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Comment by DanBC2 | Hacker News Reader

>The most crushing aspect I saved for last though. Taxes here are significantly higher than I’ve experienced anywhere. This means you’re squeezed both on your take home pay and your expenses.

...and some weirdness means they don't spend that money on roads, so the road surfaces are lousy. Maybe I've been spoiled by our great road surfaces in UK.

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Here in Oregon we have less than half the taxes of California, and yet we have well-maintained roads (to the point of joking that the state flower is a traffic cone), and well-maintained everything else. And the state doesn't gripe about not having enough money nearly as often (and when they do it doesn't make the national news). The state even (by law) gives back any excess tax revenue they collect each year, though the state legislature puts a measure on every major ballot to try to prevent that (and it thankfully always fails).

I genuinely wonder what California has done so differently to end up doing so badly when they have twice as much tax revenue per person.

Californians pay more in federal taxes than the state receives in federal spending. This is also true of Oregon, but in California it's true to a much higher degree. So the state is essentially subsidizing the rest of the country and doesn't have enough left over for itself.

why is that?

The US political system gives disproportionate influence to people living in less populous states.

This would only be the determining factor if you believe that California on its own would not vote for the federal government providing support for the lowest income people.

The evidence seems to indicate that is not the case.

They wouldn't as much as they are forced to now, especially if they were an independent country (which is the only fair comparison).

There's also efficiencies of density that you just don't get in Mississippi, but that also pays off as a redistribution within states from cities to the suburbs and countryside.

Different states have different levels of economic development. Since all states share a common currency, it isn't possible for states like Mississippi to devalue their currency in order to be competitive with California. Large fiscal transfers between states are necessary to keep things balanced out.

Why don't they just sale their goods at lower prices? No need to fiddle with artificial (non-gold-backed) currencies.

A few reasons. Less populous states have proportionally more representation, since representatives are proportional to state population but every state gets two senators. Rural states are earlier in the presidential primary season (Iowa is the first), so they wind up getting more. And the less populous states tend to be poorer in general, so they have less to give and greater welfare need.

That sounds like the results of progressive taxation and federal welfare. California income is higher than the national average. Mississippi's is lower. So some federal tax dollars from California end up in Mississippi's medicaid fund.

But you can't blame all of California's suck on that. It is not exactly a low-tax state!

Only when you consider that California on the whole is a lot richer than most of the rest of the country.

Mississippi wouldn't be a low tax state if they were unable to tax Californians.

It's not true that those tax dollars are going to Mississippi's general fund. Rather, they are going to things like Medicaid and food stamps. Presumably the federal transfers equalize access to food and medicine across states, so they both start from the same place when they start levying state taxes to provide state services.

Small states can get lots of pork, too. Just look at what Byrd did for West Virginia.

that just sounds like an accounting trick. if Mississipi had higher revenue it could accomodate for more social services without the help of California.

i'm not very familiar with this stuff, but i believe states like California have better social safety nets than states like Mississipi. so different states don't even actually start from the same place

Much has been written about the dysfunction of California's government. I would summarize it as we have a direct participation system, in the form of propositions, that has limited what the government can do. Specifically, the voters have limited the amount of property taxes that can be raised, required a super majority of the legislature to raise any other taxes, and then gone ahead and proscribed what the legislature has to spend money on, either directly on things like education or indirectly on things like prisons when we pass laws like 3 strikes. Even when we raise additional taxes, as we just did with Prop 30, we specifically earmarked that money for education. All this leads to terrible roads.

Oregon has done exactly the same thing, though, and it hasn't caused the same problems. We have a balanced budget requirement, an annual cap on property tax increases, a requirement that the legislature can't pass taxes itself but has to put them as ballot measures, and a requirement that no new tax can pass at a special election (non-May non-November) without a 50% turnout (in response to too many ballot-stuffing special elections where all the special-interest groups remind their members to vote).

So, I remain curious about the root cause difference here.

I can't speak to Oregon, but in California the voters also specify the things the government has to spend on. We have legislature must spend on. For instance we require that some 60% of the budget go to education. The legislature only have control over something like 20%. Additionally, while this is probably only a small problem now, we will have pension / retiree health care issues.

