6 ms·

The main issue is that water system maintenance in the US is funded by the locality. The locality may be a city, town, county, or some other kind of governmenta

by manv1 4y ago

The main issue is that water system maintenance in the US is funded by the locality. The locality may be a city, town, county, or some other kind of governmental overlay. Some localities have dedicated funding sources for the water system, and some localities pull the funding from the general fund. As an example, my water bills are paid directly to a water company, which is a public utility company that handles all the water stuff. Other cities might issue the bills, collect the water money, and spend it on "something else." The main issue IMO is that maintenance can be expensive, and nobody really notices if you defer maintenance for 30 years until the system fails. Until then you can spend that water money on pet projects and retire. At that point it's someone else's problem. The same issue occurs with road and bridge maintenance, which are usually prime targets for politicians looking for money to fund their projects. Very few cities in the US spend enough money on road/bridge/infrastructure maintenance, because other constituencies want that money. In many ways that's why water districts that are politically independent are better, but I've never seen any actual surveys on that.

triyambakam 4y ago
Billions for Ukraine but nothing for Jackson
- diordiderot 4y ago
  Ukraine isn't funneling it's defense funding to Brett Farve now is it
skissane 4y ago
> The main issue is that water system maintenance in the US is funded by the locality Isn't that a good argument that it should be run by the state government instead? Local government in the US has so much power, compared to many other countries. It makes you wonder if that's a mistake, and if greater centralisation would produce better outcomes.
- runako 4y ago
  Almost certainly yes (and one could similarly make a good argument for federalizing a lot of our services). However, having services run by larger jurisdictions is directly at odds with the American need to ensure that the "haves" have distinctly better living conditions than the "have nots," and so this is a political non-starter. Put another way: poor services (such as healthcare, schools, and even potable water) are a design feature, not a bug, of American civics.
  - com2kid 4y ago
    The other issue is state governments can also direct funds away from cities to the state legislators favorite pet projects. Look at the decades of underfunding of NYC's transit system for examples.
- eschaton 4y ago
  The problem is that there has been over a century and a half of histrionic propaganda within the United States asserting that government can’t do anything right, government and regulation are the root of all societal problems, the only proper role for government is to preserve property rights, and so on, starting around the late 1840s for some reason. So there have been multiple generations of Americans who have marinated in this their entire lives, resulting in large populations who assume more local control is always better, people only deserve what they can afford themselves individually, and so on—and entire societal systems built atop the ensuing systematic deprivation. At the same time, there’s also an almost North Korean degree of jingoistic “we’re the pinnacle of human achievement” nationalism so any change to the status quo is opposed even by those who would directly benefit because they don’t really believe it’s possible for things to be any better. After all, if they could be, they would be, because We’re The Best! So if things are bad, well, they’re worse everywhere else so quit complaining. This is why Americans get such culture shock going elsewhere in the world. They see that others can actually have a society that’s just as good or better, and they have to figure out how to integrate that into their worldview. TL;DR: Many things in the US stay as bad as they do because multiple generations have been brainwashed into thinking they’re the best they can be.
varenc 4y ago
Expanding on that a bit: Many suburban towns rely on growth for a large portion of their revenue. When growth eventually slows they no longer have enough money coming in to the meet their maintenance costs. Strong Towns calls this the “Growth Ponzi Scheme”: - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon... - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...
- paulmd 4y ago
  On top of that some areas outright collapse and are left with a bunch of infrastructure they can't support. The US doesn't really have any good mechanism for dealing with the "single-industry town where the industry collapses". There are a significant number of these in the more rural areas of the country, mining towns and such where the mines dried up and left town. There's no method to un-deploy infrastructure and in fact in many places there's intentional barriers to "right-sizing". Sometimes you can rip out paved roads and replace them with (cheaper to maintain) gravel roads etc but there's just a lot of miles to maintain regardless, suburban sprawl is a problem but rural/ex-rural sprawl is massive in the US. In these areas, what is left is often essentially government welfare. The area runs on social-security checks (which go a long way with cheap cost-of-living, as long as gas prices aren't too high) and government jobs - prisons, military installations, civil positions. And I'm not talking about farm areas etc - that's a local industry too, there are a lot of ex-rural areas where it's almost completely unimproved, the types of places surrounding national forests etc. What's more, these regions tend to be extremely infrastructure-heavy, there are a lot of miles of road and power-lines per resident, and while sure they don't have sewer, the US's road and power and communications infrastructure are heavily state- and federal-subsidized, state and federal governments chip in a lot on road and power spending. It's effectively a massive transfer of wealth out to regions that are economically unproductive, and while you can argue for or against that as a position, it's pretty unquestionable that money flows out of urban centers and into rural ones, both from government spending and also from service mandates that benefit these uneconomic operating areas (eg in power/telcom). It's another whole layer on the "growth ponzi scheme" - sometimes the ponzi doesn't just lose its growth, but the market can collapse underneath it too. And it's exceedingly rare that the government entities themselves ever are dissolved as a result - the expectation is that government services are a one-way ratchet.

