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> The first candidate I'd propose for the top slot is diffusion of responsibility stemming from a US obsession with localism If it were only localism, there wo

> The first candidate I'd propose for the top slot is diffusion of responsibility stemming from a US obsession with localism If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. Responsibilities, even funding local schools, have been nationalizing slowly over the years without an explicit change in the U.S. Constitution. So the national government has to 'hack' the system with grants and taxes to indirectly get national policies enacted. It's a corruption of the system to work around the Constitutional protection of federalism. One solution would be to amend the Constitution to make things like education national policy once and for all. Another would be for the national government to leave things like building roads and funding schools to the local governments.

bradleyjg 11y ago
If a transportation system crosses more than one jurisdiction than it doesn't really matter if some localities are fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. It is inherently a problem that can be solved optimally only at a different level. It might be possible to design a system such that metro areas are always a single jurisdiction, but given that such areas grow and shrink over time it wouldn't be easy. I don't think that "corruption of the system" is a cause in and of itself of the high cost of infrastructure construction or repair. Whether or not the Constitution would need to be changed, that's an implementation detail. First we need to figure out if diffusion of responsibility is actually a major problem (as I suggest), then get widespread agreement that that is the case, only then should we start worrying about what legal barters may or may not be in the way of mitigation strategies.
lifeisstillgood 11y ago
>> One solution would be to amend the Constitution Err. That's probably a tall order.
- humanrebar 11y ago
  Maybe. It used to be amended every 10-20 years, depending on how you count. It has been 25-40 years (again, depending on how you count) since the last successful amendment attempt. I think that, to some degree, the amendment process has been abandoned because people think the government can hack around it with good results. I think it's worth considering that this sort of corruption is a side effect of that approach versus the cleaner debate-and-amend process that the U.S. practiced historically. I think the U.S. government will be ultimately doomed if the U.S. can't figure out a way to amend the Constitution again. All sorts of new wrinkles have popped up since the early 90s and we have abandoned the process for democratically deciding how to deal with them. It really erodes the legitimacy of the process.
  - Frondo 11y ago
    No less a man than Scalia himself said that, if he could wave a magic wand and change the constitution, the change he would make would be to make it easier to amend. I didn't agree with most of what he said, but I thought he was spot-on with that.
  - int_19h 11y ago
    It has been abandoned because of a slew of SCOTUS rulings that have significantly broadened the powers implied in some clauses (most notably, the Commerce Clause, and the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment), allowing the federal government to work around the system more often than not; but also because of increasing partisanship of the political system making the 3/4 majority of states necessary to amend anything extremely unlikely on any issues where there isn't a near-unanimous consent already.
    - humanrebar 11y ago
      I think nationalizing more issues also leads to more divisiveness. If you get fed up with your city government, you can move. What do you do if you get fed up with your national government? On top of that, if relatively slim majorities (55%, say) can drastically change the rules (Citizens United, ACA), then there is a loss of legitimacy in the government. This also causes divisiveness since the country becomes a nation of power (who can scrape together a majority?) and not a nation of laws.
imglorp 11y ago
The feds could also do some easy, central infrastructure things that would reduce school and local govt funding needs in the first place. If the schools or localities want to buy their own, great. Three examples: 1. It seems every school uses a mishmash of Moodle, Schoology, and some Sharepoint abortion. If the feds would spend around the cost of 3 or 4 F-35 helmets ($1.6M) they could build and offer a decent school site. You know, homeworks, attendance. It could be the same software everywhere, even if you changed schools. Teachers wouldn't need retraining and kids would have their stuff follow them. 2. Fund a decent central, unbiased curriculum with open source text books. Kansas can suck an egg. Localities really _don't_ need their own curricula. The 3 R's don't need to vary with district. 3. Same as 1 but for local government operations software. Do they really all need their own?
- zrail 11y ago
  Number 2 is never ever going to happen. Do you remember all of the bugaboo about Common Core? That wasn't even the Feds getting involved in setting curriculum directly.
  - fooey 11y ago
    The right of a parent to indoctrinate their children trumps the right of the child to have an actual education. I don't know the answer, but it's a gross feedback loop.
    - fapjacks 11y ago
      >an actual eduction I'm not one of those people, but here it should be "indoctrinated by the state", because I think that's what our schools do. I think we play fast and loose with the term "school". For being an institution supposedly concerned with imparting knowledge on kids, the current system does a pretty shitty job of it. Most kids don't even know the algebra they "learn" in school, let alone stuff like how to pay rent, taxes, how to drive, how to budget, how to vote, how to work effectively in team situations on common tasks, how to survive in the wilderness (yes, that skill is taught in some countries). Our "schools" are awful. Maybe it's as simple as a big money injection. I dunno. But as is, it's awful.
paganel 11y ago
> Another would be for the national government to leave things like building roads and funding schools to the local governments. But then you'll have people from poorer neighborhoods/towns drive on worst roads and sending their kids to crappier schools compared to wealthier parts of the country. The roads' problem let's say is not the end of the world per se, but the fact that your kids will have less chances in life only because your neighborhood is not as wealthy as the one 5 or 10 miles down the road seems moraly wrong and a misallocation of resources.
- ghaff 11y ago
  School funding is already essentially through local government. It's where the vast bulk of property taxes go to. And, yes, it leads to high-priced suburbs with good schools, with schools that are often less good elsewhere. (It also means that people with children in large urban areas often feel they either have to move to the suburbs or put their kids in private schools.)
  - douche 10y ago
    Bad urban schools often get more funding than better suburban schools[1], and how's that working out? [1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-response-to-the-nytimes-article-on-school-districts-test-scores-and-income/#school_inputs https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...
    - ghaff 10y ago
      Fair enough. Funding is often one factor but there are obviously many reasons why suburban schools in good neighborhoods are "better" (have superior outcomes) than those in many city neighborhoods. And, yes, there's not much evidence that more money is a particularly effective fix in many poorly performing school districts. Mostly I was just responding to a comment that seemed to not be aware that school funding was already mostly local.
fooey 11y ago
It's in the national interest to have well maintained roads the military would be able to traverse. That's really why we have the interstate highway system in the first place. It's also in the national interest to have a well educated population with a generally common knowledge foundation. Education is a cultural and nationalistic cornerstone.
- caseysoftware 11y ago
  If you use "in the national interest" as your threshold, you can apply it to almost anything: It's in the national interest to have a healthy population. For everyone to work out regularly. For everyone to read every day. For everyone to travel the world and learn about other cultures. For everyone to get a full night's sleep. That's why that is not the US standard. We explicitly have restraints and constraints on government. If you want to remove those restraints and constraints, that's fine. There's a process for that. But if you ignore the restraints and constraints instead, then government power is based on whims and preferences of whoever is in power. And we know how that works out.
  - emodendroket 11y ago
    The government takes steps to encourage many of the things you've listed.
- aggie 11y ago
  Highways are much less of a military necessity than when they were built. The nature of warfare is no longer based as much on troop movement.
emodendroket 11y ago
Realistically, I don't see how an "every municipality for itself" (or even at the state level) system wouldn't make things much slower and more inefficient no matter what. It seems like a recipe for either too much duplication of function or else an unclear chain of command.
Aleman360 11y ago
> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. Seattle. Great water, renewable energy, lots of transit investment.
erichocean 11y ago
> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. There's at least one: Bellevue, Washington, USA (across the lake from Seattle). I lived near there growing up and watched in awe how they repeatedly refactored the city in record time, over and over and over again, improving it each time. It was almost like watching agile development happen physically in front of you.

