When I moved to America, I was surprised by the amount of fees. Fees to pick up garbage, visit a doctor, and drive on most highways.
The country I lived in had higher taxes, but almost no fees.
Americans seem dumb when it comes to taxes and fees.
Americans have a cultural dislike of taxes (for a wide array of reasons, including selection bias on who actually moved to America).
Thus, Americans (painting with a broad brush) tend to favor policies that charge people who do/consume a thing, rather than the tax base as a whole.
I find this immensely frustrating, but it is unfortunately true.
The premise is solid though. Charge the people that use the thing more than those that don't. It all breaks down though because the people that use them the most are corporations and receive the largest tax incentives.
Also, many Americans dislike taxes because they don't want "their" money being spent on people with whom they feel no affinity. It's always going to be a problem in large countries with diverse populations.
And if it seems like I'm beating around the bush and phrasing this comment in charitable terms, it's because I am. Deliberately.
Yeah no matter how much you weaken that I am not going to believe it until you produce a detailed study proving it. Especially the bit about immigrants.
I mean, I'm not going to sit here and try to change your mind.
However, if you wanted to look into it, the field of study is called behavioral genetics and it's incredibly controversial... But the research suggests that upwards of 50% of our behaviors are inherited genetically.
So the group of people that left Europe in search of the new world, and the group of people that sided with America and against England in the war, etc... Those are the people who reproduced and created American culture. Pioneering, willing to die in search of opportunity, oppositional, etc.
If you think about it it makes perfect sense.
I don't think we're (all) dumb, I think we don't have a choice.
I'm an American who has been living in Turkey for many years.
In Turkey, the political leaders in both sides of the aisle tell you not to pay income tax or property tax or payroll tax or any of the normal things Americans complain about. What is the result? An iPhone costs more than $3k. A ford focus that costs about $20k new in the US is over $50k in Turkey. EVERY package you receive is opened by the post office and inspected to see how much they can tax you. If you leave Turkey and want to bring the things you bought with you, you are taxed an exit fee.. You can potentially be charged three or four times for the same item.
Whenever I hear Americans bitching about taxes it drives me insane. They have no idea what they're asking for. The government needs money to function and they are going to get it one way or another..
Not only does the government needs money, services centralized in the hands of the government end up costing less because they have a monopoly and they don't run them for a profit! Over here road insurance is private only for the vehicle, our insurance as today users (you know, the stuff that costs a fortune to insure because breaking both legs costs more to the system than whatever car you're driving) costs peanuts in comparison to places where it's the private sector that controls it (if I lived across the border from where I am my registration + insurance cost would be double what it is now).
Trains aren't important because they make a lot of money. Trains are important because they make the land around them worth a lot of money. Businesses near train stations get more customers. People pay more for houses near train stations. Cities with strong transit systems have a higher GDP.
Despite this, England privatised its rail system and expects the rail companies to make a profit. Instead, English people are poorer and the government has less money.
England privatised its rail system
I have a dear friend from Docklands in London, who ran trains. We argue constantly about privatisation vs a government-run consolidated service like healthcare. He's adamant that a mass transit system has to be run as a separate capitalist company, that it must be cash-positive, and that's the only way to do it.
He also believes the Tube is overpriced, cramped, sweaty, and a really low value for money that is propped up by people who can't afford to drive into London nor park once they arrive, and have no other choice.
Fun fact: Japan has privatised rail. The reason is works in Japan is that the rail companies own the land around the stations and charge rent on it
The problem with California is that while they have a massive Democratic majority, they have absolutely no intent of acting like the social welfare alternative Democrats are nationally claiming to be.
Democrats have full power in California, yet it's a place full of poverty and homelessness, where poor people are screwed over hard, where housing initiatives are literally destroyed, and "undesirables" are soft-quarantined in Skid Row.
California is a place where the rich benefit and the poor suffer. Democrats chose to make that happen, and they choose to perpetuate it. Progressive efforts in California amount to nothing but lip-service, it's a blue-painted right-wing state. The only conservative things it rejects is religion.
Republicans will give you all the social conservatism capital will tolerate, while Democrats will give you all the social progress that capital will tolerate. It's a very fuckin' narrow window.
Capital wants to build more in Cali. Residents don't.
Capital is right, again.
Some capital does. Some capital opposes building in Cali. I mean, it’d (rightfully) destroy the value of a lot of beautiful homes used in part as investment vehicles. Otherwise, why would anyone be concerned with property values?
Am i crazy or is real estate an asset but not generally considered capital colloquially?
I get your take, that people use homes a investments, strongly oppose the icept that homes should appreciate in value
Depends on who you’re talking to, I think. I don’t know that there’s a colloquial consensus.
