This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.
This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.
American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED. There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time. We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change. Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.
This is not what actually happens.
Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.” So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense. It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”
So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets. It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.
And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.
And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.
In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs. Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc. All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.
Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.
American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.
It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.
Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
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