This is a disaster happening all over the country. The EPA estimates we will need $385 billion by 2030 to modernize water infrastructure.
Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even major cities like Chicago are poisoning their kids (to a lesser degree) due to inability to properly maintain infrastructure.
My wife was a finance director at a municipal water utility in an old city. Water supply infrastructure wasn't a ticking timebomb -- many pipes last literally centuries, and utilities can proactively use sensors and robots to find weak pipes to repair without digging up half the city. They had a capital program that worked, lines were replaced based on risk and there was a reserve for breaks or other failures.
The higher risk area from a cost point of view is sewers. They don't age as well and as we pave move stuff, many older sewers and combined storm/sanitary systems are unsafe and vulnerable.
The Flint issue isn't about old pipes. It's about incompetent engineers who should be criminally charged for incompetence.
The punishment is that if he poisons another set of kids within a year, she gets a higher sentence. Also her job search will be complicated for a year.
Yeah. That'll show them.
The only solution is to make monitoring the responsibility of people who are impacted. Distribute water quality testing kits that, first, clearly and easily show their results, and can then be mailed to a federal agency. Good luck avoiding those results.
It's more abouy failed leadership than failed engineering. It has to do with how Flint spread responsibility over their water source so thin that no one was to blame and no one had the full picture. Laziness gave way to corruption. I'm sure there were protests from the engineering team.
Defund or mismanage (due to incompetence, malice, or a mix) government until you cause a disaster, point at the disaster, and blame it on the government...classic Red Team strategy in action.
I sure do and I realize this was largely the State's fault. I didn't mean to say "Flint spread the responsibility so thin" so much as "The responsibility was spread thin between Flint and the State"
One could argue the Coca Cola company pushed bottled water on US residents in the 1990's. Alternatively, one could argue government standards did not keep up with filtration technology. Unfortunately, US government innovation since the 1960's has failed the test of time. Statistically speaking, the majority of quality of life improvements in the last half century, was seeded by American startups and small business.
But that's only a problem with the AMERICAN government. Lots of other governments around the world are doing amazing things, despite corruption being a constant stress on the system.
> Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones.
I don't understand the first point. Do water systems have some great economies of scale beyond the municipal level? The cost of the water system and the ability to take on debt are both directly proportional to the population size. If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them.
And as to the second point, it's not clear that the cities in such dire straits that they can't even pay for their own infrastructure are worth saving. Concentrated poverty is poisonous in general. It may make more sense to relocate the people in failed cities to other places than to spend billions of dollars bailing them out every year until the end of time.
> The cost of the water system ... [is] proportional to the population size...
Absolutely not - unless you assume every municipal area has equal population density.
You figure water pipe installation costs per mile. There are a lot more miles to get to people's houses in Podunk Nebraska. Overall - trivially disprovable.
> The ... ability to take on debt [is] directly proportional to the population size.
Absolutely not. Trivially disprovable. Compare tax revenue per-capita between Podunk Nebraska and New York City and see what you come up with. And then figure that out over the actual cost to deploy services to that population. Density of tax revenue per square mile is orders of magnitude lower.
Pro tip here: Podunk Nebraska doesn't have water service. They don't have sewer service. They have a well and a septic field, buddy. Because there isn't revenue to provide real services.
I lived in that growing up - and you don't have an accurate picture of what rural life is like at all. We had well water and septic, just like anyone who lived within 5 miles of us.
Podunk, Nebraska isn't supposed to have city water and sewer. It isn't a city. You only need those things in areas where there is too much population density for wells and septic fields.
And then you're just arguing that sustainable cities should pay for unsustainable ones again.
> If you have twice as many people in a unit then you can borrow twice as much money but have to pay twice as much to cover them.
Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk. Michigan as a whole is struggling, but as recently as 2000 it's per-capita GSP was at the national average, compared to places like Detroit and Flint where the bottom dropped out decades ago.
> Right, but you can spread out the repayment risk.
The lenders can already do that. Instead of buying $1000 in Michigan State bonds they can buy $100 in bonds from each city, limiting the exposure to any one.