Oregon is similar in that voters can specify things for the state to spend money on. However, I think the root of it is that California is a lot (more than 10x) bigger than Oregon. Any independent group that wants some money earmarked gets a much larger payoff in California than in Oregon. On the opposite side of the same coin, an overzealous reform group gets more bang for their buck getting a bill passed in California, too. Oregon has had its share of bad bills too, but as far as I understand it we just have far fewer than California.

I'm in New Zealand and interested in potentially moving to Portland one day. I'm aware that the city has a great reputation for arts and food (which is the appeal for me and my family) and personally prefer living in smaller cities. The regular folk music events, street markets and greenery all seem very appealing! Are there many job opportunities for software developers there however?

> Are there many job opportunities for software developers there however?

As a software developer there, I can unequivocally say "yes". That applies whether you prefer big companies, startups, or something inbetween.

And the rest of the reputation you mentioned is entirely deserved and accurate. (Also, if you prefer smaller cities, the surrounding area can easily accomodate, and the Portland area has a great light rail and public transit system to get you to and from downtown Portland.)

Feel free to contact me privately if you'd like to chat more about the area.

Move to Sydney instead.

Seriously.

Sydney is 10 times larger than Portland. Having lived in lots of different cities, large and small, I think 300-500k is the sweet spot for me. Any larger and I feel like you start suffering from quality of life issues - pollution, traffic, overcrowding, traveling distances, crime etc.

Sydney is choking from decades of mismanagement. Almost none of it is like the post cards.

The root cause is that Oregon is tiny.

You're not giving CA enough credit.

California is too large a state to be well-governed. Because of its size, it requires a big budget to campaign. As a result, the public sector unions dominate state politics. Democrats have had the majority in both houses of the state congress for 40 of the last 42 years - that gives you an idea of how dynamic our politics are.

In good economic times the legislature hikes union benefits and in bad times taxes are hiked to pay for benefits which are no longer affordable. We just passed prop 30 to increase our income taxes to the highest in the nation and most of the money behind the proposition was from unions. The $4 billion in revenue from prop 30 earmarked for schools will barely cover the state's shortfall in its teacher pension fund. Not a dime will go towards actually making the schools better.

California has the trifecta of suck - high taxes, bad services, and big deficits. That's what a state looks like when the government exists to serve its unions and not the people.

Others have pointed out the proposition system. Propositions do tend to be somewhat spastic - voters seldom balk at spending money on boondoggles like the high speed train that is supposed to be finished any decade now. But I don't think it is a huge problem. The proposition is one of the only outlets for non-liberal policies in the state, so I think it gets more hate and blame than it deserves.

> California is too large a state to be well-governed. Because of its size, it requires a big budget to campaign. As a result, the public sector unions dominate state politics. Democrats have had the majority in both houses of the state congress for 40 of the last 42 years - that gives you an idea of how dynamic our politics are.

This isn't really true. California's cities have some serious issues around allowing growth and development, and the state as a whole has a major problem because of Prop 13. See here: http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2009/05/should-w... for more, although there are many other issues.

These problems aren't inherent with size; they're self-created.

I dunno, the roads in eastern OR are pretty crappy.

"...and some weirdness means they don't spend that money on roads"

Of course they don't! They spend it on public-sector employee pensions, and boondoggle public-transit projects like that high-speed rail link between Bakersfield and Fresno. :P

LA has some of the worst road surfaces I've seen anywhere, even on the freeways. On the flip side, though, I suspect the US has more than 5x the roads despite only having 5x our population.

It's also a really big deal when you shut down a freeway, even if it is for maintenance that'll improve it. Not many cities make national news with road closures like LA has done with the 405. The cost of this maintenance goes way beyond time & materials.

I love how much denser the suburban parts of LA are compared to other places (though I do wish it had more of a super-dense urban core), but it does take a toll infrastructure-wise. LA has a pretty extensive network of freeways, and they're still all packed. It's crazy. And impressive, in a way (I have a love-hate relationship with the 405 in particular).

