, but it wouldn't necessarily mean the same thing as what was called the "graduation rate" previously, let alone necessarily represent a materially better outcome for students.
Perhaps, but the better question is _how_ it would change. As we can see from the history of charter schools, typically that would happen by trying to cherry pick the least expensive, best performing students while excluding the most expensive.
As a simple example, one thing which makes large school district costs higher is that public schools are required to have expensive staff to care for students’ health, mental health, and special needs. If you are running a private school, you immediately see a cost advantage if you can find a way to discourage students who need those services from enrolling. It’s illegal to say “no special needs kids” but if you’re careful you can effectively approach the same outcome without a high likelihood of being sued successfully.
A school with half the funding full of healthy children of white collar professionals in the ‘burbs will graduate more kids than a school with full funding teaching kids who speak broken English, whose parents move them around a lot between schools because they’re not housing-secure, who don’t always eat breakfast or dinner, and who are on an IEP for a learning disorder.
By far the easiest way to hit a graduation rate target is to try to take as few hard-to-teach kids as possible. The funding to make up the difference in difficulty is… I dunno, astronomical. Maybe pay for their family’s entire living expenses or something.
Yeah, these days I lean towards housing as the root of a lot of these problems but that feels kind of that that “now draw the rest of the owl” joke. There’s so much pent up demand for affordable housing and each density improvement takes long enough that the kids affected today will probably be adults by the time we see improvements.
If some people take longer to learn things than others, you pretty much have two options. Either you teach them slower, and then accept that they're not going to graduate on time and those students aren't going to get a high school diploma until age 21. Or you teach them less, and relax the graduation requirement so they can graduate on time. Both of these are unpleasant, but you have to pick one or you get the default option where they flunk out and never graduate.
I imagine most of us remember being in high school and there was always that kid in _every_ class that gave the teacher a hard time, caused distractions, etc.
There are, imho, two ways to handle that. Either drop the hammer on the kid, or do a home a visit. Or perhaps, both.
If the home visit shows the kid is just a jerk, keep dropping the hammer. If the kid has a shit home life, I imagine that 38k/yr could be spent in much better ways.
Now suppose the child has a medical condition and they have to spend half their time in the hospital getting treatment. Or they have a mental health condition and the meds only work until they build up a tolerance and then they have to switch medications and spend three months in a stupor trying to find another one that works.
They can pass the standard classes if you give them twice as long, but then they're learning one semester's worth of material every two semesters. What do you want to do with them?
There's something of a trend of reporting on schools where zero (literally zero) students are capable of doing math at grade level.
I think it started with (or at least became prominent) when Baltimore was revealed to have 23 schools in that category, though it isn't alone.
Though COVID has been taking the blame, the situation has been getting worse in the years since.
Even if these kids graduate, they have been failed by the adults who are responsible for them.
Funnily enough NYC has charter schools which aren’t exactly this but are an approximation. They’re renowned for pushing poorly performing students out of their schools and doing a terrible job serving special needs. As a result they do indeed often have great graduation rates.
https://calmatters.org/housing/homelessness/2024/04/californ...
The US school system’s remit is larger than any other nation’s.
Ever seen an article that breaks down costs between countries when education is discussed? I haven’t.
What does that mean?
> an area of responsibility or authority
I mean, what is it that US schools are doing which schools in other countries aren't, which would produce significantly higher per student costs?
A few things off the top of my head that may be different (or maybe not!) but there could well be more.
OTOH lots of other places have far better school lunches and they’re free, but maybe those aren’t budgeted under the school but some other department. Lots of ways to get different outcomes with different accounting, without even doing anything plainly incorrect.
We actually had a natural experiment with this during COVID. Schools in Western Europe and Asia quickly got students back in the classroom. But in places like NYC, teachers refused to go back to work for a year or more.
What happens here particularly often is that insiders (in context of schools, these are teachers and their unions, administrators, consultants, etc) are able to sell more of their services to users, who don’t mind the cost, because it’s spread among non-users (taxpayers), and they have very ability to exercise control over the insiders.
The world is currently in a race to see who can make the most advanced microchips the fastest, and we're doing that because it's starting to look like whoever makes the best chips gets to call the shots.
There aren't enough people who grasp the fundamentals well enough to contribute to this effort. Education is now a critical national security concern.
Furthermore, while there are bad teachers who hate kids and don't try, few if any start out that way. They become that way after prolonged exposure to bad students, their bad parents, and the school system which binds their hands and tells them to put up with it.
