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AreWeDrunkYet posted:.
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Jul 22, 2015 05:47
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Spazzle posted:The profession that you claim to make this decision has a fundamental incentive to ignore overbuilding of infrastructure. Their answer is always to build more. Yet right the funds to repair all the current stuff we have is massively unfunded. How does it make any sense to build more? What particular incentive do project analysts for government agencies that prioritize infrastructure spending to ignore overbuilding, or to prioritize overbuilding over maintenance. http://www.economist.com/node/18620944 quote:But modern America is stingier. Total public spending on transport and water infrastructure has fallen steadily since the 1960s and now stands at 2.4% of GDP. Europe, by contrast, invests 5% of GDP in its infrastructure, while China is racing into the future at 9%. America's spending as a share of GDP has not come close to European levels for over 50 years. Over that time funds for both capital investments and operations and maintenance have steadily dropped (see chart 2). But why not cross that bridge when you get to it? Current data indicate that the American infrastructure is spending substantially less (about half) than its European counterparts, and has fallen off significantly over time. Short of something to indicate that those countries are just ridiculously overbuilding, perhaps it's a reasonable presumption that there is a lack of spending here rather than vice versa? Without a doubt decisions have to be made about priorities, but you seem to be arguing from a place that there does not need to be an increase in spending of this sort. AreWeDrunkYet fucked around with this message at 06:17 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 06:14
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Willie Tomg posted:No it isn't hyperbole, that's the point! That is the whole and entire point of Keynesian economics actually! If hedge fund quants and investors and managers dug holes and filled them back up for a living they would be creating far more of Actually Existing Economic Value than what their current occupations which is manufacturing the ultimately baseless impression of value in the form of ten-figure numbers on a balance sheet whose total is reached by pressing the equals key on a calculator a few thousand times a second with high frequency trades until the operator and algorithm feel better emotionally, which intersects with Actually Existing political policy in extremely counterproductive Actually Existing ways when the perception of economic value is much much higher than it Actually Is at present! Bit belated, but yeah you explained it better. When I said hyperbole I didn't even mean that it was wrong, just that it was the argument taken to its most absurd lengths, and that even then there is still an argument that it is more effective than having it sit there while a banker jerks off on his balance sheet.
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Jul 22, 2015 06:40
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Narciss posted:Are there leftists out there that really don't understand that the intelligent allocation of capital is itself a valuable contribution to society? There's a huge difference between allocating capital to improve market efficiency and the financial manipulation going on today. The IMF estimates that excessive financialization costs US GDP 2% growth each year, which is massive. That is reason enough to reign it in, never mind the fact that the power and gains of the big financial institutions also perpetuates wealth inequality, which in itself is harmful, nor does that begin to get into the systemic crises these financial markets have caused.
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Jul 22, 2015 06:55
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Every day, I cross a river between states on a bridge that opened in 1917. I know that I will die on (specifically, beneath the twisted wreck of) that bridge someday. It is inevitable as the setting of the sun and I fasten my headband in anticipation of my martyrdom.
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Jul 22, 2015 07:00
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Spazzle posted:Like, the modern history of America is basically based on unquestionally building the exactly wrong infrastructure regardless of costs. This both creates huge amounts of unmaintainable crap and creates loving awful cardboard places that collapse in a generation. the interstate highway system is loving awesome. while it lead directly to modern american sprawl, it was only the first step in a chain of decisions which ended with thousands of small jurisdictions trying to cash in by permitting flimsy cardboard development. infrastructure is not to blame for suburbanization, greed and bureaucratic shortsightedness is to blame. you might as well blame the concept of paved roads itself
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Jul 22, 2015 07:11
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illrepute posted:Every day, I cross a river between states on a bridge that opened in 1917. I know that I will die on (specifically, beneath the twisted wreck of) that bridge someday. It is inevitable as the setting of the sun and I fasten my headband in anticipation of my martyrdom. People drive on bridges built by the Romans.
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Jul 22, 2015 07:57
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WPA is bad because it'll become makework justifying its own existence like any other beaurucrat hive. There aren't enough jobs, the end. hth op.illrepute posted:Every day, I cross a river between states on a bridge that opened in 1917. I know that I will die on (specifically, beneath the twisted wreck of) that bridge someday. It is inevitable as the setting of the sun and I fasten my headband in anticipation of my martyrdom. Shiny and chrome bruh.