The effect you're really after is that at the state level the interest rates are lower because one city failing doesn't cause any of the state-level bonds to default. But that's just the second point again -- sustainable cities bail out the unsustainable ones. Instead of cities paying more interest they have to pay the same money to cover the bondholders against another city's default. If the bond market is efficient in evaluating risk and pricing it into interest rates then it's exactly the same average amount. But more of the money comes from the cities that already would have paid lower interest rates, to prop up the failing ones.
It's basically the state acting as an insurance company for the bondholders against the risk of default, without reinsurance. So the government suffers unexpected large one-time expenses rather than predictable small expenses over time, and if too many municipalities get into trouble at once it could take down the whole state. Look at what Greece nearly did to the EU at an even higher level.
Buoyed by Ann Arbor, Grand Rapids, Lansing, and Bloomfield Hills.
As with every state - the urban areas by and large provide the tax revenue.
With Michigan, the Detroit City Center is mostly a trainwreck. There are still strong metro areas, and in particular there is a buttload of money flowing into the U of M area from overseas.
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?
It can't be overstated. All metro areas need their actual residencies checked, because the lead service lines are everywhere.
There's been a lot more checking (under the Obama administration - goodbye EPA) and there are many million+ resident municipalities with very bad lead levels because of lead service lines.
...in America. There's lots of developed countries where municipal governments are generally well run as a rule, and while there's always grumbling things never get this out of hand. Lead is posion, for pete's sake. Where else in the developed world would poisoned drinking water be allowed for so long?
In Canada we had what we consider a big disaster 17 years ago:
The Premier (equivalent of a governor), was investigated by judicial inquiry, his offices searched, people went to jail, there were payouts for damages - and this is something that only affected a town of 5,000 people. More importantly, it was fixed as fast as possible.
My point being: it's not that there aren't screw-ups elsewhere, it's just that they're so rare that they cause a huge scandal and everyone runs around trying to fix things. In America everyone just seems to just get angry at each other and then do nothing.
So don't tar governments. They work well elsewhere. America's just doing it wrong.
Exactly. The question now is: why is American government so broken, and the corollary is: what can we do to fix it? Is American culture simply broken, so that only utterly sociopathic people go into government? Is America just completely filled with people who have been trained from birth to be sociopathic, as evidenced by the way they vote?
"Slavery". That sort of system requires a fair amount of legal and propaganda support. Our election system gives the old slave states a boost. And our more bigoted politicians are constantly rehashing and reusing the propaganda to justify their actions. So while slavery itself is gone, the weighted legal system and propaganda are still in place doing what they do. It's a safe bet that much of the Flint water crisis is due to the water system being for "those people".
America is the richest country in the world and as such attracts the best propagandists on the free market.
American culture has a long individualist streak that distrusts authorities, combined with our many entrenched sins regarding e.g. racism, leaves a significant fraction of the population vulnerable to many effective forms of propaganda... and that's just the right. Except for a few states like MA and VT, the left consistently fails to field candidates that will fight for ordinary people against monied interests because that's where their election funds come from. In the past, leftists were associated with official enemies of the state (e.g. communists, socialists) by major media organizations and trusted authorities. Now most people here distrust their gut instincts about fairness, inequality, the golden rule, and mutual caring.
Many forms of leftist organization were broken down and destroyed after the upheavals of the 60s, with especially aggressive pushes by Regan, but this has continued by both parties up to the present day with Republicans taking mainly larger digs at the integrity of the public trust. This story continues with rather emphasized savagery into the present day starting in 2017.
However, this is an interesting moment where it seems there is a big fight brewing between truly breathtakingly rapacious greed and a significant fraction of the public. It will be interesting to see who wins in the coming decades - it may determine the fate of the planet's suitability for human life.
It's the adversarial system - people vs Government. In pretty much every country that's doing well, the Government is considered a representative of the people, and is expected to act as one or suffer political consequences - but in the case of the US, it's expected that the Government as a whole is not a functional part of society, so it has no reason to behave as one.
Can you give some examples of those countries? Which countries are doing well and have governments that their people are generally happy with and consider representative of the people?