Your problem is that the parties have shifted so far right, most of the democratic support in California would actually be centrist republicans.
California is overwhelmingly not super liberal, though there are notable exceptions.
There is no easy fix for poverty and homelessness in CA. It should legitimately be a national level issue given that the homeless populations here are near to small size city.
CA has grown all it could in the last 6 decades and now is contracting. I moved here 20 years ago and the grown is absolutely staggering.
The biggest problem CA has with housing is that it's housing and zoning policies cater to people who (or whose grandparents) moved to Cali in the 50s and 60s. "Neighborhood character" is defended by even nominally left-wing demagogues in California.
You fix housing costs by creating more places to live. Californians rejected this to such an extent that Newsom had to take a nuke, statewide, to local zoning ordinances.
I moved where I am 4 years ago. I was able to afford it by working hard as fuck and saving every penny. I didn't inherit shit from my parents and we came to US in late 90s.
Am I a shitty person for not wanting a homeless housing anywhere near my neighborhood? Fuck it, I'll take it one further - I don't even want apartment buildings anywhere near me.
I'm not an exception. Vast majority of people around me are immigrants with similar stories.
am I a shitty person
Yes
The shittiness stems from the motivation.
I don't want homeless people because nobody should be homeless. You don't want homeless people because you think they're gross.
We are not the same.
Seriously, as someone who
was able to afford it by working hard as fuck and saving every penny
It seems like they would be acutely aware of just how razor thin the line we walk is, how easy it can be for the average person to slip into homelessness. Yes, even those of us who are responsible, or aren’t addicted or have jobs. Gross attitude.
I worked my ass off to get my degrees and professional license plus getting a foothold in the industry and so on. I barely made it - and I have all the advantages in the world. It's really really hard to succeed even if you have everything going for you. The "make your own luck" and bootstraps mentality is pure hubris IMO. They want to pretend they are special and didn't have any support I guess.
How long have you lived in California?
I'm sick of hearing these sweeping generalizations from people who have never lived here. We have amazing social welfare programs when compared with the rest of the US. We have state grants for college, tuition waivers, scholarships and programs for different populations including the most disdvantaged. We have Medi-Cal, which improved so much since the Obama admin that it covers ten times more than my parents' private insurance did when I was a kid. This includes addiction treatment and mental health. (This is actually a federal requirement so not sure why CA should be any different). Methadone, suboxone (again, federal, as Biden just increased access to suboxone doctors), rehab, ER, ambulance, derm, psychiatry, inpatient psych, birth control, reproductive care, etc. However, the city/county you live in needs to have that healthcare infrastructure before Medi-Cal can pay for it, and geographically, much of this state is pretty conservative. To your "point" about progressivism being "lip service," our metro areas have large enough populations to counter that. I mean, idk if you ever paid attention in high school civics, but geography and population density are two different things. The San Juaquin valley is pretty red, but it consists of...Fresno. The advantages we have here are astronomical compared to Medicaid in other states, especially red states. Not to mention housing, food programs, K-12 and pre-K education, reproductive rights. The way we handled covid was far better than most of the country, but Pelosi got her hair done when she shouldn't have so I guess it doesn't count. Oh, and homeless people exist, so I guess all the rest of it is invalid too. Which is exactly why education is so important. Decent higher education teaches you to think for yourself and identify what's true and what's not, instead of buying into rhetoric. They call it "media literacy" and it's taught in our state subsidized colleges. Good luck with all those book bans though.
But no one can convince someone of reality when they'd rather believe clickbait. This is America - no state is going to have social welfare that is anywhere near as extensive as it should be, and no state in the union is "progressive." California is only doing the absolute bare minimum of what a decent direct democracy should be doing for it's people, and even that is just so fucking radical that the rest of the country seems to think we're Sodom and Gomorrah (while simultaneously arguing about how we're not liberal enough. Hmmm.) So it's just disingenuous to argue that it's "not progressive enough" when that's just...not even a thing in the US. But if whining about someplace they've never been, that has such a high GDP that it probably subsidizes their own state, is so much fun for people then who am I to try to stop their bitching. If you want to have perfection be the enemy of progress, then I guess that's on you.
I've visited. Your state is a shithole with some walled gardens and towers of gold. Your streets smell of piss and worse, there are tents everywhere people can get one up without the cops immediately coming over to throw them out. And that's how you intend to keep it, because you have no interest in housing the unworthy.
What you have are a lot of programs with a lot of names that are supposed to sound like they do something. You have a lot of things to mention.
What you don't have are results, or an interest in getting results.
I live in Norway. I know what a democracy with solid welfare should look like, even when it's never perfect.