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Jul 22, 2015 13:15
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This poster loves police brutality, but only when its against minorities!
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asdf32 posted:This is idiotic. can you give us a graph to illustrate this, perhaps
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Jul 22, 2015 13:20
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Baron Porkface posted:People drive on bridges built by the Romans. Not generally in the same condition though.
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Jul 22, 2015 13:40
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Spazzle posted:The profession that you claim to make this decision has a fundamental incentive to ignore overbuilding of infrastructure. Their answer is always to build more. Yet right the funds to repair all the current stuff we have is massively unfunded. How does it make any sense to build more? Too bad. You can't get around every conflict of interest in a complex society and at some point have to put some faith in the experts.
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Jul 22, 2015 13:54
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asdf32 posted:Too bad. You can't get around every conflict of interest in a complex society and at some point have to put some faith in the experts. That might be a decent place to start, but the engineering profession has spearheaded a massive overbuilding of american infrastructure to the point that a slew of states are completely unable to maintain it. We're somewhat blind to it because the subsidies are sold as business as usual. This thread seems to have a default assumption that any infrastructure signed off on by a planner must be good. But America is literally covered in crappy roads and towns that nobody can afford to maintain because they were built with zero regard to any fiscal sustainability. Why should the default assumption be to trust the profession that put us there?
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Jul 22, 2015 15:21
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Spazzle posted:That might be a decent place to start, but the engineering profession has spearheaded a massive overbuilding of american infrastructure to the point that a slew of states are completely unable to maintain it. so you're just categorically against infrastructure, huh has it occurred to you that economic conditions and the context in which infrastructure is used changes within the lifespan of said infrastructure? maybe those crappy towns weren't crappy 40 years ago, etc? there are less-weird ways to hate sprawl without blaming paved roads for existing bro
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Jul 22, 2015 15:37
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Spazzle posted:That might be a decent place to start, but the engineering profession has spearheaded a massive overbuilding of american infrastructure to the point that a slew of states are completely unable to maintain it. How do you support the claim that states are "unable" to maintain their infrastructure? Especially in opposition to the claim that infrastructure maintenance is easy to defer both politically and from a budgeting perspective. By your same logic I could claim that underfunded school systems are signs of overbuilt education systems (doubtless caused by those darn teachers' unions!) I don't think you've really thought this through much since one of your main points is pure fallacy. How do engineers drive government infrastructure needs more than political incentives (ie pork barrel spending) and focused lobbying by corporate entities? AreWeDrunkYet posted actual figures on the well-known discrepancies in American infrastructure spending, are you planning on ignoring statistics here or what? TheresNoThyme fucked around with this message at 15:54 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 15:43
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Popular Thug Drink posted:so you're just categorically against infrastructure, huh I'm against the desire to build more infrastructure just cause. And your second point is just  . Everything can look ok when it's newly built. The whole criticism of blindly building infrastructure is that if it can't bring in enough revenue in aggregate to support itself it will always end up crappy 40 years later. Sprawl cannot be disconnected from the initial subsidies it recieved and the inevitable fact that it fails to generate enough wealth to maintain itself.
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Jul 22, 2015 15:47
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TheresNoThyme posted:How do you support the claim that states are "unable" to maintain their infrastructure? Especially in opposition to the claim that infrastructure maintenance is easy to defer both politically and from a budgeting perspective. I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. You're saying that there is a deficit in spending to maintain our current system. I don't disagree, but I'm say that is because our system has been over built to a degree that nobody is willing to pay what it costs to maintain.
