I agree, finance is being used here as a way of framing sustainability. But it's obscuring and distorting the entire basis of economy altogether, which is living ecology. If people are denied the basic ability to improve the livability of their communities because of allegiance to global market tab sheets, then money has replaced the very thing it is meant to serve: human beings.

All this talk of there not being any jobs is hypocritical balogne. There's clearly plenty of infrastructure work to do, not to mention basic life stuff, like raising and teaching kids, growing food, building community... But the global market has stripped life itself of its value for these people.

Your community and mine aren't far behind, from the looks of things!

I think you're missing a lot here. The city isn't failing for lack of jobs, but for lack of jobs that produce value. A job rebuilding the infrastructure of an area is only valuable if there are other jobs from which you can tax to justify that.

If I spend $100 million to fund a trench that does nothing, it's a money sink. I've effectively thrown that money away. However, I have achieved however much employment that $100mm bought me. Until and unless that $100mm gets somebody some value, it isn't worthwhile, and as we've seen, there are very few people willing to fund completely pointless projects for no reason... even governments try to avoid it.

This is different than health care spending, or housing, or welfare -- those things (at least arguably) provide benefits. If I give someone health care for free, it's largely assumed that the cost of that health care will be offset in other ways. See the discussions on the Utah Unemployment article for examples.

But because governments are funded by tax dollars, and tax dollars are generated by earnings, until and unless people are earning moneys from outside the government that pays them, it simply isn't sustainable. Building infrastructure in the middle of nowhere is fruitless it is used as a lure for some form of money or productivity. The absence of said productivity means that, at best, you'll be revenue neutral on the funding projects and sustainable until inevitably inflation wipes everything away. Of course, to do that, the community has to be entirely self sustainable, which Flint definitely isn't.

In short, tax and spend can't work unless there's something to tax that isn't also part of the spend.

The only things I'm missing are the points from the downvotes I keep getting in this thread.

See, the thing here is that you and I are operating with completely different definitions of the word "value". I'm insisting to you that clean water is intrinsically valuable.

Yet you impose a restriction on the supposedly free market, claiming that: "a job rebuilding the infrastructure of an area is only valuable if there are other jobs from which you can tax to justify that".

But I maintain that it needs no such justification. It's clean water.

"When the Last Tree Is Cut Down, the Last Fish Eaten, and the Last Stream Poisoned, You Will Realize That You Cannot Eat Money"

Clean water is only valuable if someone can get for it greater than what it costs to extract. The aspect you're missing isn't a definition of value, but a model of sustainability.

If there's industry enough in an area that there is some other way to pay for water extraction, production, cleaning (see Nevada) -- then water can be sold at a loss because it supports something else, and is sustainable so long as there a mechanism to keep it being so.

The problem in Michigan is that the other way to pay for it isn't working, and the government doesn't have the revenues or a profit model to keep it going otherwise.

Again, this would be true whether the government were capitalist, socialist, socially democratic, totalitarian or anything else.

Economics are true whether or not your ideology agrees, but it shouldn't be controversial to assert that trying to sell luxury goods to Liberia (the poorest area in the world, last I checked) is fruitless, it should be easy enough to replace "luxury goods" with "water", or any other product and still be true.

> Economics are true whether or not your ideology agrees

This is not true. Hence the old name Political economy. There's no such thing as objective economics - much to the annoyance of usually libertarians.

And to add to this discussion there's no way that this would happen and not be fixed where I live no matter the profitability of the municipality itself. If the municipality couldn't pay for it, the state would. And the sustainability, or "is it worth it? profitable?", question would barely come up because access to clean water is culturally deemed more or less a right.

people are just arguing over each other because the other's point of view is unimaginable.

on the one hand, providing basic necessities which is deemed a basic human right, like clean water, is a no brainer. it should be done regardless, and if the city cannot afford it, it ought to be subsidized by an out of city entity like the state.

on the other hand, what's the worth of these human lives? if it cost more money to keep a city running than the productivity it produces, it makes sense to cut it out. it leaves the resources that would've been allocated to be used elsewhere.

For me, it's less a question of ideology and more of a question of where the money comes from. If the money is there, and will be there again in the future, then it doesn't really matter where it comes from, and I'm not suggesting that people should be denied access to water.

However, if (in what I suspect is an extreme hypothetical) this $100 million dollars only guarantees water access for a few years, and they'll be asking for handouts when this money is spent, then the question of whether or not its sustainable should probably be asked.

My only objection to the OP's assertion is that you can just build infrastructure out of tax dollars and call that sustainable. You can't, and it's been shown time and time again that it isn't tenable without some very special circumstances or conditions. There are circumstances applicable to Keynesian economics, but just paying one group of people to shovel holes in the day, and another group of people to fill them back up in the night time just doesn't work unless somebody, somewhere is producing something of value enough that it can subsidize this behavior.

Perhaps I'm reading it wrong, or perhaps he's not stating his case clearly, but that seems to be basically what he's suggesting.

Yes, the latter is deeply unethical in my book. If the same standards of "economical/business sense" are applied to more things, of equal necessity, it would create a completely dystopian society.

I hear you saying that in Nevada, clean water is [economically] sustainable because of [gambling].

But I'm talking about ecological, biological sustainability, insofar as human life is concerned.

So yeah, I'm dodging your financial model of sustainability altogether, intentionally, because in this case my entire ideological basis is irreconcilable with your model.

water is not a product in my religion, as it is in yours

You're asking the wrong question. It isn't a question of whether the people of Flint should have clean water. The question is whether people should continue to live in Flint. And if the answer is no, spending a hundred million dollars to install pipes there makes no sense.

A related question is: should every single place to live be subject to the same conditions that produced Flint?

I see a fundamental viewpoint conflict between the concept

'what created Flint was a persistent course of governance action stretching way back to the 60s and only exacerbated by municipal choices to destroy the infrastructure, and this is basically criminal behavior'

and

'Flint is what it is because when subjected to natural law with all other things being equal, it was a big loser and never justified its existence. It atrophied rather than growing and thriving, and all such places should pretty much be disbanded, if possible before they deteriorate to such an extent.'

Depend on it, if places to live have to operate on the basis of 'outcompeting OTHER places to live' just to exist at all, everywhere will be Flint except for a few places that are San Jose and San Francisco, with comparable rents (that being the primary metric showing you how much they won!). As soon as you sentence locations to economic death for losing that game, that's the inevitable result.

This is because suffering or injured people, OR places, by definition are at a competitive disadvantage to places and people with no injury. It's redefining civilization as mercy killing, and this is a choice (and a choice that doesn't automatically have to be made in only one way).

Places don't have to compete other places to be worth living in. Places where water extraction and delivery is relatively cheap, for example, need not produce very much in the way of value to be justified.

Moreover, economic value can be created, and is not zero sum, meaning that two people, or two places may create value without being parasites on each other. The important thing though is just that somebody has to create some form of value -- value can be minimal, and value can be isolated, but there must be someone doing something of value for the math to work out, and for a variety of reasons, a tax-funded commune is very unlikely to work except in areas that are rich in resources, which Michigan is not known to be. (Though I could be very wrong on that)