(Yes, I know solar energy is not "the
solution" due to intermittency, lack of
storage, fossil fuels are needed to build
and maintain the solar infrastructure,
etc.--but the point is: would we be better
off if we'd invested 20% of the money
squandered on the Iraq misadventure on
alternative energy, even with all its
limitations?)
But this does not exhaust the
list of extraordinary misallocations of
treasure.Universities
have found the funds to build grand edifices
on campus (never mind the trillion dollars
in student loan debt that funded the
delusions of grandeur) while much of the
rest of our educational infrastructure
crumbles as deferred
maintenance takes its inevitable toll.
Public transit systems such as the San
Francisco Bay Area's BART always find the
funds to pay for hefty raises and
gold-plated benefits for employees and
managers, meanwhile the system's core has
crumbled due to--you guessed it--hundreds of
millions of dollars in long-deferred
maintenance.
While employee wages,
benefits and pensions dominate local
government outlays, maintenance is funded by
selling bonds, which cost twice as much over
the long run due
to interest and other costs.
Where cities and counties once funded school
maintenance and filling potholes out of tax
receipts, now many locales demand taxpayers
approve tens of millions of dollars in new
bonds to pay for these basic infrastructure
maintenance projects.
|
Join with over 100,000 people in more than 140
countries, who place people before profit
|
It has reached the point that even
maintaining city parks requires borrowing
millions.
Political elites have found
that promising the impossible--lower taxes
and increased benefits/entitlements--keeps
them in power, and
as long as the credit spigot of new
government borrowing is wide open, there are
no limits on how many more trillions of
dollars in future interest payments can be
promised to win re-election today.
The fact that this sets a toxic banquet of
consequences for future taxpayers and
beneficiaries--no worries, some future
politico will have to sit down at that
banquet:
Political and financial
elites have lined their own pockets and
insured the continuity of their own power by
deferring boring, unsexy,
you-get-no-votes-for-this maintenance. Want
to be "popular" and win re-election? Ram
through sexy new projects such as
"affordable" housing (i.e. costly housing
subsidized by taxpayers), extensions in mass
transit lines, fancy new stadiums and
student-services buildings--and
pay for it all with borrowed money and by
slashing boring, unsexy maintenance work.
While we must ask cui
bono (to whose benefit?) of
scare-mongering estimates of deferred
maintenance (one person's "required
infrastructure" could be another person's
pork-barrel project awarded as payback for
political contributions), many of us can
see a
crumbling empire of deferred maintenance
with our own eyes.
I can personally attest to city streets that
were potholed 20 years ago that finally got
repaved--but only after taxpayers agreed to
pay double by borrowing millions for routine
street maintenance that was previously paid
out of tax revenues.
I see spalling concrete (concrete falling
off due to rusting rebar) at major
international airports, university buildings
that are flooded due to poor drainage that
should have been addressed decades ago,
water mains that burst, sewer lines that are
decades past their replacement date--the
list is truly endless.
Dear Imperial America: the
lifestyle you ordered is permanently out of
stock.The banquet
of consequences has already been served, and
will only become more distasteful the longer
we put off facing our skyrocketing debt,
runaway elites and delusions of grandeur
head-on.
Charles
Hugh Smith - For more, please visit the OTM
essentials website.
The views expressed in this article are solely
those of the author and do not necessarily
reflect the opinions of Information Clearing
House.