I also know why you're not getting the results you should:
You don't believe you should make it THAT easy to just not be homeless. You simply don't believe in just paying to build the buildings and handing out the keys. It's not the way you want to solve it.
So, when all is said and done, and another decade has passed; You stilll won't have solved it and you likely still won't want to solve it.
California is only doing the absolute bare minimum...
You said it yourself.
You're from fucking Norway, of course your standard of living is way better than anywhere in the US. It all sucks over here, but California is marginally better, which to Americans is leagues better than other states. It's sad, we are forced to fight for Breadcrumbs. The town I live in in Oregon has the highest amount of homeless people per capita. Other states and cities may not because they bus homeless people to partocular cities in California and in Oregon, or throw them in jail. Homelessness is a US issue.
I have no problem with paying taxes. I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered instead of to corporate pockets. Universal healthcare, better schooling and teacher wages, public transportation, a power grid that doesn't go out when it's needed most, actual road maintenance instead of just cones blocking off most of the lanes with no workers.
Edit: Also have the super wealthy pay their share as well.
I'm not denying we do live in a special corrupt time, but government is inherently inefficient due to its scope and wage pressure from private industry 1
Changes in real world wage movements across sectors account for about a third of the rise in the cost of U.S. government services between 1959 and 1989, while relatively slower productivity in the public sector acccounts for the remaining two-thirds. Even though it is slower, however, the productivity record still is positive even in the labor intensive government sector. Consequently Baumol argues that the public's likely future objection to necessary increases in the share of expenditures over the next 50 years will betray a fiscal illusion unless policymakers take pains to dissolve it.
Private industry is also super inefficient, and then cuts massive corners on everything.
the reason private industry doesn't have the reputation for inefficiency that government has is nothing to do with private industry's actual efficiency. It's a combination of the fact that most of the decisions private companies make are behind closed doors whereas government stuff is public and something I call selective collectivism, which is to say that when government fucks up that's a reflection on government as a whole but when private industry fucks up we only fault that individual company and not private industry as a whole.
It's a magic feature of capitalism, the ability to convince people that any failure is limited to a single entity.
It’s why so many people underestimate the deaths attributable to capitalism. We all know where the buck stopped under Stalin. In the contemporary US, who is responsible when people die in underregulated workplaces or the equivalent? Is it the state? The company? The industry? We can’t decide, but we don’t blame capitalism, even if that structure drives the suffering.
hell, if we're gonna be historical about it why is the USSR and communism as a whole responsible for the Ukraine famine but capitalism isn's responsible for the Irish or Bengali famines? About 5 million dead between the two of them, all due to decisions by capitalist-democratic-imperialist governments. But that just doesn't count because we don't talk about it.
100%
I would pay more if it went to things that actually mattered
The really fun part of this is that if we all banded together and negotiated as one nation of almost 400 million people almost everything would be cheaper than if we all negotiate separately. Everything could be better and cheaper, but the "freedom" of the US is the freedom of every antelope to negotiate on its own with the local pride of lions. It's the freedom to get forced into bad deals with the threat of homelessness, it's the freedom to starve, it's the freedom to work and scrimp and save your whole life and then have all that wiped out by medical bills after an accident that's someone else's fault.
Mother of fuck if all the local governments teamed up on infrastructure it would be the worse nightmare I could imagine. I would quit in a second.
The only way at all public infrastructure moves forward (I do a lot of work in that sector) is in smaller governments that don't have the leverage to sabotage their own projects. I wish I was lying. The bigger the local government the more of a cost disease obsolete crap they get. I don't drink the water in Toronto for a reason. I know the shysters who built their stuff.
Smaller governments are willing to update their specs, they are open to ideas that make their equipment last longer, they have an incentive to having working systems instead of backcharges.
Also fun fact I have openly threaten one of those government contract cockroaches to tattle on him to every anti-government media source I could find unless he fixed the specs of a system.
As someone who works in the industry, do you have a theory as to why virtually all of our peer democracies are so much better and more cost efficient at building big public infrastructure?
Nothing obviously jumps out at me, but I am middle management and probably don't have the bird's eye view you'd want to make sense of it.
For those who don't know, it's been an objective fact for several decades now that virtually all of our peer democracies build big public infrastructure better, faster and cheaper than we do in the US.
And it wasn't always this way. We used to be able to get shit done, but something happened in the last few decades.
And before anyone says anything, I am not taking political sides here. I don't know what the answer is, I'm just making an objective and well-documented observation.
As someone who works in the industry, do you have a theory as to why virtually all of our peer democracies are so much better and more cost efficient at building big public infrastructure?
