All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime. That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem, even if it means that the wealthy are contributing back to the country that provided the business and social environment to do so.
> That suggests to me that we can afford to solve this problem
I don't think that follows. It's certainly not true in software.... it's cheap to add things in the beginning of the design process, but gets exponentially harder as you add more complexity. And in general in homebuilding remodels are at least a factor of two more expensive than new construction.
Putting down a water main while you're building a street and before you've built any houses seems substantially easier than replacing a water main while dealing with traffic and a block full of customers who need continuous water supply. Not to mention more stringent building codes and such.
I think it should be done regardless, because it's generally impossible for people to run their own water lines, so the State has a moral imperative to do it. But I can easily see it being much more expensive than the original build.
> All that I know is we were able to afford the infrastructure originally under a higher tax regime.
Actually, we couldn't.
Cities can actually afford their infrastructure--they're dense enough.
The problem is that we built a whole bunch of suburbs that people moved into. Suburbs can't afford their infrastructure once they quit growing. And, if they drain the critical mass out of the city, they also make the city not able to afford its infrastructure.
In this country we've lost the ability to build things at a reasonable cost (or at all). A single mile of track in NYC costs about half as much as the entire Delhi metro system, or a typical Spanish rail line (not just a small track extension), etc.
The problem is costs, not revenue. Charging more money will merely divert funds from productive and valuable investments (e.g. self driving cars) into less valuables ones (e.g. tiny extensions to NYC subways). If you want to fix infrastructure, fix the cost problem.
There was an article shared on HN a couple years ago arguing these that sorts of cost spikes and overruns are pretty much endemic to countries with common-law legal systems, and almost non-existent outside them.
I'm having a hard time digging it up, though. Sorry.
On a bus in Cambodia, I watched a man fixing potholes in the road. He had nothing but a spade, and each time a vehicle came past he leapt out if it's way, clinging to a dirt bank.
When I got home after that holiday, I saw someone repairing the motorway near my home. The whole lane was shut down just for him, and there was a large truck with a crew of two and huge flashing arrows on it in front of him just to keep him safe.
It would be literally hundreds of times cheaper building anything in an environment where lives were considered expendable.
You've misdiagnosed the cost problem. We have suburbs who have never, and continue not to be, amortizing -- they don't pay their costs in taxes. That can be papered over by fees from growth when they are growing, but when they stop expanding, wait 50 years for infrastructure to wear out, and you have a disaster.
Lots of suburbs and rural America are built far too sparsely to be affordable (to the denizens; Woodside will continue to be just fine).
The price/cost overruns of building the 2nd ave subway (and the large stations, which is were most of the costs went) is unrelated to the price of building roads and sewer in suburban America.
Also, doing stuff in America costs more than in China or India. News at 10.
Complaining (as I think?) that it's relatively more expensive is reasonable, though I doubt Americans would tolerate the widespread death rates involved in large infra projects in some countries.
As I pointed out, nothing he mentioned is relevant to infra costs of your suburbs that aren't building giant gorgeous mezzanines or stupid pretty bridges like sf.
Most of the infrastructure was built on taking out debt based on optimistic projections of future growth. Flint and Detroit are poster children for this.
Isn't the current trump administration plan exactly the same regarding infrastructure, with wildly unrealistic growth numbers being used to support the spending?