> What makes you think that’s the problem?
The US has a presidential system (even at the state level) where the legislative and executive branches are kept independent, which harms policy coherence
Most of the rest of the Western world (outside of Latin America) has either a parliamentary system (in which the executive is fully subordinated to the legislature) or a semi-presidential system (in which the executive is partially subordinated to the legislature and partially independent of it).
This doesn't just happen at the national level, but often gets repeated at the state level – in American states the executive (Governor/etc) and legislature are independent, in Australian states and Canadian provinces the state/provincial legislature controls the state/provincial executive
When things go wrong in the US system, it is so easy for the legislature and executive to engage in buck-passing in which each side claims they could solve the problem if only the other side would let them do it. In the rest of the English-speaking world, in most of Europe (and Japan too), that technique doesn't work, since the leaders of the legislature are also the leaders of the executive.
See also Latin America, where the same system leads to even worse problems. The US has other advantages (wealth, power, etc) which lets it overcome some of the downsides of its political system, where countries lacking those advantages can't
Suffice to say, observing the data from California or New York allows us to quickly reject this theory.
No we shouldn’t. Dominance of a single party will prevent inter-party fighting/fingerpointing/blame-shifting, but their intra-party equivalents can be just as bad. This is especially the case given the US has very weak party discipline by global standards, the party leadership has rather limited powers to tell the party’s elected officials what to do
In a parliamentary system, the executive needs to actively retain the confidence of the legislature, since a bare majority of the legislature can fire the executive at any time for any reason (and in a bicameral system, generally just a bare majority of the lower house). In a presidential system, the executive is an independent power base, separately elected, and the legislature can only remove it on the basis of serious misconduct (and often needs a supermajority to do so)
The school system spends a lot of money on inefficient heating, poor insulation, inefficient water fixtures, repairs etc. because there is no capital budget to replace schools or even these individual systems wholesale. Even finding a site to place a replacement school building is difficult in a city as crowded as New York and with NIMBYs; and then usually a new school isn't replacing buildings because all the buildings are over capacity, sometimes even 200% or 300% capacity with children in trailers on the playground and some lunch periods at 10am because there is no room in the cafeteria.
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One other thing is that NYC spends a lot of money doing things like extensive ESL education. In fact it is pretty rare for an NYC school to have zero ESL resources given the extensive immigration into NYC. This kind of remedial resource is generally not provided in a country like Japan, where only specific schools would have these kinds of resources.
And how much does ESL even cost? If it comes remotely near explaining why NYC needs three times as much money as Japan to do a worse job, that seems like a huge downside to immigration that nobody is talking about.
On the one hand, Tokyo is much older than NYC.
On the other hand, the Japanese have a penchant for tearing down and rebuilding things (partially policy-driven).
But thankfully the war ended before it was completely destroyed, as it would have continued being hit otherwise.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo#Postwar_rec...
A lot of countries have significantly newer schools, because a lot of the physical building were destroyed like everything else during the wars, or most people moved into newly developed suburbs and new towns. NYC notably doesn’t includes its suburbs so its share of old buildings is a problem that suburban districts do not have.
If it delivers much worse results at much higher costs for everyone else, that seems like a terrible trade off.
Given that the US can barely handle the meager social security of those with work disability, it's hard to imagine that we could afford widespread, more expensive specialized institutions. And Japan is not exactly doing hot with spending given that they run a 263% debt to GDP ratio.
Japan has a different set of problems, but delivering efficient and cost effective, high quality education is something they get right. And insofar as special needs people are evenly distributed among various countries populations, we should be able to learn from what they do.
And, I live in Florida now, and the public schools here also have lunch at 10 am because they don't want to fund building a new cafeteria. It's real. But, we don't have "woke" problems anymore, I guess.
FWIW, the MTA is run by the state government, not the municipal one. That being said, as someone who has lived in New York the past 8 years (still don't quite consider myself a "New Yorker", but maybe I never will), I have no strong sense that the city government would make a particularly good internet service, but even a mediocre one would be _miles_ ahead of Spectrum. I have no other option in my apartment building, and we get random outages when there isn't even a storm or anything an average of maybe a few hours a month. Their website never shows an outage when it happens, but after I check the status when our internet is down, I'll get a text in around a half an hour saying "oops, there's an outage". The idea of being in one of the largest cities in the world but not being able to get reasonably consistent internet for literally any cost is mind boggling to me, and having such a terrible service have exclusive access to my market is a much larger failure of municipal regulation than merely having a subpar municipal internet service as an alternative.
