As U.S. Debt Hits a Worrying Milestone, Washington Barely Notices
nytimes.com
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I’m not sure why anyone expects differently. Politicians corruptly waste money to helping themselves, their careers, their party, and their causes. It’s other people’s money that they are spending. And most of them never had substantial experience in private industry to learn the skills it takes to manage billions of dollars of budget. Governments are far, far more wasteful and inefficient than anyone realizes.
https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-8-28-the-growth-pon...
I very often think about how much money Americans spend just on basic infrastructure needs compared to people who live in places built at a more sensible scale.
If I got a job in Arlington Texas right now, I’d first need to load myself up with a car payment and spend 4-5 figures per year just for basic needs like groceries and work, even if I lived within walking distance of that job.
Arlington, with a population of over 350,000, has no scheduled route public transportation service.
American towns and cities never seem to think about things like like “how many feet of sewer line/streets/utility lines and miles of road do we need for each resident?” or “how much population/economic activity per acre do we need to break even on services?”
Not having public transportation or high-density housing nearby is a feature and a desirable property.
> I’d first need to load myself up with a car payment and spend 4-5 figures per year
Also a feature: if you can't afford this, perhaps that isn't the community for you?
This is a fairly typical agenda: "I want to spend your money turning your city into something you don't want it to be so some theoretical utopia can be actualized."
No matter how much crying and extolling of virtues you do: nothing is going to make me ride the bus. No matter how many "road diets" you impose, no matter how many lanes you kill by dedicating them to buses: I'm not going to ride your bus system. I'll just take my tax dollars (which far exceed that of typical bus ridership) elsewhere.
I ride the subway everywhere in NYC, but not every city needs to become NYC.
1. New suburb is built, new residents are attracted by new housing stock and good value.
2. 40 years pass, the built infrastructure has aged to the point of needing refurbishment or replacement
3. Suburban government is forced to raise property taxes to cover maintenance
4. Affluent residents leave as they are attracted to a more recently built suburb with new housing stock and lower property taxes
5. Repeat steps 2-4
I am not at all advocating for stifling urban density. I never suggested that nor ever talked about building subways or skyscrapers.
The organization I linked to is called "Strong Towns" not "Strong Cities" and that is on purpose.
> Also a feature: if you can't afford this, perhaps that isn't the community for you?
Let's reframe this: If I'm a business owner, I can pay an American breadwinner $100,000 and they'll spend $10,000 on transportation per year for their family. Or, I can hire someone who lives in a place where they don't have to spend that much and I can pay them $95,000 a year. Maybe that other family only owns one car per family instead of two, I'm not even saying that they never drive. They just don't have to use a car to reach 100% of the destinations they want to reach in their life (grocery store, school, work, playground, etc).
This is what I'm really getting at here: Americans collectively blowing all this money on longer roads and sewer lines and a bunch of half-empty parking lots that don't generate tax income and economic activity makes America less competitive on the global stage. It’s a silent drag on the economy.
This is before we even dive into the rabbit hole of the statement you just made: that you implicitly believe that this self-reliant car-dependent transportation system makes it more difficult to be poor. What happens if my car breaks down before my first day at work at an entry level hourly job? I'm going to be fired, and then I will have no job to pay for fixing my car.
You don't even have to be pro-urbanism or prefer to walk to places to understand that argument.
> This is a fairly typical agenda: "I want to spend your money turning your city into something you don't want it to be so some theoretical utopia can be actualized."
1. What do you want your city to be? Can you describe it? What environments in your city/town do you enjoy spending time in? Which ones do you find uncomfortable to be in? What's it like to stand in those places, outside of your vehicle?
2. Is the utopia theoretical? Try visiting the downtown of any small railroad town in the US and observe the scale of it. How many millions of Americans per year travel internationally to experience walkable environments? Small towns that are comfortable to traverse without driving do exist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ztpcWUqVpIg
> No matter how much crying
I do not recall crying
> nothing is going to make me ride the bus
> I ride the subway everywhere in NYC
Now you're sending mixed signals, I guess. My hypothesis is that you don't actually know what it's like to ride the bus, and the idea scares you. I hear you. You've probably never been on one that is frequent or pleasant, probably just your typical infrequent broken-down slow bus that is underfunded in America, the kind of bus where you have to be extremely desperate to resort to using it. So you get on the bus and that's the demographic, and it makes you uncomfortable.
Have you ever been to Disney World? Did you ride the bus there? Why didn't you just drive up to the gate?
Have you ever ridden a bus from the airport parking to the airport? Why did you do that? Why not just drive up to the airport?
> no matter how many lanes you kill by dedicating them to buses
Even if you prefer to drive, you should actually want what I want, because it alleviates traffic. If your goal is to get more people to drive, you will have more traffic.
> I'll just take my tax dollars (which far exceed that of typical bus ridership) elsewhere.
The place you are taking your tax dollar is into sewer line reconstruction. it really isn't even all that much about transportation itself, it's about property tax efficiency.
It’s also corporate level. Worse than government actually, because the government deficit is caused by several trillion-level tax cuts that were financed by government debt. Corporate debt comes on top of that.
> A lot of the debt is hidden too.
Accounting is even worse in corpo-land.
> Politicians corruptly waste money to helping themselves,
Again, Wall Street is worse, politicians don't become billionaires - billionaires buy their way into politics.
> Governments are far, far more wasteful and inefficient than anyone realizes.
Compared to corpo-land, governments are frugal.
Or is this some terminology lawyering that default is a legal term that doesn't apply to a sovereign?
Modern Monetary Theory says that's OK. You stop the pretense of borrowing, then print as much money as you want. You then control inflation by taxation, and then simply burning the dollars you collect.
But the switch from one to the other would be unpleasant, since a lot of bond holders are depending on their bonds being worth more than the purchase price after inflation.
But yes you don't hear anyone about this because politicians waste no time on things they know they can't fix. DOGE was a fucking embarrassment.
In the 1930s the Dutch cabinet knew very well that they likely couldn't keep up neutrality. But they also knew there was no chance in hell that they could build up an army in 3 years that could stop Hitler. So what did they do? Lie to the public and secretly open Canadian bank accounts.
With such a great plan what could possibly go wrong?
https://www.reed.edu/economics/parker/f13/201/cases/Argentin...
"Argentina, like many other chronic-inflation economies, went through repeated cycles of hyperinflation followed by attempts at stabilization. A typical cycle in such an inflationary economy begins with acceleration of money creation to accommodate the government's budgetary needs. As inflation accelerates, political pressure to reduce inflation builds, leading to an eventual "monetary reform." Such reforms usually include the introduction of a new currency (which is convenient since inflation has usually moved the nominal prices of goods and services into the thousands, million, billions, or even trillions of units of the old currency) and promises on the part of the government (which is in charge of the budget) and the central bank (which is in charge of issuing money and is often under direct control of the government) to follow rules leading to slower monetary growth in the future."