Yeah, I've only lived in two countries, but in both a lot of people are upset about how uniquely bad theirs is, and think things are much better in the "sane" world.
Sighs of "Only in X-Country..." abound.
This kinda mirrors the common misunderstanding that I or my family are the only ones with problems. Everyone else seem so happy and problem free.
Not the UK: In which probably 50% of the population feel the government doesn't represent them.
Not France I'd guess? Which seems to have issues and strong probability of a Frexit?
Not Italy, whose politics as seemed somwwhat messy for some time?
Those are the countries in Europe that are "doing well" in terms of GDP at least. Aside from Germany that is.
So is Germany the role model? I'm really trying to ask an honest question. I'm wondering which are the countries currently doing well economically and treating their citizens well.
>Not the UK: In which probably 50% of the population feel the government doesn't represent them.
When you have a situation like that, it seems like it's time to break up the country into smaller units so that you don't have a half-and-half divide, because then you'll never get to a stable state where a large enough majority of the population accepts the government (because they're constantly fighting the other half in a tug-of-war and the majority keeps flipping back and forth).
According to the Brexit results, Scotland strongly favored "remain", and so did Northern Ireland. London did too. So obviously, Scotland should simply secede from the UK, and it can rejoin the EU as a separate nation. It's certainly large enough to be an independent nation on its own. Northern Ireland can too, or better yet it can rejoin regular Ireland which is already an EU member.
I do wonder, however, what would happen if they did another Brexit vote just to see if many people have changed their minds.
There are many well functioning local governments in the United States.
The US is a big country both in terms of habitable land and population, with almost 325 million people (Canada technically has more land, but since most of it is uninhabitable, they don't have to worry about plumbing it). You've read about ONE city where the mismanagement was so severe that the water became poisonous. I'm sure it's not the only one, but I'm also sure this happens in countries that aren't America sometimes too.
I'm not a civil engineer but from what I hear, Flint's water problem is nearly impossible to resolve and would practically require a complete extraction and replacement of the city's infrastructure, which isn't really possible without destroying the city anyway, since there are buildings and roads and stuff on top of it. Of course, it's politically incorrect to admit that, and politicians and bureaucrats will probably keep pretending like they are going to do something to resolve it to try to keep public anger at bay, and just hope the city empties out before anyone notices that it's been 30 years.
Maybe that evaluation of the engineering issue is incorrect, it's just what I've read; as above, I'm not a civil engineer so I don't actually know. But this is not just a simple matter of cleaning up a minor bacterial contamination. Minor contaminations of that type occur and get cleaned up all the time without anyone taking special notice (except the citizens affected by the boil order).
I understand it's fun to throw rocks at the big guy, but your comment is not representative of life in the US. If we had such a hard time providing basic services like water and our neighbor to the immediate north didn't, things would look a lot different.
For the record, I don't raise this because it's "fun to throw rocks at the big guy". Your country is saturated by propaganda, which I'm fine with, but unfortunately it's leaking. People in my country listen to your media take this anti-government stuff seriously, even though we don't have the same kinds of problems, and it has a real effect on the electorate.
It was obvious when the Obamacare debate first started and for a week or two the US paid attention to how healthcare worked in other countries. All the sudden these hit pieces started showing up about how bad healthcare is in Canada and the UK, with all this exaggerated garbage about wait lists etc. Or recently with Norway and the "Islamic plague". It's absolute propaganda, taking the tiniest grain of truth and turning it into a giant calamity for political purposes, even though the truth on the ground (which is obvious to anyone in those countries) isn't even remotely similar.
Like I said, if your country wants to do that, that's fine. But I feel obligated to point out that you can't just look at America's government and declare that all government is that wasteful and ineffective.
isn't the problem in Flint that a set of politicians decided to switch the water source to a heavily polluted one in exchange for some financial compensation
now that the lead particulate has gotten into all the existing pipes, it's an insurmountable problem, but still entirely a result of American corruption, rather than an engineering issue.
They switched the water to the Flint River to try to save money (the city had been maintaining infrastructure and a treatment plant to pull water from the Flint river for many years previously but it was unused).