bradleyjg 11y ago

If a transportation system crosses more than one jurisdiction than it doesn't really matter if some localities are fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. It is inherently a problem that can be solved optimally only at a different level. It might be possible to design a system such that metro areas are always a single jurisdiction, but given that such areas grow and shrink over time it wouldn't be easy. I don't think that "corruption of the system" is a cause in and of itself of the high cost of infrastructure construction or repair. Whether or not the Constitution would need to be changed, that's an implementation detail. First we need to figure out if diffusion of responsibility is actually a major problem (as I suggest), then get widespread agreement that that is the case, only then should we start worrying about what legal barters may or may not be in the way of mitigation strategies.

lifeisstillgood 11y ago

>> One solution would be to amend the Constitution Err. That's probably a tall order.

humanrebar 11y ago
Maybe. It used to be amended every 10-20 years, depending on how you count. It has been 25-40 years (again, depending on how you count) since the last successful amendment attempt. I think that, to some degree, the amendment process has been abandoned because people think the government can hack around it with good results. I think it's worth considering that this sort of corruption is a side effect of that approach versus the cleaner debate-and-amend process that the U.S. practiced historically. I think the U.S. government will be ultimately doomed if the U.S. can't figure out a way to amend the Constitution again. All sorts of new wrinkles have popped up since the early 90s and we have abandoned the process for democratically deciding how to deal with them. It really erodes the legitimacy of the process.
- Frondo 11y ago
  No less a man than Scalia himself said that, if he could wave a magic wand and change the constitution, the change he would make would be to make it easier to amend. I didn't agree with most of what he said, but I thought he was spot-on with that.
- int_19h 11y ago
  It has been abandoned because of a slew of SCOTUS rulings that have significantly broadened the powers implied in some clauses (most notably, the Commerce Clause, and the Due Process clause of the 14th Amendment), allowing the federal government to work around the system more often than not; but also because of increasing partisanship of the political system making the 3/4 majority of states necessary to amend anything extremely unlikely on any issues where there isn't a near-unanimous consent already.
  - humanrebar 11y ago
    I think nationalizing more issues also leads to more divisiveness. If you get fed up with your city government, you can move. What do you do if you get fed up with your national government? On top of that, if relatively slim majorities (55%, say) can drastically change the rules (Citizens United, ACA), then there is a loss of legitimacy in the government. This also causes divisiveness since the country becomes a nation of power (who can scrape together a majority?) and not a nation of laws.