[Edit] The university in this town runs its own private ISP, which allows you to download e.g. a Linux distribution in about 12 seconds. The university includes the oldest part of town, which is full of mediaeval buildings and archaeological sites.
Tell him he needs to be willing to support for the muni internet in order to get Spectrum to offer symmetric fiber in the first place.
Same way he needed to be able to convincingly threaten to cut the cord to DirectTV the umpteen times he's forced them to offer him a discount, or to let XM radio subscription expire in order to get them to drop from $25/mo to $5/mo to get him back.
Dollars to donuts he's had the experience of paying out the ass for those services. Perhaps you're lucky and he's never renegotiated either of those. In that case tell him how to get those cheaper rates, and let him feel what it's like to instantly save an order of magnitude dollars monthly.
Then you'll get a better sense of how deep those beliefs go.
Do you still oppose municipal Internet in that case?
Maybe your locality is different, but before we got municipal Internet we had basically 3 choices: Xfinity at $180/mo for ~gig down/120M (something in that ballpark) up, CenturyLink with 40Mbps or less DSL (antiquated infrastructure, they actively blocked CLECs from doing anything that could improve it), or terrestrial wireless (fairly sketchy in our environment).
Once we got municipal broadband, we finally got fiber to the house, gigabit symmetric, great customer support, and latency that was 10x lower, AND Xfinity dropped their prices.
You realize it isn't free and people still subscribe right?
Also do you realize this has already been done and worked incredibly well in lots of places with much faster speeds and cheaper prices? This isn't some wild experiment.
In the US, goods like this are usually provisioned through a metered semipublic utility. The problem is that to work, those need a monopoly.
This isn't true and we can see it by the fact that lots of places have multiple wires run to them from ATT and multiple cable companies. Most of the time with cable a neighborhood is wired up but a cable isn't ran to a house until it is needed.
ISPs make so much profit they don't need everyone to sign up. A lot of times there is nothing to dig and it is run off a pole. They aren't giving a metered commodity like electricity, gas or water with their lines. Once a line is run to someone's house it's wildly profitable since the bandwidth per person is so cheap.
Loaded with debt and other liabilities and grocery store profits/net margins.
Gross margins may be 60% or more but they aren't ending up with the shareholders or C-Levels
Then link something and show me specifically what you are talking about.
Loaded with debt and other liabilities and grocery store profits/net margins.
I'm not sure exactly what this is supposed to mean, but debt is how things are financed and comcast made a 3 billion dollar profit from 31 billion in revenue.
That profit is 10% What's the spread between that and the loan repayment rate? What's the Fed rate?
People invest in different things but they should be getting value at least equivalent buying Fed bonds.
You tell me, you're the one who made the claims.
That profit is 10% What's the spread between that and the loan repayment rate? What's the Fed rate?
Profit is after servicing loans.
the loan repayment rate?
What loan? What are you talking about?
What's the Fed rate? People invest in different things but they should be getting value at least equivalent buying Fed bonds.
It's 5.25%, that took me 4 seconds to google. Did you think it might have been 10%?
At&T is 155 billion in debt
That Fed rate spread definitely puts those companies in grocery store rates
It's not a good business to be in unless you're a big investor depending on consistent earnings
They aren't "making it big"
Unless there's collusion, multiple providers means minor amounts of profit.
Bandwidth is ridiculously cheap these days once you're big enough.
The costs are in laying Fiber, power, repair and support. And definitely debt servicing.
Let's say there's a new residential block with 12 homes one mile away from another place with service from your network core
If the ground is alright or there's poles, you deliver at 15 to 20k/mile to the demarc at the building. Spend 5k for a stub or 20k for a regular connection that allows for extensions like the one you just made. Then spend 750/home for connections+CPE. Maybe extra money for IP addresses if you don't do CGNAT.
If you bill 50 a month and have no issues there you spend 7 years recovering your money before you make any profits.
When you see this you'll know why Verizon removed it's CEO after he laid lots of fiber. These numbers are assuming there's full take-up.
A single truck roll can wipe off two months of earnings from a user
There's better shares to buy. Better businesses to invest in
Above someone was trying to say municipal ISPs don't make money. They clearly can, ISPs make plenty of profit and municipal internet has been done many times before. Not only that their speeds are often higher than competing ISPs in the area.
Comcast has a 148.43 billion market cap, which includes their debt. They made over 3 billion in profit which includes servicing their debt.