My understanding is the largest problem was not pulling water from the river - it was the decision of evironmental department officials and treatment plant managers to not add anti-corrosion chemicals to pH balance the acidic water. (They claimed to misinterpret federal regulations and believed 1 year of monitoring was necessary before adding the chemicals). The chemicals themselves were quite cheap and there hasn't been any "corruption" related reason for them not to have been added. Unless new evidence has come out since then, this was a case of incompetence.
How do short sellers punish the executives of the company? Even if they lose their jobs, they'll get millions of dollars in "performance" bonuses and millions more in severance in return for running the company into the ground.
Often boards will appoint CEOs to dismantle or sell off hopeless companies (disappearing market, obstreperous union, product is turning into a commodity) in a last ditch effort to recover some shareholder value. We can't call those CEOs failures if they manage to get shareholders something as opposed to the nearly nothing they would get if the company went bust.
I think a lot of the criticism of Marissa Mayer misses the point that she was appointed CEO of Yahoo, home-page website for people who don't know how to change their home page. The fact that she managed to arrange an exit for Yahoo that wasn't a complete bankruptcy or shutdown is just epsilon-short-of-miraculous.
Another way to look at it is that she had an entire large tech company at her disposal and managed to do pretty much nothing with it, then pawned it off and jumped out with a golden parachute.
Not an equally legitimate way of looking at it in my opinion.
This was Yahoo we're talking about. A buyout was the best possible scenario for shareholders. She's been rewarded for rescuing some shareholder value from a burning car wreck.
Here's a question you can ask yourself: do you think Verizon got a good deal? I'd be upset if I held Verizon stock because I believe based on everything I know about Yahoo that Verizon shouldn't have purchased them and that it was a bad deal for them.
that's a common idea, but really there's no inherent quality of Governments that make that the case - I think it's more to do with how various Governments are set up. Interestingly enough, I think that regulatory frameworks set up by people who have the idea that Governments are inherently inefficient can actually make it a self-fullfilling prophesy.
It's what I've seen, for example, in the Australian telecommunications and electricity markets. The parts that have been privitised are now run 'more efficiently' by underinvesting on maintenance, upgrades etc., all the time with rising cost to the consumer and rising profits, and now when Government intervention is required (you may have heard about the SA blackouts after Elon Musk offered to build them a 100MW grid scale battery within 100 days recently), the Governments can't really do everything they need because they are limited by law of interfering with the 'efficient' markets.
Of course, the idea that you could have a competitive power generation market when the cost of entry is so high is ridiculous.
I think the "inherent quality of [democratic] Governments" is this:
If a government does something that causes short term pain with much bigger long term gains, it will tend to get voted out of office long before it gets to the "gains" part. The incentives for elected officials is to focus on winning the next election, or perish.
Private organizations also have short term pressures, but they're not nearly as short term and drastic. Board members and stock analysts will actually do serious in depth analysis of the long term prospects. The median voter does not.
Or maybe just privatize it? In France (one of the most socialist country on Earth) we've been privatizing more and more of our water infrastructure (we're around 30% private by now and it increases each year) and the quality of water is still one of the best.
England's water system was privatized in the 1980s, and prices went up significantly. But that's also kind of the point. One of the reasons U.S. water infrastructure is so bad is that bureaucrats set the water/sewer rates too low to appropriately fund upgrades.[1] Regulators set rates way too low, because they'd rather poison children (who don't vote) with lead than raise water rates on grandmas (who do vote).
I don't think that "too cheap" is an issue because the state can put subsidies in place. The core issue is lack of oversight and that can happen in public and private environments.
The subsidy isn't going to be from rich residents to poor ones. It's going to be from urban cores to the suburbs. Spread out a bunch of people over a large area, and there's much more pipe per capita.
Framing it that way misses an important part of the story.
It was the institutional and regulatory failure during the switch away from Detroit city water that made the lead an emergency. Part of the reason that happened is that Flint had depopulated and was basically a failed city. It's not acceptable that it happened, but it didn't happen just because Flint was trying to skimp on infrastructure 40,50,60 years ago.
