But no one knows how that money is being spent, and no one knows how much a functional infrastructure actually costs.

This is public information. In most places in the USA (except the incredibly corrupt ones), it is easy to find. Believe me, no-one listens to the people who make the systems work—they’re usually delighted to explain when someone asks politely.

Hominids. You’d think they’d forgotten they’re all going to end up as food or something.

Infrastructure: something that libertarians don’t believe exists, or something that gets built by the Infrastructure Fairy.

“I don’t care why these pipes aren’t working!” one of the residents yelled. “I pay $60 a month for water! I just want my toilet to flush! Why do I need to know how it works?”

Let me translate for you: “Don’t tell me facts I don’t care about!” one of the residents yelled. “I just want Santa Claus to bring me my stuff like he always did when I was a child! Why should I have to pay for what I get – this isn’t how capitalism is supposed to work!”

The amount of water wasted in this country is obscene.

Here’s your example of failed infrastructure: Dec 30th either a sewer or water main burst one block south of me. Then the other main broke. Then there was the first of two related gas line leaks. It took a month to fix the problem. For that entire month, my neighbors had their feces and urine vaccuumed out of their houses by pump trucks running day and night. And now the repaired area is collapsing, causing structural damage to the sidewalks and possibly nearby houses.

So you know, a few extra tax dollars are starting to look really appealing to me.

Of course, that doesn’t help if you don’t have the extra dollars, which is why some tax hikes are non-starters…

We want to flush endlessly

Not really. Just once each time I ….. well, you know.

Of course, I am just not into recreational flushing the way some of you are.

Although now that I am retired, I might try it as a new hobby.

The great conservative plan of the last four decades wasn’t to drown government in a bathtub, it was to drown all of us in feces and storm runoff.

That half trillion dollars plus we are spending on the military could probably come in handy. As could those tax cuts that fueled the awesome “growth” of the Bush era.

This is surely my favorite blurb from a BJ top post of all time.

The drowning scheme has worked. Alas, it is us that gets drowneded. You are doing a heckuva job, Grover!

First drowned in shit, and then raptured. Isn’ t that exactly what Nostradamus predicted, after all?

I don’t know how it is in other states, but in California the big agricultural companies get their water dirt-cheap and end up wasting a huge amount of it because they have no incentive to even try and conserve.

When up to 80 percent of the water in California is used for agriculture, people are going to get pissed when you tell them that they have to pay much higher prices for their residential water use so the farming companies can continue to waste water.

What people hear instead is Noted Water Expert Herr Hannity telling a group of pissed-off (& wealthy) Westlands farmers that the reason they don’t have sufficient water isn’t a three-year drought but rather, a three-inch golldurn minnow.

FWIW the state water project delivers its product to the water contractors (who are primarily urban) for the actual cost of delivery, i.e., the actual cost of building, operating and maintaining the system, including the bond financing costs.

The federal project, OTOH, delivers subsidized water mostly to agriculture. To “fix” the purported lack of supply would only take changing the contract cost to reflect the actual cost of delivery. This will occur approximately on that day the sun rises in the west.

What’s happening instead is folks are getting out of the raising crops business and into the water marketing business. It’s a lot less work.

The notion that it does stuns me; sure it can sometimes lower costs, but in many cases things cost what they cost, and the need to make a profit over that cost is not an issue when the public sector does something.

I guess Norquist was wrong about one detail. The great conservative plan of the last four decades wasn’t to drown government in a bathtub, it was to drown all of us in feces and storm runoff.

Win.

And new regulations require the storm runoff and sewer to be separated. Yes, more money to build concurrent systems, but savings every year when you don’t need to treat all the runoff.

There are many other areas of the infrastructures that are in relatively similar states of crisis. Check out the latest ASCE Infrastructure Report Card. Full disclosure – I am a card-carrying member of ASCE and stand to personally profit (ie, remain employed) when we get our heads out of our asses and start devoting more money to infrastructure.

I had a buddy who once asked me why we don’t privatize all road work. Number 1 – it is mostly privatized. Most engineering work is done by consultants and low-bid contractors build it. The pared down local or state agencies more & more just provide oversight and review/approval and even some of those functions are being performed now by consultants. Number 2 – how do you pay for it? There just isn’t any means better than taxes to collect money from everyone to have the government or contracted agents perform work. Privatizing doesn’t make the cost of something magically go away.

I only wish that were true but look at the decaying state of the MTA. Anyone who knows where the funding comes from is aware that most of the recent shortfall is due to falling real estate prices and taxes. But if one looks at the City Room section of the New York Times they all believe that firing the head of the MTA and opening their books is going to rebalance the budget. The MTA has had corruption problems but even transforming it into the most efficient organization in the world isn’t going to fix this hole.

@BR:

I watched that movie over the weekend and it is spot on. I have been a follower of James Howard Kunstler for years. Everyone should read The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Anthropologist Jared Diamond’s book Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

We’re pretty much in a classic Malthusian Collapse scenario and I fear that it is only going to get worse.

I agree, but I think it’s somewhat unfair to say it’s hard for the people to understand, when no one ever says it. It’s not like the people are, in general, clapping their hands over their ears and going “Lalalalala”—the politicians actively sold these projects and whatnot as one time costs, and just swept under the rug all of the on-going expenses. Then they didn’t do the repairs, people got used to paying $30 a month for water, and then when the politicians come back and go “OMG we need more monies!” the people say, “But water costs $30, and I pay my taxes, so fix it yourself!”

I think it’s fair in that the first thing people scream about is their taxes. Now, I agree that there should be acknowledgment that there’s ongoing costs, and they should be built into the budgets for the future. The problem is that if people are told “we’re going to extend the water line to X village, and it’s going to cost Y dollars to build, and we’re going to add Z dollars a year to your tax bill to keep it up,” either it won’t get built, or people start complaining about the tax raise when it’s a new line. I see it happen all the time.

It’s also quite true that the first thing that gets cut when budgets are tight, and politicians are looking to cut taxes is maintenance. In my area, there’s a state agency maintenance facility. It used to have about 25 full-time employees, who were responsible for a sizable area. Right now, there’s 10 people there, and it’s looking like they’re going to be cut some more. None of their responsibilities has decreased, but every time the budget gets tight, lo and behold, some of the field positions (which this is) get pruned back. The end result is that they tend to run from one disaster to another, instead of doing what they used to do, fixing it before it got to that point.

Yes, I’d love to see that better understood by the public, and yes, I’d like the politicians to step up on that. Unfortunately, the common gripe is the taxes and the “evil government workers” – so it’s not until it fails that someone wonders why it wasn’t fixed.

I object to this statement as a tv fan and a warcraft fan. Yet I am also a person who writes on politics and food while being very politically active. If you choose to care, nothing is an opiate.