Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

Comment by toomuchtodo | Hacker News Reader

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> Do they really though? Road infrastructure (especially bridges) is widely recognized to be really bad in the USA.

This is due to Republicans in Congress blocking an increase on the gas tax, currently at ~18 cents/gallon of gas since 1993.

> It's hard to say how well police work without comparing it to something else, but just based on the US prison population I would say that police don't work well.

I'm not a huge fan of police myself, but I believe this problem to be with laws enacted by legislative bodies. I believe you'll see less arrests as drug arrests drop due to decriminalization/legalization of recreational drugs across the US.

> Fire and maintenance services might work reasonably well, but I bet both are shockingly extremely expensive.

Citation? My property tax bill for my municipality (~75K people) shows public safety costing ~$48 million/year and highways and streets cost ~$14 million/year. I don't believe those costs to be out of line for the amount of people covered.

> This is due to Republicans in Congress blocking an increase on the gas tax, currently at ~18 cents/gallon of gas since 1993.

Is it, though? Only 60% - 65% of the gas tax is spent on roads and highways [1] [2]. Not to mention (possibly ultimately justified, but still relevant) drivers of extra cost like the Davis-Bacon Act.

[1] http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=20698 [2] http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB1000142405270230381540...

>This is due to Republicans in Congress blocking an increase on the gas tax, currently at ~18 cents/gallon of gas since 1993.

Your demagoguery does not hold up to the fact that Democrats recently held a majority in both houses of congress.

Can you show me Democrats that have voted against the gas tax increasing? I'm going off recent (the last 4-8 years) news.

The idea is that they're now in power and if it were such a good idea, they should have implemented it now that they could get it passed.

If it's not such a good idea then perhaps it was only done as a publicity stunt, and that would explain why it hasn't come up again.

I don't know that I care much one way or the other. But saying "Democrats haven't voted it down" is actually different than "Democrats have made it a priority"

Pointing out that there are hypocrites in the Democratic party too gets downvotes? Really? I'm not saying that I like the Republicans, they're hypocrites also.

But the Dems do get campaign contributions from Oil & Gas companies. Only at 20% of the rate of folks in the GOP but it's not as though it's a 99/1 split.

https://www.opensecrets.org/industries/indus.php?ind=E01

> Your demagoguery does not hold up to the fact that Democrats recently held a majority in both houses of congress

Your argument fails to take into account that, due to the filibuster, legislation can be blocked by one party (with no support from the other party) so long as the opposing party doesn't have both a majority in the House and a filibuster-proof supermajority in the Senate.

> This is due to Republicans in Congress blocking an increase on the gas tax, currently at ~18 cents/gallon of gas since 1993.

Maybe so, but that's not the point. I'm just challenging the claim that government (which includes Republicans) effectively performs those tasks.

I'm arguing local government can deliver services effectively to its citizens in almost all but a hand full of cases.

I missed that in your argument. I would still challenge that claim, especially when it comes to roads, which get a ton of funding from higher level governments and are still pretty bad.

Are you not proving the point? Saying that government-run projects are limited because of the decisions of the government doesn't seem to be a great argument for government-run projects.

I thought I was proving that local governance works, whereas federal governance does not as much. Its much easier to effect change at the local level than the federal, hence "municipal broadband" and not "federal broadband".

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