They skimped (ie entirely did not use) on corrosion inhibitors when the water supply was switched. I believe those are the "savings" OP was referring to.
"By not adding a corrosion inhibitor, Flint was going to save about $140 per day. "
"Replacement of Flint’s lead service lines, which is the only permanent solution to address its lead vulnerability, is estimated to cost up to $1.5 billion, according to Flint’s mayor, Karen Weaver."
Yeah, that it was a financial decision is an institutional and regulatory failure. It shouldn't have even been on the table to switch without properly treating the different source water.
Everything is a financial decision at the end of the day. You can't just wish away the laws of economics.
Let's say that regulations dictated that they had to spend this money and they didn't have it. Add enough of such regulations and a shrinking tax base and eventually you have an insolvent city. What do you propose we do then?
Near as I can tell, it's reasonable to have such regulations so people don't get hurt by people making decisions with consequences they don't understand, but eventually this will lead to insolvency and we need to have a plan to shut down cities that become insolvent and support relocation efforts when that happens.
Saving $140/day at the risk of $100M damage to infrastructure is not good financial sense. It's the financial sense exercised by the kind of person who expects someone else to pay for the mess, i.e. a government official. A private corporation which was exposed to the liability would have likely chosen to raise the price of water to pay for the corrosion inhibitor, but someone whose job is to manipulate the balance sheet for political gain has a different utility function. We handle this with rules.
If that private corporation were a mining company in Montana they would choose to take the profits, go bankrupt, and again have the people pay to clean up the mess.
But if you want to erase your student loan debt with bankruptcy you're a lazy mooch who should just get a part time job to pay for college like I did back in the '60s. /s
Well, when your state is broke, you try to cut corners. You cut the wrong corners, people are maimed or are killed.
So, I suppose I agree with you that its institutional and regulatory failures in the most general of ways, similar to how Enron would have been considered "a breakdown in internal controls". And those responsible should go to prison and have civil penalties inflicted on them. Has that happened? I don't know.
And if we are taking this long to fix Flint's problem, imagine how long it will take for the rest of the nation to realize housing first initiatives are a better solution to homelessness then the justice system?
You're acting like this was forced on them from budget cuts. The city manager was warned about exactly this happening and still went ahead and did it because it was the city manager is appointed by their corrupt Republican governor [1]. The city manager should not have been able to make those decisions without a much more thorough vetting process.
The city manager was only appointed after Flint became effectively a failed city, and the state took over management.
In the US, cities manage their own municipal services including water supplies. The state only intervenes when the city runs out of money to provide basic services to their inhabitants -- and this happens very rarely.
If Flint had had a functioning government, the state appointees would have had nothing to do with the water supply.
It's a tragedy what happened, but at the point a city is unable to provide the most basic of services to its citizens like clean water, I think we need to consider whether it is worth pumping money into a city, or just call it quits and provide relocation funds to the remaining inhabitants, to get them to a region with actual economic activity.
> In the US, cities manage their own municipal services including water supplies. The state only intervenes when the city runs out of money to provide basic services to their inhabitants -- and this happens very rarely.
In most of the country, if the city runs out of money, the city runs up a debt. And if the city can't pay the debt, the city goes bankrupt.
No state intervention to protect creditors. They took on the risk when they lent the money. And it is only money.
The idea that muni bond holders are so important that cities should have fiscal solutions forced on them from above to prevent a debt default?
That's a Michigan thing.
And now we know what that Michigan idea can lead to.
In the US, cities manage their own municipal services including water supplies. The state only intervenes when the city runs out of money to provide basic services to their inhabitants -- and this happens very rarely.
In my view a city is not a sovereign nation. The political and financial structure of cities is decided by the states. If a city isn't providing basic services, it means that the state isn't providing basic services in geographic pockets of the state.
On the other hand, if this structure is really the best way of delivering municipal services, so be it. But I'm skeptical.
I see no reason why something like water service has to be managed at the municipal level. There could just be a state water service, and it could decide to manage itself by creating regional services. So far as I know, the cities aren't expected to manage delivery of electricity or natural gas.