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Jul 22, 2015 15:56
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Spazzle posted:I'm not sure what point you're trying to make here. You're saying that there is a deficit in spending to maintain our current system. I don't disagree, but I'm say that is because our system has been over built to a degree that nobody is willing to pay what it costs to maintain. State governments being "unwilling to pay" could either be caused by misgovernance or a tipping point where we have too much infrastructure. The latter point could be argued if the USA was statistically a high spender on infrastructure. However most figures I've seen suggest that the USA is not an over-spender on infrastructure when compared to other nations and there are many reasons to believe that deferring infrastructure maintenance costs is politically expedient. I'd say "politcally expedient in the short term" but that's basically a redundancy in our political landscape. Like I said in my education allegory, you're using state budgeting shortfalls to indicate that a system is overbuilt. That's the only argument you've presented. That claim flies in the face of how political budgeting actually works and isn't convincing at all. Edit: I actually do not have an opinion on whether new infrastructure projects are overvalued versus maintenance projects. I imagine that's a technical discussion that would also devolve into semantics over "new" vs. "maintenance." Is adding a new bypass "maintenance" on an existing highway? Or is that a "new" project? Etc... TheresNoThyme fucked around with this message at 16:19 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 16:08
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TheresNoThyme posted:State governments being "unwilling to pay" could either be caused by misgovernance or a tipping point where we have too much infrastructure. It is well known that the USA is not an over-spender on infrastructure when compared to other nations and it is also well-known that deferring infrastructure maintenance costs is politically expedient. I'd say "politcally expedient in the short term" but that's basically a redundancy in our political landscape. I think it's more than just the political class who make these decisions. Our system was built with little regard for long term fiscal viability. When people are presented with the actual costs of upkeep a generation down the road, they inevitability balk. My home county of sonoma, ca has had pretty large road maintenance deficits. When new taxes were asked for by the government to cover this people completely shot it down. The solution is in part to not repave the marginal roads and let them go to gravel. There is just too much stuff per person to support, the money to do so just doesn't exist in a lot of places.
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Jul 22, 2015 16:25
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Spazzle posted:I'm against the desire to build more infrastructure just cause. what? sprawl can bring in enough wealth to maintain itself, this is not inevitable. there are loads of examples of cadillac sprawl with nice shiny infrastructure. again, you're getting confused by looking at the decisions of politicians to underfund or the movement of the market and people moving to places with falling home prices because that's what they can afford, and then deciding that roads and civil engineers are to blame for some reason. i don't think you've thought very hard about this argument of yours
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Jul 22, 2015 16:38
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Spazzle posted:I think it's more than just the political class who make these decisions. Our system was built with little regard for long term fiscal viability. When people are presented with the actual costs of upkeep a generation down the road, they inevitability balk. My home county of sonoma, ca has had pretty large road maintenance deficits. When new taxes were asked for by the government to cover this people completely shot it down. The solution is in part to not repave the marginal roads and let them go to gravel. There is just too much stuff per person to support, the money to do so just doesn't exist in a lot of places. people had a different attitude towards government responsibility when a lot of this stuff was built sixty years ago. voters being cheap now because wages haven't risen in the last forty years is not the fault of civil engineers in the fifties being too optimistic sonoma county has a median household income of $64k, well above the national average. the money does exist, the voters are too cheap to maintain the infrastructure they've got. i don't see how you could possibly blame anyone other than the electorate for refusing to pay boner confessor fucked around with this message at 16:44 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 16:40
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Spazzle posted:I think it's more than just the political class who make these decisions. Our system was built with little regard for long term fiscal viability. When people are presented with the actual costs of upkeep a generation down the road, they inevitability balk. My home county of sonoma, ca has had pretty large road maintenance deficits. When new taxes were asked for by the government to cover this people completely shot it down. The solution is in part to not repave the marginal roads and let them go to gravel. There is just too much stuff per person to support, the money to do so just doesn't exist in a lot of places. Why were new taxes required to cover those maintenance costs? How did deficits occur in the first place? Isn't the request for new taxes itself a decision made by the political class? The rejection of that referendum doesn't represent a refusal to maintain infrastructure, it represents a refusal of new taxes. How many referendums on new taxes do you think pass, exactly? The Sonoma Co. budget is online. Was the 1.8 million dollar increase this year in detention funding put before public referendum? By and large the public electorate does not understand the political mechanisms by which one budget increase is classified as deficit spending while another is not. Those bureaucratic decisions are controlled by the political class and are heavily influenced by political priorities. TheresNoThyme fucked around with this message at 17:05 on Jul 22, 2015 |
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Jul 22, 2015 16:56
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Spazzle posted:I think it's more than just the political class who make these decisions. Our system was built with little regard for long term fiscal viability. When people are presented with the actual costs of upkeep a generation down the road, they inevitability balk. My home county of sonoma, ca has had pretty large road maintenance deficits. When new taxes were asked for by the government to cover this people completely shot it down. The solution is in part to not repave the marginal roads and let them go to gravel. There is just too much stuff per person to support, the money to do so just doesn't exist in a lot of places. Which is why gas taxes should be increased. You can dislike any particular bridge, but at this point it time an increased emphasis on infasteucture would be beneficial for a host of reasons.
