11–20 of 564 posts
Bureaucrats, allied with progressives and public sector unions, work vigorously to make government as expensive and inefficient as possible. In the United States, they are succeeding very well.
That suggests that U.S. costs are high due to general
inefficiency [...] Americans have simply ponied up more
and more cash over the years while ignoring the fact that
they were getting less and less for their money.
For example, if a big irrigation project will force taxpayers to subsidise corporate farms, the corporations have a big incentive to spend on ads and campaign contributions. Or if you have to give $60 to a private company for tax filing software, they have a big incentive to lobby and make campaign contributions to keep the tax system complicated.
I'm sure construction projects are subject to the same pro-waste incentives.
I'm not sure what the solution to this is - campaign finance reform, perhaps?
No one wants to send their kid to an unproven, experimental university. No city wants to beta test a new style of road building. No patient wants to be the first to try a new treatment. We are so dependent on these things that the cost of failure is astronomical. Because no one is willing to try new methods of doing things, costs never go down. There are marginal improvements, for sure, but no disruptive changes.
It feels like a weird manifestation of NIMBYism. We all want innovation, but we want to test it on someone else first.
I suspect this is because there is a high incentivize to get a toll road up quickly and start generating revenue to pay back the initial investment.
Residents generally hate tolls, but its a good motivator for infrastructure to go up quickly.
I never understood why similar incentives wouldn't kick in for mass transit projects.
It doesn't address any of the numerous political issues with American infrastructure, but it could be good for repair and maintenance
From my perspective infrastructure is politically driven in the US. Projects are debated for decades, over this time changes are made to placate some groups and buy the support from other groups, and create jobs for some politician, until it baloons into something that is many billions of dollars. Then it is built as a one off mega project. At this point it should be killed but this is seen as the only way to get stu…
Infrastructure? Same thing. There's something distinctly American in how slow and expensive it is. These are systemic issues, not some single-cause thing that [liberals|conservatives] can finger-point to a partisan villain.
It costs extra because CORRUPTION. They're skimming off the top at every level, and that's why they can't let anyone investigate.
Come now, citizen, you used the wrong word.
In newspeak the word is "Profit".
Every company working on a project deserves to make profit, right? and they deserve to make more profit than ever before, right? So they made $100 million in profit 10 years ago, $1 billion last year, you know for sure they are going to make > $1 billion this year, otherwise they are an outright failure.