So you're proposing we throw good money after bad?
The city failed. It it's not financially feasible to fix it so it is self-sustainable at a level of investment that can be paid back in a reasonable amount of time, relocating is a perfectly acceptable proposal.
People have every right to stay there if they can afford to do so, but if they are going to ask others for financial help bailing them out, it's not in the least bit unreasonable for those spending the money to do so to dictate how that money is spent. If the city has no hope of recovery, then saying the money can only be used for relocation is perfectly acceptable. What's not acceptable is expecting others to support your unsustainable city in perpetuity.
Money is nothing but abstracted power and there's no such thing as 'good money', only the ability to wield power. As such you're effectively saying that it's morally wrong to use power to keep people in a wrecked city that they did not wreck, because while it's their home they are not themselves powerful enough to merit having one.
The whole 'good money' thing is a neat exploit on Western civilization as it began with the Magna Carta (admittedly a bit of an out-of-date concept now!). It's the idea that if power is abstracted into money, all of a sudden it can't be questioned again. By contrast, being able to set societal expectations for ultimate power turned out to be, by definition, civilized.
Translating your statement gives us 'if people without power dare to ask others with all the power for help, it's not the least bit unreasonable for those with the power to have total control over how those people live and what they do. What's not acceptable is to help people who will always lack power, because that's just wrong'.
And while this has been tried over and over in history, again: Magna Carta. This touching idea that everything has to ultimately serve money, has got to go. Anyway it's only an abstraction papering over the simple reality that if you accumulate enough abstracted power, your whims are more unquestioned than those of Kings… because 'good money'.
I'm proposing we throw good money into basic human necessities instead of investing in weapons, and that our measures of success be linked to human health and wellbeing, not to level of absolute exploitation.
While I don't agree on our defense spending budget and I'd love for us to cut back, there are a few things worth pointing out.
1) money spent on defense is orthogonal to the argument being made. Your point is a good one, but it still doesn't refute the point that it's good money following bad money.
2) While I don't think it's the best industry that we could be investing in, many people see defense spending as investing in the American people. One of the chief exports of the US is war, defense and weaponry. Lots of countries our customers of the US and there are lots of towns and cities that would be economically hurt (to the point of dying like Flynt) depending on how our defense spending was cut.
Appreciate this moderate take. It's the cold hard truth of American capitalism, especially in places like Michigan, but it doesn't mean we can't wish for humane policies!
What does capitalism have to do with it? It's almost universally agreed that government choices were the ones at fault, and whether capitalist, socialist, whatever, cost vs. quality is still a factor.
Uh... how about, give them money to relocate so the children in the failing schools can grow up somewhere that doesn't have the highest crime rate in the country, can drink water that isn't poisoned, and get a job that still exists?
They are real people who are fucked because they were born in a dying city which relied on a dying industry. They aren't plaything for your anti-financial philosophy.
Look, I'm not opposed to helping people relocate, but please don't trivialize my "philosophy" as some kind of a toy. I grew up in a community fractured by racial and socioeconomic segregation. It's not some play toy thing when I see schools and basic infrastructure being systematically defunded in in the name of globalization.
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)
That's the thing here, Michigan has some of the most clean, abundant sources of water in the country, and $100,000,000 is not very much money for a long term investment of this much importance.
What do you think It was the institutional and regulatory failure during the switch away from Detroit city water that made the lead an emergency. means?
Or in a sibling thread where I say it shouldn't have been a financial decision?
It's even bigger than that. Detroit had to raise rates on Flint because a combination of depopulation and terrible management left its water system in dire straits.
I grew up in a suburb of Detroit, and we got Detroit water. This is no accident -- Lake Huron is some of the cleanest water in the world. Had my town even considered switching from Detroit water, there would have been an uproar.
This is a resource that has no reason other than historical accident, for being a responsibility of the City of Detroit. It looks like it was mainly a way to burden Detroit with more debt.
The article I link in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13899164 makes the case that it was more complicated than that, with Detroit making a long term offer at least competitive with the new water system Flint was going to participate in.
