Niel Irwin of the New York Times said on PBS Newshour tonight that of these four items (tax cuts, military spending, deregulation, and infrastructure) the last one - infrastructure - would be the item Congress would least consider passing/ratifying/whatever.
Aren’t the US’s roads and bridges falling into disrepair?
All that unsexy maintenace stuff doesn’t yield immediate gain, in that it’s over time that the effectiveness of such policy can be of benefit. Retrofitting a bridge - that to the average shmuck’s (or scumbag politician’s) eye already looked ok as it was - doesn’t provide that promise of immediate gratification, as would the erection of a phalanx of steel factories, say. (To those who support more steel factories, that is.)
Do we really need to increase military spending? Not a fan of tax cuts (more than likely for the rich, in the main?) and deregulation will usher in more pollution and destruction to the environment, so infrastructure seems like a slam dunk for having more importance than the other three, to me anyway.
Curious to hear arguments in favour of prioritizing any of the other three items over infrastructure. I might take more of a back seat here and see where the wind blows this OP.
huh - weird all the unintended sexual connotations in this OP. Oh wells.:o
Then why did Colorado Springs, one of the most conservative cities in the nation, and one that generally hates taxes with the fire of a thousand suns, recently pass – by popular vote – an increase in the sales tax specifically designated for infrastructure spending?
The benefits of improved infrastructure accrue over the long term and are thus completely irrelevant to populist politicians. The only aspect of infrastructure projects that will affect Congress’ or Trump’s decisions are the immediate jobs and corporate profits.
If the present U.S. government makes any major move toward infrastructure development or improvement, it is a safe bet that the real (but slightly hidden) focus will be on opportunities for graft and enriching specific corporations.
As always, it is important to distinguish “conservative” citizens or voters from Republican politicians. They are often quite opposite from each other in their intentions or motives.
I’m a cultural conservative and of those 4, would increase taxes, cut military spending in half, create more regulation, and maintain infrastructure to the max.
Nothing is more important to keeping civilisation going than improving the built environment and protecting the natural environment.
One of your cites quotes the American Road & Transportation Builders Association and another the American Society of Civil Engineers. These are the people who the money would be spent on. Of course they are going to claim that it is urgent that the government give them tens of billions of dollars.
Our infrastructure is not crumbling or getting worse with time. In 2000 48% of automobile miles traveled was done on roads rated good by the FHA in 2010 that number went up to 57%. 30 years ago 52.6% of urban interstates were rated as congested and by 10 years ago that number had been cut in half to 26.3%.
Federal infrastructure bills are inefficient because the money is doled out by congressional power and not be actual need. For example in Obamas 840 billion dollar infrastructure package twice as much per capita was spend on the least dense states as the ten most dense states.
The US is uniquely bad at infrastructure. For example the next phase of NYC’s second avenue subway line is projected to cost $2.2 billion per kilometer. Paris and Berlin recently built subway extensions for about $250 million per kilometer. Boston’s big dig was supposed to cost $2.6 billion but ended up costing $24 billion.
Before we start shoveling money out the door we need to fix the broken system. We need to end prevailing wage laws, featherbedding, costly environmental reporting systems, and protectionism. Until we do that 9 out of every 10 dollars we spend will be wasted.
Not to mention that maintaining large infrastructure or better yet new great works projects create a lot of low to mid-qualification public jobs, to the benefit of the working classes. Since it’s public money, this boils down to redistribution, which is Cool and Good. So is the military to some extent, but the military of course builds fuck all and is a net money drain, whereas (judicious) infrastructure is an economy force multiplier.
I think your problems would be solved by bucking your sinophobic president and engaging the Chinese to do all your public works, like Gallio they care for none of these things.
I’m not sure how the second sentence follows from the first.
The wide-open spaces tend to have more infrastructure per capita spending simply because there’s fewer people to spread the costs across, but the costs probably aren’t all that much cheaper. If you’re building a four-lane divided highway, it’s not going to be one-twentieth the cost just because the city at the other end has 25,000 people instead of half a million; a bridge over the Big Blue River in northern Kansas isn’t magically going to be so much cheaper than a bridge across the Patuxent in central Maryland just because the Patuxent watershed is more populous.
Indeed.