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Jul 22, 2015 17:04
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Popular Thug Drink posted:what? sprawl can bring in enough wealth to maintain itself, this is not inevitable. there are loads of examples of cadillac sprawl with nice shiny infrastructure. again, you're getting confused by looking at the decisions of politicians to underfund or the movement of the market and people moving to places with falling home prices because that's what they can afford, and then deciding that roads and civil engineers are to blame for some reason. i don't think you've thought very hard about this argument of yours Agreed. Also, infrastructure investment can also reduce the overall maintenance costs of the system. Whether you're talking about installing more power-friendly devices and electrical subsystems, or performing overhauls that reduce the need for costly patch maintenance, there are many ways to reduce the overall systemic costs by being willing to invest money in real solutions. One classic example from the transportation thread is that many two lane roads in populated areas would actually be cheaper as three lane roads, with the middle lane acting as a turning lane for vehicles that need to cross the median. This reduces the collision rates, which in turn reduces the costs of emergency services. Also, Spazzle's objections to road development need to be contextualized within the fact that there are many roads and bridges that unarguably need replacement. And we have a significant need for an overhaul of our electrical, data, and piping systems, particularly in our older cities. We have a long, long way to go before WPA would even be thinking about repaving the corners of rural America. Beyond that, WPA did all sorts of other projects, including many cultural and archaeological programs that have become treasured parts of our American heritage. There is so much that could and should be done.
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Jul 22, 2015 17:10
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asdf32 posted:Which is why gas taxes should be increased. You can dislike any particular bridge, but at this point it time an increased emphasis on infasteucture would be beneficial for a host of reasons. in the case of california they also have the hilarious prop 13 capping property taxes to 1% which is a gigantic gently caress you from the wealthy to the poor. like it's really funny for a californian to whine about there being no money available in the state which crippled local government revenues more than any other state in the union. in atlanta, gwinnett county is similar to sonoma county (wealthy, suburban) and gwinnett is continually investing hundreds of millions of dollars in infrastructure and schools to keep its population boom growing. the money is absolutely there, the residents of the area just need to be willing to cough it up
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Jul 22, 2015 17:20
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Popular Thug Drink posted:people had a different attitude towards government responsibility when a lot of this stuff was built sixty years ago. voters being cheap now because wages haven't risen in the last forty years is not the fault of civil engineers in the fifties being too optimistic Iirc local polling at the election had the nature of the tax being part of the rejection because voters wanted a tax that would only fund the roads but the county government made the funding pot of money more generic. There is very low faith in the county to not be total fuckups, for various reasons. Also, a lot of wealth is concentrated in the cities in sonoma, so those roads and infrastructure are more or less ok because the cities take care of things. The county roads in question are frequently of the "why is this even here" sort. The roads are an interesting issue because they are visible and oft complained about by the rural groups but if you handed Sonoma County a big bag of infracash there are far better uses than road upkeep or development, like taking existing water or power, which work pretty well, and making them work even better.
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Jul 22, 2015 17:34
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Zachack posted:There is very low faith in the county to not be total fuckups, for various reasons. Also, a lot of wealth is concentrated in the cities in sonoma, so those roads and infrastructure are more or less ok because the cities take care of things. The county roads in question are frequently of the "why is this even here" sort. i can accept that, but it's a big leap from this argument of "my local jurisdiction's planning process is hosed up" to spazzle's argument that "the entire concept of planning is hosed up, look at my local jurisdiction for an example"
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Jul 22, 2015 17:37
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Willie Tomg posted:No it isn't hyperbole, that's the point! That is the whole and entire point of Keynesian economics actually! If hedge fund quants and investors and managers dug holes and filled them back up for a living they would be creating far more of Actually Existing Economic Value than what their current occupations which is manufacturing the ultimately baseless impression of value in the form of ten-figure numbers on a balance sheet whose total is reached by pressing the equals key on a calculator a few thousand times a second with high frequency trades until the operator and algorithm feel better emotionally, which intersects with Actually Existing political policy in extremely counterproductive Actually Existing ways when the perception of economic value is much much higher than it Actually Is at present! I think you fundamentally do not understand what hedge funds do.