> That option was projected to save the region $200 million over 25 years, according to City Council meeting minutes.
Flint has already taken $250mil in state funding, and it will be taking another $120mil in fed+state funds now. So I guess that this whole thing will break even in 45 years?
That $200 million is only vaguely related to the situation, there isn't any technical reason that the long term plan to switch to the Karegnondi Water Authority supply required the short term switch to the river water.
It's not even clear it represented real savings. This article is written sort of after the fact, but it sounds reasonable to me.
I suspect the primary cause was engineering incompetence rather than a desire to save money. The water quality problems were caused by a lack of corrosion inhibitors; corrosion inhibitors would have cost $140/day, which is cheap compared to the $4 million that Flint spent upgrading the water treatment plant. It seems most plausible to me that the Flint engineers simply weren't thinking about the need for corrosion inhibitors.
fwiw I don't really see anything inflammatory in the parent's statement, or any indication that they feel the current administration is any more/less equipped than previous ones to deal with the water crisis.
The parent comment’s implication is that the administration does not have any plan for dealing with the problem. It was phrased in a sarcastic/jokey way, which doesn’t always read clearly on the internet.
To be fair, his interpretation was my original intent. The "bold assumption" being that this administration has a plan or has any interest in developing a plan to deal with lead in thousands of municipalities' drinking water.
The Obama administration + Congress did that. Trump had nothing to do with it.
From the 3rd paragraph of the article:
> The funding was approved by Congress in December and signed into law by President Barack Obama, but the EPA had to review and approve a formal request from state officials detailing how the city intends to use the grant money.
It's an assumption that the current administration will deal with it at all. Consider its denialist position on climate change and the evisceration of the EPA budget, it's entirely reasonable to conclude lead elsewhere isn't a concern worth doing anything about. Besides, don't plutocrats drink only bottled water?
This expenditure was approved by the previous administration. As for the current administration... I'm sure the free market will figure out ways to improve water quality. High taxes are the only thing preventing that from happening.
I don't think there's real belief that the free market would fix it.
It's a reference to the general republican stance that if government stays out of the way then the free market will fix everything i.e. health care, banking regulations, environmental protection, et cetera.
I would imagine one of those places is my apartment. Lead is bad, but it's not that bad... Removing lead from gasoline is probably 100x times more important than other hand wringing
Good thing this was approved by the previous administration. The next Flint will most likely receive a tank to protect itself from rioters, given the EPA cuts and further bloated defense budget
Flint is the symbol of mid-West's de-industrialization. Since this administration has vowed to give these people's jobs back, you can be sure that they're going to make sure Flint is better off in 4 years than it is now. So giving them federal money to fix their water pipes is a great way to be the good guys. They're going to be able to hire a bunch of people to fix it, and solve a health problem at the same time.
I'd be more worried about my water quality if I lived in a region with a lot of shale oil drilling...
I think you have missed the fact that this money was given during the Obama administration. Since Trump have cut funding to the EPA it's hard to believe that all the "Flints" out there will have it better after 4 years...
This was put into effect under Obama, it seems, by the Water Infrastructure Improvements for the Nation Act of 2016, an act introduced and sponsored by a Texan Republican.
I definitely agree with that. Even though this was initiated by the Obama administration, they probably could have scrapped it as part of the drastic budget cuts they are making.
My guess is that they will remove everything that is to protect the environment (deregulation of anything oil-related), and spend what's left on creating federally-funded jobs in de-industrialized regions like this.
Strong towns makes a compelling argument that the reason we've invested so poorly in infrastructure that we can't possibly hope to maintain is that we don't conduct government business using accrual accounting. I wonder - do local governments anywhere use accrual accounting? It would be so much harder for government to spend money we don't have with good accounting practices in place, which leads me to believe that this is uncommon.
They can also be capped to a maximum amount. You can see this often on NPR listener donation rallies, when companies match funds up to something like $5k for the duration of a show. If more than $5k is reached, the company still donates only $5k.
1.
corresponding in pattern, color, or design; complementary.