by manv1 4y ago

triyambakam 4y ago

Billions for Ukraine but nothing for Jackson

diordiderot 4y ago
Ukraine isn't funneling it's defense funding to Brett Farve now is it

skissane 4y ago

> The main issue is that water system maintenance in the US is funded by the locality Isn't that a good argument that it should be run by the state government instead? Local government in the US has so much power, compared to many other countries. It makes you wonder if that's a mistake, and if greater centralisation would produce better outcomes.

runako 4y ago
Almost certainly yes (and one could similarly make a good argument for federalizing a lot of our services). However, having services run by larger jurisdictions is directly at odds with the American need to ensure that the "haves" have distinctly better living conditions than the "have nots," and so this is a political non-starter. Put another way: poor services (such as healthcare, schools, and even potable water) are a design feature, not a bug, of American civics.
- com2kid 4y ago
  The other issue is state governments can also direct funds away from cities to the state legislators favorite pet projects. Look at the decades of underfunding of NYC's transit system for examples.
eschaton 4y ago
The problem is that there has been over a century and a half of histrionic propaganda within the United States asserting that government can’t do anything right, government and regulation are the root of all societal problems, the only proper role for government is to preserve property rights, and so on, starting around the late 1840s for some reason. So there have been multiple generations of Americans who have marinated in this their entire lives, resulting in large populations who assume more local control is always better, people only deserve what they can afford themselves individually, and so on—and entire societal systems built atop the ensuing systematic deprivation. At the same time, there’s also an almost North Korean degree of jingoistic “we’re the pinnacle of human achievement” nationalism so any change to the status quo is opposed even by those who would directly benefit because they don’t really believe it’s possible for things to be any better. After all, if they could be, they would be, because We’re The Best! So if things are bad, well, they’re worse everywhere else so quit complaining. This is why Americans get such culture shock going elsewhere in the world. They see that others can actually have a society that’s just as good or better, and they have to figure out how to integrate that into their worldview. TL;DR: Many things in the US stay as bad as they do because multiple generations have been brainwashed into thinking they’re the best they can be.

varenc 4y ago

Expanding on that a bit: Many suburban towns rely on growth for a large portion of their revenue. When growth eventually slows they no longer have enough money coming in to the meet their maintenance costs. Strong Towns calls this the “Growth Ponzi Scheme”: - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-ponzi-scheme-a-crash-course https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/8/28/the-growth-pon... - https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growth-ponzi-scheme-md2020 https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020/5/14/americas-growt...

paulmd 4y ago
On top of that some areas outright collapse and are left with a bunch of infrastructure they can't support. The US doesn't really have any good mechanism for dealing with the "single-industry town where the industry collapses". There are a significant number of these in the more rural areas of the country, mining towns and such where the mines dried up and left town. There's no method to un-deploy infrastructure and in fact in many places there's intentional barriers to "right-sizing". Sometimes you can rip out paved roads and replace them with (cheaper to maintain) gravel roads etc but there's just a lot of miles to maintain regardless, suburban sprawl is a problem but rural/ex-rural sprawl is massive in the US. In these areas, what is left is often essentially government welfare. The area runs on social-security checks (which go a long way with cheap cost-of-living, as long as gas prices aren't too high) and government jobs - prisons, military installations, civil positions. And I'm not talking about farm areas etc - that's a local industry too, there are a lot of ex-rural areas where it's almost completely unimproved, the types of places surrounding national forests etc. What's more, these regions tend to be extremely infrastructure-heavy, there are a lot of miles of road and power-lines per resident, and while sure they don't have sewer, the US's road and power and communications infrastructure are heavily state- and federal-subsidized, state and federal governments chip in a lot on road and power spending. It's effectively a massive transfer of wealth out to regions that are economically unproductive, and while you can argue for or against that as a position, it's pretty unquestionable that money flows out of urban centers and into rural ones, both from government spending and also from service mandates that benefit these uneconomic operating areas (eg in power/telcom). It's another whole layer on the "growth ponzi scheme" - sometimes the ponzi doesn't just lose its growth, but the market can collapse underneath it too. And it's exceedingly rare that the government entities themselves ever are dissolved as a result - the expectation is that government services are a one-way ratchet.