There’s also a chicken-and-egg thing to consider : yes, that four-lane highway or railway track to Peoria might not be immediately cost-efficient because there’s not many people going to or from Peoria ; but by the same token if it isn’t built new entreprises won’t set up shop in Peoria because there’s no highway to ferry their goods out of there. So Peoria is doomed to remain Peoria when it could have become Flint or Detroit.
So, it’s not possible, then, that they are speaking out of professional duty? To simply write them off as acting purely out of cold, hard self-interest is totally dismissive, at best.
Cites?
Agree for the most part, but can you elaborate on my bolding, preferably with cites?
In what you’ve explained so far, I’m not even the slightest bit convinced of those quite extreme numbers.
Define “recent.” The U55 line in Berlin started construction in 1996; it’s less than two kilometers long and did not cross or connect to any existing subway lines. Paris’s Metro Line 14 was completed in 2003.
Moreover, a chunk of the cost in New York is explained by the fact that Manhattan sits on schist bedrock, which is quite a bit harder (and hence more difficult/expensive to tunnel through) than the limestones under Paris, AND the 2nd Avenue subway will run quite a bit deeper than Metro 14. I’m not sure how to compare apples to apples here, but let’s leave the kumquats out of the equation.
The limestone presents its own engineering challenge. Namely : it’s a real Swiss cheese down there - ten centuries of basements and buried houses and burial grounds and stone quarries ; old subway lines, gas lines, canals and sewer tunnels nobody remembers or has a map to, catacombs, mushroom growing tunnels dug by private persons in the 18th century who never told anybody about them… Then you have extensive erosion (which works doubletime on chalk, limestone and gypsum), rat and termite activity on top of all that.
Basically any careless digging can (and sometimes does) result in the street level suddenly becoming the sub-sub-basement. Experts estimate about 20% of the city and its near suburbs could crumble overnight, given half a reason. Streets and buildings have been recorded collapsing under their own weight since before the Revolution.
Sorry, but entropy is a thing. Everything is always crumbling, for a certain value of crumbling. In fact, any time something is built, be it road, dam, or bridge, it is possible and desirable to calculate the maintenance costs for the thing and to start budgeting for it.
Fram oil filters had an ad campaign back in the day about maintaining your engine by changing the oil and oil filter regularly. The tag line was “you can pay me now (significant look at a car getting it’s engine replaced) or pay me later.” The same holds true for infrastructure maintenance.
Unfortunately, maintenance isn’t sexy and maintenance money often isn’t collected or is shifted to more immediate needs or to something that is politically flashier. That kind of thing eventually builds up.
It’s done by both, and by counties and cities and regions, too. The feds just have more money, which gets everyone’s attention. Also Congress votes on how it will be distributed, which attracts lobbyists and arguments.
I live in a county that voted in a quarter cent addition to the sales tax for transportation funding. It pays for some things directly, but also gets used as leverage when applying for state and federal grants. Most grants either have a required local match (usually between 10 and 20 percent) or the applications with a voluntary local contribution are given additional evaluation points, making them more likely to get funded.
Most of the state and federal highway funding comes from gas taxes. Some state street funding comes from DMV fees. We’re constantly paying into the funds, therefore. We talk about the federal funds because we’ve already paid in and don’t want to forget to do the planning and grant writing necessary to get our bit back out.
Because actual fiscal conservatives - for argument’s sake we’ll call them ‘adults’ - know that investment leads to greater growth over the long haul and investing in infrastructure - either maintenance or new - leads to increased prosperity and greater economic and social stability.
Infrastructure concerns, have been purposely turned into a grand scale political football, unfortunately. And as always happens when something real and important is turned in to a game by the politicians, that has made for a lot of preposterous claims being made, and actual facts to be misused.
National Republicans purposely blocked Federal infrastructure spending during the previous administration, as a part of their openly declared dedication to undermining 100% of what Obama wanted to do, regardless of the best interests of the country. Local Republicans, as local politicians of all kinds usually do, paid lip service to the national policies, while doing what would be best to get them re-elected in their home areas.
Both major parties know that spending is needed, but they are so dedicated to gaining short term political advantage, they aren't debating the details honestly.
In my experience, people won’t vote for tax increases for unspecified purposes but will vote for tax increases if they know (and approve of) exactly what it’s being spent on. (“Would you vote for a $100 million municipal bond measure for a new water treatment plant/replacement for an aging bridge/community center/etc?”)
