5 ms·

If vetos are the reason, then enough people don't want to build what the author is suggesting. It's not a failure to simply not do what he (and not a clear majo

If vetos are the reason, then enough people don't want to build what the author is suggesting. It's not a failure to simply not do what he (and not a clear majority) thinks is good.

throwawaygh 7y ago
> clear majority In the section on the federal government, he identifies the senate filibuster. The filibuster means you need a supermajority of the vote in a deliberative body that's already not representative of the majority of the population. You can argue that minority veto power is a good things, but the senate is definitively not a body that represents the "clear majority" of Americans. Even prior to a fillibuster, the senate is not even intended to be a body that represents "a clear majority".
- WillPostForFood 7y ago
  What percentage of "building" is blocked because of a filibuster in the senate, vs complications at the local level? Look at both the housing and transportation issues in the Bay Area - it is mostly a local issue. NIMBYism, environmentalism, lawsuits, poorly run city and county govt, etc...
  - throwawaygh 7y ago
    Huh? The author isn't writing about housing prices in SFBA.
    - WillPostForFood 7y ago
      Second sentence of the second paragraph: The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and later in the article: You can see it in the inability of American cities to build public transit
      - throwawaygh 7y ago
        Expansive essays are sometimes hard to comprehend. Setting aside a debate about the author's argument, let's just focus on comprehending his actual words. The author clearly isn't implying that the Senate's filibuster is the reason SFBA has a housing crisis when we writes about the senate. You can tell because housing is discussed in a section on "The state and local veocracy" while the senate is discussed in the section entitled "The federal vetocracy"! He's identifying the filibuster as one instance of "vetocracy" that causes certain issues. By "vetocracy" he's referring to a phenomenon that happens at the local, state, and federal levels. The effects at each level are different. In fact, vetocracy even in the private sector (dear god have I some first hand experience with that!) The senate is at the federal level, not the sort of state/local issues you identify. The author identifies many other examples of vetocracy. In particular, there is a section entitled "The state and local vetocracy", in which he discusses state and local issues such as the ones identified in your post. And the author even identifies some of the root causes from your posts. E.g., he links to an hour+ discussion between a leftist and a libertarian on "neighborhood defenders", i.e., the NIMYism you identify in your original post! As a meta point, section titles are super useful. When reading, I always read the intro and then skim section titles. Only after that I then read through the article. It's a simple but useful reading comprehension trick. For example, in this article, it's easy to lose the overall flow of the argument. However, if you skim the section titles first, you certainly won't make the reading comprehension mistake of confusing content in a section entitled "federal" as talking about state and local stuff when there's also a section entitled "state and local" :-)
        WillPostForFood 7y ago
        As a self proclaimed expert on reading comprehension, maybe reread my comment instead of spending 311 words being defensive about being caught getting the facts wrong. I'll restate it for you: The crisis in building is bottom up. The senate has marginal relevance to most building, be it local housing or bigger infrastructure projects like bridges, airports, or dams. Even if the filibuster was eliminated, projects wouldn't proceed because there is enough local power to stop them. So calling out the senate is misplaced priority. You need to loosen up the local level first, then worry about getting more federal money flowing. I.e., "What percentage of 'building' is blocked because of a filibuster in the senate"? Not much. If you want proof, look back at 2009 when the Senate was willing to dump a ton of money into infrastructure, and nothing interesting got built. The money was directed into a bunch of non controversial road projects and maintenance that would have happened anyway.
breischl 7y ago
>enough people don't want to build If the problem was that 51% of people didn't want those things, well that's just democracy. For a true veto, one person is "enough people." That's an exaggeration in this case, but the point he's getting at is that it takes a very very small minority to prevent things from moving forward. And there will almost always be some people invested in the status quo, or even just trying to block things in the hope of getting some kind of payoff in return (trolls, basically).
- greendave 7y ago
  And 51% is quite misleading. 24% of the US population lives in the 30 smallest states. That means that effectively 12%* of voters are responsible for a supermajority of senators. Or if you consider the filibuster, 41 senators can represent as little as 11% of the US population and are elected by 5.5%* of U.S. voters. *Assuming a uniform population-voter proportion across states, which is undoubtedly not quite the case, though I don't have the exact numbers handy.
  - hanniabu 7y ago
    And good ol' gerrymandering and voter suppression helps solidify that 5.5%.
- bhupy 7y ago
  Well that's just because the United States is not a unitary state, it's a federal union. The United Nations and the European Union both also have "vetocracy" structures baked into their systems.
pwinnski 7y ago
A veto is not the same as a majority. It takes 40 Senators to ensure something doesn't pass Congress. It takes a single President to ensure something doesn't become law--a literal veto. "Enough people" needing to be literally "every person" is a big part of the problem.
- bhupy 7y ago
  Much like the United Nations or the European Union, the United States is a Union of States. The consensus necessary to pass something that broadly applies to all 330 Million people across 50 disparate democratic republics (each with their own Constitutions) is what preserves this Union. The US, as a Union, is also unique in that _every single state_ agreed to join by ratifying the Constitution (same cannot be said for the European Union). The States agreed to this because part of the deal was the federative system of checks and balances that preserve their sovereignty to a large degree. That was the contract, that's what they signed up for. Unless we can come up with a way to convince these states to voluntarily relinquish their sovereignty, States will just walk away from the deal if they think that the contract they signed up for is violated after the fact. The 10th Amendment is our tool for ensuring that change can eventually propagate through the entire system in a stable way.
- lazyjones 7y ago
  > It takes a single President to ensure something doesn't become law--a literal veto. That single president has to be elected though and by definition represents the majority of voters/electorate (modulo whatever special voting mechanisms the country has).
  - pwinnski 7y ago
    Or, currently, 46% of participating voters, which is a quite a modulo.