You are assuming that they are. From what I see for every airport that is so glorious it is an affront to the gods there is raw sewage being poured on the ground an hour drive away. Countries are good at peices of infrastructure, sometimes. Japan is famous for this but only because no one is mentioning their powerlines or snail mail system or their M2M over fax nonsense. The Israelis got water management down pat but best not to talk about East Jerusalem. Generally speaking the US has better sewage systems than say the UK but rail not so much.
And it wasn’t always this way. We used to be able to get shit done, but something happened in the last few decades.
Yes, as a whole humanity is getting worse at infrastructure. There is plenty of blame to go around. I imagine it is a variation on cost disease. We only have so many technical people and if they are all working on Faceboot and Twatter they aren't optimizing the traffic lights.
In particular what would make my job easier and give the taxpayers a break:
Allow long term maintenance calculations to be used in bidding. If company A is bidding say 100k and company B is bidding 90K but company A can prove that their solution will cost less in the long run, factor that in by some equation. There are dozens of ways I know how to lower my upfront cost and increase taxpayer long term cost. I would rather not do any of them.
No more incentives to use local businesses. I know it sounds all cute and green on paper but in practice it creates monopolies and corruption. If the best water pumping system I can find for your town is in the another country please let me buy it.
Backcharges are now banned. If you are unhappy with what was delivered give the company a chance to make it right or blackball them for a decade. There are better things to do with our time than waste it with lawyers trying to remember what was said casually in a meeting three years ago.
No more requiring a PE unless someone can prove that a PE is required and at the same time do not let PE boards decide licensing. PEs are scarce, thus cost more. Because they are scare they can't train new ones. Additionally since they cost so much and improvements can't be made because no one is willing to pay for specs to be upgraded. That is why you have specs calling for components that haven't been made in decades and why innovations don't move around the sector.
Solve the problem, not the secondary effects. For example right now we have crap electricity at a site and I am struggling with all motors overheating. Upgrade the electrical feeding the site instead of demanding that I deal with impact. "Can't you solve it in software?". No Johnathan, I can't software a solution to a motor melting for being demanded to give constant torque with 3rd world grade electricity.
The top down pyramid model has been proven to be the most wasteful and slow to innovate. It only exists because it is easy. Stop using it to build infrastructure. Just because a kid knows a bit about cement doesn't mean they are experts on welding.
Stop farming work out. Deal with one company. That company buys it from a catalog or they build it themselves.
Almost all the problems you listed are just symptoms of going with the lowest bidder for everything. It's similar to why so many start ups turn into ponzie schemes when VC money is involved. If you set achievable goals on a realistic timelime no one will invest in your company because there are 10 other people willing to lie to get the money. This is how most medical start ups went broke while Theranos was worth 9 billion.
Same with infatructure projects. Some town official who doesn't even know which end of a screw driver goes in the electical outlet listens to (at best) a few proposals and chooses one. None of those proposals are going to give an honest cost by cost assesment compared to the other options. It comes down to the person making the decisions choosing who to trust. If one guy says it will need 10k a year in maintenance and the other says 100k who do you believe?
The only way to know for sure is to have your own people who you trust to verify information. But paying a knowlegeable staff like that is expensive; and people who don't understand how complex this stuff can get will be angry at "double spended". As in, why pay anyone in house when they aren't actually "doing" anything like the private companies creating the proposals.
Why wouldn't I give an honest answer? A dishonest answer is going to make me miserable. Most of the processes my company makes we make so much that we can give good estimates on total yearly cost. It would be easier for me to just hand over that data vs making up new fraudulent data that could survive a court challenge. As Mark Twain mentioned, if you tell the truth you don't have to remember a damn thing. Besides they would easily be able to point to the numbers going over budget and demand free parts or free service.
Your idea about having your own people is why I yelled in my other comment. Those people are the worst. The more my customer understands the more problems their system will have. I know one horse towns in deliverance country using systems that smash the recommended operating lifespan and I know places that have all this local talent who are down monthly.
Doctors make the worse patients, lawyers make the worse plaintiffs, and inhouse engineers make the worse clients. The more the design is tampered with the less likely it will work right. Don't believe me? Go ahead and open up your chest cavity and start poking around, maybe try to get your kidneys to work faster. That is what it is like dealing with the local engineering "talent". They are overconfident, weight in on stuff that they don't understand, follow ancient specs, and pretty much every other sin of engineering you can list.
Put another way. If me and my coworkers are working on process X all day every working day with hundreds of sites do you think we may know more than a person who deals with a single instance of the process? Phoenix Arizona is another great example. They have the most bottom of the barrel catty in-house engineering team of any city in the US. Kinda people who measure the paint thickness on a motor with calibers, demand a repainting if it is off by a milimeter, then leave it in direct sun, and are shocked when the motor overheats.
Taxes are way too high anywhere anymore. I used to live in Chicago but those taxes are criminal
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