That Fed rate spread definitely puts those companies in grocery store rates
What are you even talking about, this doesn't mean anything.
They aren't "making it big"
Comcast is a fortune 100 company worth 150 billion dollars. Municipal ISPs just need to work.
Again municipal internet already works all over the place. Chattanooga offers 300 mb internet for $58 USD. They offer 10 gigabit for $300.
Unless there's collusion, multiple providers means minor amounts of profit.
Prove it.
The whole point was that municipal internet works because it can make its money back over time. You making up random hypothetical scenarios has nothing to do with that.
Better businesses to invest in
Except that a municipal internet service can break the ISP monopoly, offer much higher speeds, lower prices and do it all while earning its money back.
The Fed rate spread is the difference between investing in a company and giving it to the Feds. I'm sure you've heard of "the end of easy money" and articles about if your world view was created by ZIRP. Of course another important rate is that between your profits and the inflation rate. i.e are you actually making money or running on a treadmill
Have you heard of Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Exxon, Facebook, Nvidia?
And that profit is almost nothing although the ratio is 1% into okay
Municipal broadband is a good thing. It keeps the money home. It can be successful. It's the sort of thing that's fine with very long term loans and the associated horizons
In fact most of Comcasts issues are TV related
Municipal broadband=okay Overbuilding = very terrible idea for anyone trying to make money.
It's like trying to turn a profit in Ashburn selling carrier services where Transit is cheaper than peering
150 billion in the cap isn't free cash flow.
I already posted that they had 31 billion in revenue, did you miss that?
Have you heard of Google, Apple, Microsoft, or Exxon, Facebook, Nvidia?
Nope, never heard of them. Good point of <nothing at all>
Overbuilding = very terrible idea for anyone trying to make money.
Are you hallucinating nonsense that no one every said anything about?
We have this thing called local control where local governments are empowered to create and tailor the services that their residents need most.
That's so much better than just not having support that works!
My friend had his Comcast line damaged. It required him 2 _months_ to get that fixed, and he was not able to work from home during that time.
Of course, you can always switch ISPs, right? Oh, yep. No, most of the US has only one _wired_ ISP.
This argument is dumb because it has nothing to do with the government. A non-profit could take out a loan and build an ISP and not have to turn a profit.
The real argument in this nature is if the municipal ISP is being subsidized with tax money their competitors don't get. But you can solve that too: Either they pay for the network by issuing a bond and then have to pay it back from subscription fees, or if there is to be a subsidy then anybody operating an ISP gets the same one.
The actual problem here gets back to the original issue: The ISPs lobby the government to suppress any competitor. If the incumbent sucks and people hate them, why doesn't a non-profit, or any other for-profit business, enter the market and take their customers? Because the incumbent has lobbied for laws to prevent that, or will sue them under whatever pretext they can find to slow them down, try to bankrupt them and deter anyone else from making the attempt.
It's harder to do that to a municipal network because the government workers operating the network will have insider knowledge of how to deal with their own bureaucracy and have the ear of the government officials who approved the network to get any artificial roadblocks cleared away. But the real problem is that none of those impediments should be there to begin with.
> The government should build and maintain the physical infrastructure like fiber and cell towers, and private industry should be able to access this infra at cost + a small fixed markup and provide all other needed equipment and services on top of that infra.
You can do even better than that. Have the government install cable trenches along all the roads, then provide cheap access to anyone who wants to install fiber in them. That reduces the build-out cost dramatically and then you get competition without anybody being able to make any claim of unfairness because access to install cable is available to every individual member of the public. It should be cheap and easy enough that if you want to run fiber from your house to your buddy's on the other side of town, your primary cost should be the two miles of fiber optic cable.
What? Like actual open trenches with exposed cables? Along every road? Is that sarcasm?
They are religious extremists, kind of like the Taliban.
In my experience, they are not actually looking at data and are not ready to be convinced by deeper analysis, examination of natural monopolies, or examples of government successfully delivering something. There are a few in this very comment section
I fully agree and am on board with this. I liken this to a “public roads” approach and (in applicable countries) a nationalized rail system. So many businesses are successful operating on publicly-owned infrastructure without the burden of maintenance. However, if everyone had to maintain their own infra like that, this same burden creates a high barrier to entry for new companies, promoting a monopoly, which leads to a situation where there is non need to compete or innovate: Build once, bill forever.