"a blue jacket and matching skirt"
**2.
equal in number or amount; equivalent.
"the college will provide matching funds to complete the project"**
I'm aware, but the second definition I think is also valid, and perhaps one that many people are more colloquially familiar with. After all, a match (singular) is a 1:1.
Then I would have clarified that sentence, by saying matching funds UP TO $20 million. If my employer says they are matching my 401k contribution, I'd expect that is 1:1, not a hidden, oh we really only meant 20%. I'm just being pedantic.
"Matching funds" is an established term of art in government (and some other) finance for contribution with some proportionality factor required by the granting agency to be spent toward the same goal by some other agency (often the recipient themselves) as a condition of the granted funds.
The term was used correctly in the sentence, and since the exact funding split was specified, there was nothing to be clarified.
I think I'm gonna to go ahead and assume what you are saying is 'why isn't the state and:or city already handling this' just more poorly worded.
I'm going with that because I want to take a moment to highlight this is one of the things that is very wrong with American infrastructure. You see most states aren't like the federal government in that they are often competing with other states for things like industry, job creation, and this in turn has a very high curbing away from infrastructure projects from say a town like Flint which isn't really a thriving economic center like to once was. The state itself is going to choose rightly or wrongly to dump money into places like Ann Arbor, which is much more of a thriving place in Michigan. Cities also are competing more wholly in this regard and it's unlikely Flint could even come close to paying for this being caught up with all the other services that city has to run. This is before we factor for political favors, corruption, ill fated projects and the like.
For all but the biggest metros/cities and most populous and still thriving states like California, New York, or San Fran, LA, NYC, hell your thriving and well run Minneapolis-St.Paul and the like. You have a great inability for cities and even entire States that without influx of Federal funds would be unable to do even minimal investment in infrastructure.
It's a huge problem. One of the reasons that calls for a Federal Infrastructure Investment Act is so broadly supported in both sides (though what infrastructure that would be built isn't and it is always about Roads it's seems before anything else)
I've now seen this devolution in argument a number of times. Here, Facebook, and Reddit
Trump Supporter: Look what Trump Did!
Answer: Obama Pressured Congress, the bill was passed in December
-Obama waited till he was on his way out so what's the point. He was ineffective.
Answer: Actually the legislation was drafted much earlier, but republicans didn't want to pass it. Obama used his office to raise the profile of the crisis to help convince Republicans to get on board.. Congress hands out Money, not the President
-So Obama fixed his own mistake in poisoning Flints water. A lot of good the EPA does.
Answer: Actually it was a Republican governor who assigned "emergency managers" to take over Flint. He superceded the democratically elected Mayor. The new managers shifted the water source from Detroit to the Flint Michigan. The EPA told them they needed corrosion controls, but the response was by the managers was there was no law requiring the controls. Flint was a financial disaster before, but the emergency managers came in and started doing whatever they wanted regardless of the outcome.
- So the EPA just let it happen.
Answer: The EPA escalated up the chain of command. The argument went on for six months, but they didn't hold press conferences with news organizations, which was probably their last option.
-Because the EPA is ineffective, and that's why it's funding should be cut! Totally Useless!
The final answer from Trump supporters is either a) you can't stop another Flint Water issue so just get rid of the EPA, or b)getting rid of all regulations will allow the free market to naturally fix the issues.
It's no longer possible to have rational discussions. Anything positive is directly attributed to Trump, and anything negative is the fault of Obama.
This is great news from my vantage point. a +1 for Trump and his team for taking care of this mess. Throwing a lot of money may not be the right solution but it does fix a lot of pipes.
From the article:
> The funding was approved by Congress in December and signed into law by President Barack Obama, but the EPA had to review and approve a formal request from state officials detailing how the city intends to use the grant money.
Putting municipalities in charge of utilities is basically a failed model. Municipalities are too small a unit to be able to effectively take on the long term obligations that come along with infrastructure like this, or cross subsidize from richer residents to poorer ones. Even major cities like Chicago are poisoning their kids (to a lesser degree) due to inability to properly maintain infrastructure.