On the other hand, the city I'm from originally is finally getting to widening one of the core freeways in an area that's seen a ton of growth over the past twenty years, and it sounds like just as much a pain for the people living there as the 405 construction has been in LA. There's just a far lower total of affected people since the city is so much less populated. :)

I am right near the 101 myself, so I hear you on the love/hate thing. I figure, at least it isn't the 710.

Even the medium sized midwestern city I am from has problems with road widening. I think it's basically a scourge wherever it goes on. There are some freeways in LA that almost seem impossible to shut down under any non-catastrophic circumstances, such as the 5 downtown (or anything downtown, probably) so it'll be interesting to see how they approach that over time.

The problem we see down in Sydney is that they spend a lot of time and money on the widening of the freeways, but nothing on the infrastructure as soon as you get OFF the freeway. So the traffic still piles back up with huge traffic congestion through all the towns that are connected.

Major highways in metro areas are regularly resurfaced and repaired. It doesn't take a long-term shutdown of the road. They just shut down one or two lanes late at night, repave or repair a section of the road, and then do the same for the other lanes a different night.

It wasn't a long term shutdown, it was a weekend shutdown to blow up a bridge: http://www.metro.net/projects/i-405/mulholland-dr-bridge-dem...

Have you ever been to the northeast? NY and MA have far worse roads.

I'd say Minnesota and the midwest states take it for worst roads, especially in the city areas. The freeze/thaw and snowplows decimate our roads every winter.

I will confirm this. Just had to replace part of my exhaust a few weeks ago because I bottomed out hitting a pot hole at night I couldn't see until too late.

No chance! MN and WI are so proactive about road maintenance that we get pretty good roads despite the extra hassles caused by cold weather. I've spent a bit of time in Los Angeles and Hawaii, and those roads are easily in worse condition than the roads of Minnesota and Wisconsin.

Whenever I cross the boarder from NJ or Maryland or Ohio into PA, I suddenly feel like I'm off roading. PA roads are so garbage.

Maybe inside NYC or Boston city limits, but not in rural NY or MA and certainly not on the freeways. PA, on the other hand... you don't drive through PA in the summer without hitting at least one section of freeway that's become a parking lot because of road construction.

NY is a funny animal when it comes to roads. Upstate, the thruway, state highways, and interstates are pretty good. The State and Feds fund this.

County roads often suck because the counties are broke for a variety of reasons. City streets are awful because the state doesn't provide any aid -- although "towns" (some of which are bigger than cities) do.

The other thing is related to NY being ahead of the curve on highway construction. Many of the "expressways" and "parkways" in the NYC metro area are ineligible for federal highway funds because they connect toll bridges, but don't receive any toll money.

Massachusetts has a road system designed by masochists who didn't drive. No amount of money could fix it.

It's fun driving around in the hills, which represent a massive slice of property taxes, and often be on street surfaces that are far worse than anything you'll find in the most rural sections of Georgia.

In the northeastern US, they have to fix the roads every spring from damage caused by plows and frost heaving. In SF and other mild cities, there's now much seasonal component to road maintenance so roads tend to go much long between repaves.

Similar stories play out in cities like Seattle.

What freeways in the northeastern US have average daily traffic volumes above 300k? Do those have alternative routes or see significant traffic volumes overnight? It's tough in Southern California because of a lack of north/south transit corridors.

Compared to the US in general? Probably.

Though it's surprising that even a temperate US city would have dodgy road surfaces. In the north and northeast, it's at least understandable with our winters and the multiple freeze/thaw cycles we usually see before spring.

I'm guessing you never drove through Essex?

Or Edinburgh. Maybe it's places starting with 'E'...

Truth. Edinburgh has the worst road surfaces and quality of any British city I've driven in (one of the nicer cities otherwise though!)

You do know that we have a lot of cobbled streets here in Edinburgh? ;-)

On a serious note - I think the ongoing billion pound Great Tram Fiasco resulted in a lot of streets being left half-repaired for a long time as they were once part of the ever-shrinking tram route. Either that or the council is saving money on road repairs to help pay for it.

Or it might be part of the ongoing attempt to discourage driving in the city - which I don't mind as I pretty much walk everywhere!

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