In my city, Sacramento, the collectively owned power company (SMUD) owns all the power poles and regularly sells space on them for telecom with little restriction. For internet service, I have the option of 2 different FTTH ISPs, 2 DOCSIS ISPs, and 1 DSL ISP (which is 2-3 more options than many people have). Not perfect, but it does mean there is healthy competition and customer choice. I just wish SMUD would run their own PON and sell bandwidth on it, we would then see a number of ISPs pop up and ISP-adjacent innovation utilizing this (hypothetical) city-wide PON as a platform.
I think Australia might be the same or at least per state. They do own the last mile, AusGrid comes and repairs power poles and has a map of outages online.
Lebanon is the other extreme where you just need your own generator because the infra is localized and unreliable.
It's a large (mainland USA in area equivilant) area with sparse dense pockets of population.
W.Australia has a fully independent power grid, I suspect the Northern Territory is the same. The East Coast (where the vast majority of population resides) has inter connected State grids .. including (recently) Tasmania, an island state with a great deal of hydro electricity and gas reserves.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basslink
There's a federal road network, lesser roads are state roads, smaller roads are managed by local councils.
There's quite a bit of Wind generation, too - and a whole lot of capacity for more, if the windfarms can get approval. (Roadblocks from local communities)
There's a project to duplicate basslink (500MW HVCD) - it was initially planned as 2x 750MW cables, but the three governments involved wouldn't fully agree on the increased price. Which IMO is insane because it'll be needed.
There's a dashboard showing how the various states interlink and export power between themselves[1].
[1] https://aemo.com.au/en/energy-systems/electricity/national-e...
The problem that I often see with these approaches is that the companies making the profits often lobby extensively to reduce the "fees, costs..." or have the infrastructure being continously funded by society via e.g. taxes (I actually don't have an issue with initial construction being taxpayer funded). This typically results in infrastructure getting into worse and worse condition because the funds to maintain are not there. Then the lobbying calls for public/private partnership investments (where the private partner reaps the profits and the public is left with the costs). Road infrastructure is a good example, a single truck causes 10000 times more damage then a car [1], but trucks pay only a miniscule proportion of road taxes.
Adam Smith would agree. So do I.
This is America. Give companies our tax dollars to be legal monopolies and make our lives suck.
Finally though there was a cooperative formed with the local power company and they hung fiber up on the power poles and brought drops down right into the home and now we get 1 gig for less than the wireless cost and completely sidestepped the garbage local telecom company who had been promising internet and not delivering for near two decades. And it didn't take them long at all to string it up down all the roads around here and then drops to peoples homes.
Independent redistricting commissions, banning political Gerrymandering/requiring competitive districts, publicly financed political campaigns, and rank choice voting would all have positive impacts on who gets selected and the ability of a constituency to replace them when they don't vote in their interest.
Define "independent".
I note that California has an "Independent redistricting commission" and it gerrymandered the state more than the previous "by legislature" system. (Exactly how do you determine "independent" in a way that isn't easily gamed?)
Of course, there's also the "define gerrymander" question.
The typical answer is some variation on "minimize the perimeter of districts." That's measurable but why is it good? For example, it doesn't follow interest group lines
In the military we had a saying: "There is only one thief; Everyone else is just trying to get their shit back."
The same applies to the monopoly on force, extorting individuals and corporations, but corporations can actually afford paying off and directing government towards their competition (and us individuals).
Our politicians are bought cheap.
There are ways to sneak around campaign finance laws but it's not that simple.
It's not even "thousands". Those are actually just the individual employees making donations. You have to name your employer so that the election commission can make sure they aren't filtering money.
The power brokering happens in terms of trading favors. Often, trading votes. (And these days, "issue ads", which was the Supreme Court's big ole fuck-you to election finance laws.)
Is such anonymity common?
https://communitynets.org/content/trojan-horse-cripple-muni-...
The problem isn't that lobbying is allowed, the problem is that corrupt politicians are allowed to act without punishment due to the press not caring about it. Blaming "lobbying" is just politicians way of deflecting blame when it is their own fault.
I do not expect my congressperson to be an expert in every issue. So they should go to the experts. What do you do when the experts have a vested interest in one narrative?
A more powerful Congressional Legislative Counsel akin to the Congressional Budget Office.
There is currently a House of Representatives Office of the Legislative Counsel and it does a lot of great work like summarize each bill, but it's rarely involved in legislative drafting unless explicitly asked. It should operate more like the CBO which gets called in for every bill that might impact government finances and the California Office of Legislative Counsel.
Glad to see the clause was nixed!