imglorp 11y ago

The feds could also do some easy, central infrastructure things that would reduce school and local govt funding needs in the first place. If the schools or localities want to buy their own, great. Three examples: 1. It seems every school uses a mishmash of Moodle, Schoology, and some Sharepoint abortion. If the feds would spend around the cost of 3 or 4 F-35 helmets ($1.6M) they could build and offer a decent school site. You know, homeworks, attendance. It could be the same software everywhere, even if you changed schools. Teachers wouldn't need retraining and kids would have their stuff follow them. 2. Fund a decent central, unbiased curriculum with open source text books. Kansas can suck an egg. Localities really _don't_ need their own curricula. The 3 R's don't need to vary with district. 3. Same as 1 but for local government operations software. Do they really all need their own?

zrail 11y ago
Number 2 is never ever going to happen. Do you remember all of the bugaboo about Common Core? That wasn't even the Feds getting involved in setting curriculum directly.
- fooey 11y ago
  The right of a parent to indoctrinate their children trumps the right of the child to have an actual education. I don't know the answer, but it's a gross feedback loop.
  - fapjacks 11y ago
    >an actual eduction I'm not one of those people, but here it should be "indoctrinated by the state", because I think that's what our schools do. I think we play fast and loose with the term "school". For being an institution supposedly concerned with imparting knowledge on kids, the current system does a pretty shitty job of it. Most kids don't even know the algebra they "learn" in school, let alone stuff like how to pay rent, taxes, how to drive, how to budget, how to vote, how to work effectively in team situations on common tasks, how to survive in the wilderness (yes, that skill is taught in some countries). Our "schools" are awful. Maybe it's as simple as a big money injection. I dunno. But as is, it's awful.

paganel 11y ago

> Another would be for the national government to leave things like building roads and funding schools to the local governments. But then you'll have people from poorer neighborhoods/towns drive on worst roads and sending their kids to crappier schools compared to wealthier parts of the country. The roads' problem let's say is not the end of the world per se, but the fact that your kids will have less chances in life only because your neighborhood is not as wealthy as the one 5 or 10 miles down the road seems moraly wrong and a misallocation of resources.

ghaff 11y ago
School funding is already essentially through local government. It's where the vast bulk of property taxes go to. And, yes, it leads to high-priced suburbs with good schools, with schools that are often less good elsewhere. (It also means that people with children in large urban areas often feel they either have to move to the suburbs or put their kids in private schools.)
- douche 10y ago
  Bad urban schools often get more funding than better suburban schools[1], and how's that working out? [1] https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-response-to-the-nytimes-article-on-school-districts-test-scores-and-income/#school_inputs https://randomcriticalanalysis.wordpress.com/2016/05/09/my-r...
  - ghaff 10y ago
    Fair enough. Funding is often one factor but there are obviously many reasons why suburban schools in good neighborhoods are "better" (have superior outcomes) than those in many city neighborhoods. And, yes, there's not much evidence that more money is a particularly effective fix in many poorly performing school districts. Mostly I was just responding to a comment that seemed to not be aware that school funding was already mostly local.

fooey 11y ago

It's in the national interest to have well maintained roads the military would be able to traverse. That's really why we have the interstate highway system in the first place. It's also in the national interest to have a well educated population with a generally common knowledge foundation. Education is a cultural and nationalistic cornerstone.

caseysoftware 11y ago
If you use "in the national interest" as your threshold, you can apply it to almost anything: It's in the national interest to have a healthy population. For everyone to work out regularly. For everyone to read every day. For everyone to travel the world and learn about other cultures. For everyone to get a full night's sleep. That's why that is not the US standard. We explicitly have restraints and constraints on government. If you want to remove those restraints and constraints, that's fine. There's a process for that. But if you ignore the restraints and constraints instead, then government power is based on whims and preferences of whoever is in power. And we know how that works out.
- emodendroket 11y ago
  The government takes steps to encourage many of the things you've listed.
aggie 11y ago
Highways are much less of a military necessity than when they were built. The nature of warfare is no longer based as much on troop movement.

emodendroket 11y ago

Realistically, I don't see how an "every municipality for itself" (or even at the state level) system wouldn't make things much slower and more inefficient no matter what. It seems like a recipe for either too much duplication of function or else an unclear chain of command.

Aleman360 11y ago

> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. Seattle. Great water, renewable energy, lots of transit investment.

erichocean 11y ago

> If it were only localism, there would be localities that were fantastic at investing in their own infrastructure. There's at least one: Bellevue, Washington, USA (across the lake from Seattle). I lived near there growing up and watched in awe how they repeatedly refactored the city in record time, over and over and over again, improving it each time. It was almost like watching agile development happen physically in front of you.