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Jul 22, 2015 18:00
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Popular Thug Drink posted:i can accept that, but it's a big leap from this argument of "my local jurisdiction's planning process is hosed up" to spazzle's argument that "the entire concept of planning is hosed up, look at my local jurisdiction for an example" I largely agree and was mostly filling in detail for this particular example, but at the same time do feel that a generic restart of wpa is a much more complicated problem than most people could ever anticipate, in large part because the types of problems being solved now and how they are solved are very different to that of the past. Environmental protections alone, to say nothing of transparency concerns, NIMBY, special interest group fights, etc would create huge hurdles to the goal of creating jobs in the manner desired, and the ARRA stimulus projects from around 2009 or so that I had involvement with were, as a result, much more focused on low hanging fruit that solved real problems but without a lot of challenging elements or wpa-esque job creation. I've rumbled this in my head before and for a lot of this I kinda lean towards repurposing the Marines and Army into a sort of mega Corp of Engineers, and part of that is because it'll presumably be easier to court martial and execute people engaged in corruption.
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Jul 22, 2015 18:00
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OwlFancier posted:"The world will not literally end if people continue to endure poor public services and housing shortfalls as a result of excessive private control of the housing market so I think I am justified in continuing to obstruct improvements in that area." lol
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Jul 23, 2015 03:20
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Maybe it is time to restart the Civilian Conservation Corps.
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Jul 23, 2015 04:50
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I recommend a new kind of WPA. Weaponize the Poor Administration. Give them firepower and licenses to kill.
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Jul 23, 2015 06:47
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President Kucinich posted:I recommend a new kind of WPA. And place bounties on the rich  Also a few pages late but sorry that your first post was loving Narciss OP
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Jul 23, 2015 10:52
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Caros posted:Bit belated, but yeah you explained it better. When I said hyperbole I didn't even mean that it was wrong, just that it was the argument taken to its most absurd lengths, and that even then there is still an argument that it is more effective than having it sit there while a banker jerks off on his balance sheet. Hell, I've known lots of crazy conservative types that credit WWII with pulling the economy out of the great depression, not realizing they are making a profoundly Keynesian argument for how the world works.
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Jul 23, 2015 12:41
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President Kucinich posted:I recommend a new kind of WPA. We already have an Army. The advantage of the WPA is that the build things, otherwise the Army fulfills the goal of baseline income and makework jobs just fine. Who would work for a new WPA that doesn't already work for the military, AmeriCorps or Peace Corps? Just expand AmericCorps funding and enrollment.
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Jul 23, 2015 21:21
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I've actually heard this argument of "we obviously have overbuilt the infrastructure because nobody's willing to pay for it any more," because the latter is clearly due to cash-strapped budgetary wisdom and not because, say, it's been put off forever with an eye towards turning large sections of roadway into privatized toll roads and so on. Obviously in some places, of course, it is literally the case, but I don't think anyone's really arguing for building new roads in the middle of nowhere for no reason. They're talking about repairing what is in active use and perhaps expanding areas where the current infrastructure is overburdened. We AREN'T doing that, despite obvious need, for political reasons.