If vetos are the reason, then enough people don't want to build what the author is suggesting. It's not a failure to simply not do what he (and not a clear majority) thinks is good.

throwawaygh 7y ago

> clear majority In the section on the federal government, he identifies the senate filibuster. The filibuster means you need a supermajority of the vote in a deliberative body that's already not representative of the majority of the population. You can argue that minority veto power is a good things, but the senate is definitively not a body that represents the "clear majority" of Americans. Even prior to a fillibuster, the senate is not even intended to be a body that represents "a clear majority".

WillPostForFood 7y ago
What percentage of "building" is blocked because of a filibuster in the senate, vs complications at the local level? Look at both the housing and transportation issues in the Bay Area - it is mostly a local issue. NIMBYism, environmentalism, lawsuits, poorly run city and county govt, etc...
- throwawaygh 7y ago
  Huh? The author isn't writing about housing prices in SFBA.
  - WillPostForFood 7y ago
    Second sentence of the second paragraph: The US could be building our way out of the housing crisis and later in the article: You can see it in the inability of American cities to build public transit
    - throwawaygh 7y ago
      Expansive essays are sometimes hard to comprehend. Setting aside a debate about the author's argument, let's just focus on comprehending his actual words. The author clearly isn't implying that the Senate's filibuster is the reason SFBA has a housing crisis when we writes about the senate. You can tell because housing is discussed in a section on "The state and local veocracy" while the senate is discussed in the section entitled "The federal vetocracy"! He's identifying the filibuster as one instance of "vetocracy" that causes certain issues. By "vetocracy" he's referring to a phenomenon that happens at the local, state, and federal levels. The effects at each level are different. In fact, vetocracy even in the private sector (dear god have I some first hand experience with that!) The senate is at the federal level, not the sort of state/local issues you identify. The author identifies many other examples of vetocracy. In particular, there is a section entitled "The state and local vetocracy", in which he discusses state and local issues such as the ones identified in your post. And the author even identifies some of the root causes from your posts. E.g., he links to an hour+ discussion between a leftist and a libertarian on "neighborhood defenders", i.e., the NIMYism you identify in your original post! As a meta point, section titles are super useful. When reading, I always read the intro and then skim section titles. Only after that I then read through the article. It's a simple but useful reading comprehension trick. For example, in this article, it's easy to lose the overall flow of the argument. However, if you skim the section titles first, you certainly won't make the reading comprehension mistake of confusing content in a section entitled "federal" as talking about state and local stuff when there's also a section entitled "state and local" :-)
      - WillPostForFood 7y ago
        As a self proclaimed expert on reading comprehension, maybe reread my comment instead of spending 311 words being defensive about being caught getting the facts wrong. I'll restate it for you: The crisis in building is bottom up. The senate has marginal relevance to most building, be it local housing or bigger infrastructure projects like bridges, airports, or dams. Even if the filibuster was eliminated, projects wouldn't proceed because there is enough local power to stop them. So calling out the senate is misplaced priority. You need to loosen up the local level first, then worry about getting more federal money flowing. I.e., "What percentage of 'building' is blocked because of a filibuster in the senate"? Not much. If you want proof, look back at 2009 when the Senate was willing to dump a ton of money into infrastructure, and nothing interesting got built. The money was directed into a bunch of non controversial road projects and maintenance that would have happened anyway.

breischl 7y ago

>enough people don't want to build If the problem was that 51% of people didn't want those things, well that's just democracy. For a true veto, one person is "enough people." That's an exaggeration in this case, but the point he's getting at is that it takes a very very small minority to prevent things from moving forward. And there will almost always be some people invested in the status quo, or even just trying to block things in the hope of getting some kind of payoff in return (trolls, basically).

greendave 7y ago
And 51% is quite misleading. 24% of the US population lives in the 30 smallest states. That means that effectively 12%* of voters are responsible for a supermajority of senators. Or if you consider the filibuster, 41 senators can represent as little as 11% of the US population and are elected by 5.5%* of U.S. voters. *Assuming a uniform population-voter proportion across states, which is undoubtedly not quite the case, though I don't have the exact numbers handy.
- hanniabu 7y ago
  And good ol' gerrymandering and voter suppression helps solidify that 5.5%.
bhupy 7y ago
Well that's just because the United States is not a unitary state, it's a federal union. The United Nations and the European Union both also have "vetocracy" structures baked into their systems.

pwinnski 7y ago

A veto is not the same as a majority. It takes 40 Senators to ensure something doesn't pass Congress. It takes a single President to ensure something doesn't become law--a literal veto. "Enough people" needing to be literally "every person" is a big part of the problem.

bhupy 7y ago
Much like the United Nations or the European Union, the United States is a Union of States. The consensus necessary to pass something that broadly applies to all 330 Million people across 50 disparate democratic republics (each with their own Constitutions) is what preserves this Union. The US, as a Union, is also unique in that _every single state_ agreed to join by ratifying the Constitution (same cannot be said for the European Union). The States agreed to this because part of the deal was the federative system of checks and balances that preserve their sovereignty to a large degree. That was the contract, that's what they signed up for. Unless we can come up with a way to convince these states to voluntarily relinquish their sovereignty, States will just walk away from the deal if they think that the contract they signed up for is violated after the fact. The 10th Amendment is our tool for ensuring that change can eventually propagate through the entire system in a stable way.
lazyjones 7y ago
> It takes a single President to ensure something doesn't become law--a literal veto. That single president has to be elected though and by definition represents the majority of voters/electorate (modulo whatever special voting mechanisms the country has).
- pwinnski 7y ago
  Or, currently, 46% of participating voters, which is a quite a modulo.