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Jul 23, 2015 22:00
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Nessus posted:I've actually heard this argument of "we obviously have overbuilt the infrastructure because nobody's willing to pay for it any more," because the latter is clearly due to cash-strapped budgetary wisdom and not because, say, it's been put off forever with an eye towards turning large sections of roadway into privatized toll roads and so on. Exactly this. The simple fact that a lot of people from large cities talk about 2-hour commutes being normal just blows my mind. If nothing else, it easily makes the case for the fact that in even some of the most densely populated places in the US, there is simply not enough infrastructure. I'm not saying that it all needs to be roads, either. We could do a lot better with rail, or trying to experiment with city/suburb plans that could completely eliminate the need for most residents to have a car. I dunno, something. I've sort of toyed with the idea of a WPA-style system, but for STEM research. I'm sure there's plenty of projects that recent grads could work on and gain experience relevant to their field, instead of having to wait tables. (Nothing against people who wait tables for a living, just that if that isn't something you *want* to do, why be forced into that option?). I mean, there are plenty of senior projects that happen every year at every university that produce valuable output; there's no reason the government couldn't continue to fund that sort of stuff until the people in that program had enough experience to get poached by private firms. Part of my concept to help fund it would be to auction off projects (and maybe work contracts for the people on the projects, if they wanted) each year. Of course, there's nothing saying that if someone liked the program enough, they could stay in and maybe take a project management role or something. Thinking about it, though, I'm sure you could do the same thing with artistic types. Heck, I've even wondered why we don't have a publicly-funded groundskeeper for each neighborhood, even. Some people really enjoy yardwork, but most don't much care for it. That, and it seems almost wasteful for each and every house on a block to own a lawnmower, when it would probably be more efficient for one person on the block to own two or three, and take care of everyone's yard each week or two. Of course, the ideal person you'd want in that position would enjoy landscaping and the like, and help work to improve properties year over year, small project by small project. Really, there's almost an unlimited number of things we could do better, but for any of that to happen, we'll first have to figure out how to convince a LOT of people that, yeah, having 15% unemployment is incredibly wasteful and no, it's not because they're all lazy.
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Jul 24, 2015 00:57
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Leviathan Song posted:We already have an Army. The advantage of the WPA is that the build things, otherwise the Army fulfills the goal of baseline income and makework jobs just fine. Who would work for a new WPA that doesn't already work for the military, AmeriCorps or Peace Corps? Just expand AmericCorps funding and enrollment. Most people can't or won't abandon their families and support structures for a few years (military, Peace Corps) or are not in a position to give up a bunch of time to volunteer (AmeriCorps). The idea with a WPA-style program isn't just to get infrastructure built (not to mention the idea wasn't limited to infrastructure, government directly providing services like daycare or or even participating in revenue-generating industries like mining/drilling or manufacturing is perfectly reasonable). It is to create a floor for long-term jobs in the US that provide a living wage and benefits. Not only would everyone working directly for this agency benefit, but low-wage employers would find that they also have to provide a living wage and benefits - the alternative would be exclusion from the labor market. It is, in effect, bypassing the opposition to a reasonable minimum wage and regulation over benefits by avoiding creating those regulations and saying "Don't want to meet these standards? Go for it, but good luck finding anyone willing to work for you."
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Jul 24, 2015 02:51
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If you want to support STEM graduates the easiest way to do that is to increase (read: restore) the funding for the NSF and related organizations.
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Jul 24, 2015 05:05
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The Democrats didn't cut nearly a million government jobs, institute a three-year wage freeze, and limit raises to 1% per year after that, just to turn around and start a massive federal jobs program paying decent wages. Austerity is still the order of the day.
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Jul 24, 2015 14:32
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AreWeDrunkYet posted:Most people can't or won't abandon their families and support structures for a few years (military, Peace Corps) or are not in a position to give up a bunch of time to volunteer (AmeriCorps). AmeriCorps is actually paid work in most cases and does nearly everything you are describing. The main caveats are that it is only open to a limited number of people and there are time limits for how long you can be employed by them. As to the abandoning their families aspect, that was a reality under the WPA and CCC as well. People still have to move to where the infrastructure needs built, where the mining is done, or where the children need taught. Just expand AmeriCorps and Teach for America funding and drop the requirement that it be a short term. There's no reason to add an entire agency when government programs already do as much of what you're asking as their funding allows. Main Paineframe posted:The Democrats didn't cut nearly a million government jobs, institute a three-year wage freeze, and limit raises to 1% per year after that, just to turn around and start a massive federal jobs program paying decent wages. Austerity is still the order of the day. This is exactly right. The programs are already in place but the current government is decreasing their funding rather than increasing it.
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Jul 24, 2015 15:15
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