Because the US Gov has had a 60 year ideological assault on its validity and functioning (Goldwater was the first major presenting symptom), leading to practical results of dysfunction.
This is best illustrated by Reagan's phrase:
> “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"
That is to say, if you wage an idea war on the idea of government, you'll have a government which doesn't work.
This is an idea often trotted out in these discussions but then you should ask how regions of the country such as California which for decades now have had essentially none of that assault in meaningful amounts and yet still is a largely dysfunctional entity. Or look at San Francisco.
Surprisingly, there are multiple causes to dysfunction. There's a certain tendency to prioritize the individual aggressively in the US - there are liberal failure modes as well as conservative failure modes.
My perspective is that California got eaten by NIMBYs and an ideology of trying to freeze in time to about 1970ish. Also, it seems that CAs adopted a lot of the neoliberal project, with commensurate successes and failures.
I also think that general expectations differ wildly from city/county to state to federal. Anyway. There are a hundred thousand books on "Why Does America Have Issues". This is what I've culled from my reading and observations of life.
edit: The GOP is most full frontal on it. The Democrats tend to approach things via "private contractor". Because, ideologically - in both of those cases - the private sector works better.
> My perspective is that California got eaten by NIMBYs and an ideology of trying to freeze in time to about 1970ish.
Yes, CA’s major problems are pretty directly derived from this, IMO. The public infrastructure issues are driven by extensions of the attempted time freezing as well as a uniparty lack of accountability.
I’m not sure how to interpret the “neoliberal project”. Do you have specifics there?
Sorry about the delay, while I like long ping times for thoughtful responses, this was beyond my P99 boundary.
The failure of the GOP to provide a POTUS candidate in 2016 that wasn't a flaming nutjob will lead to all sorts of uniparty failures across the nation. Having an orderly rotation of power helps clean out & potentially prosectute the bits of corruption that burrow in over time. I would actually speculate that a lot of the failure modes at play in government is downstream of uniparty government (there's a book "The Big Sort" which talks about how the USA has been doing assortive sorting and effectively moving from purple zones to blue/red zones): if we do a fishbone diagram of root causes, I expect it to be a major contributor. Of course there are loops of causation etc here.
The time-freezing is probably going to ease up as the Hippies in the Haight generation dies off: the rose tinted lenses are, I reckon, driving a lot of the situation in SF & CA, specifically.
Let me try to characterize what I mean by neoliberalism.
(1) Neoliberalism has a slangy meaning and a technical meaning. There's... some... overlap between those two. Let me dump Britannica's definition as, presumably, it's been vetted by economicists or other experts.
(2) Neoliberalism, ideology and policy model that emphasizes the value of free market competition. Although there is considerable debate as to the defining features of neoliberal thought and practice, it is most commonly associated with laissez-faire economics. In particular, neoliberalism is often characterized in terms of its belief in sustained economic growth as the means to achieve human progress, its confidence in free markets as the most-efficient allocation of resources, its emphasis on minimal state intervention in economic and social affairs, and its commitment to the freedom of trade and capital.
(3) One example of the neoliberal project is the mythic version of Silicon Valley: a free market with unconstrained innovation and minimal regulation (reality markedly differs, naturally, but the vision, the ideal is of more importance, since perception drives politics).
(4) That noted radical leftist publication[], the Financial Times, has a fascinating letter by the editorial board on April 3..
> Radical reforms — reversing the prevailing policy direction of the last four decades — will need to be put on the table.
And the article goes on to describe the key reversals described, which would be the in practice* neoliberal policies. The FT has a pretty stringent content lock, so I doubt I can get that specific article shared publicly.
(5) One consequence of minimum regulation / high individuality is a concentration of power as the game is iterated over a number of years. So out of the gate, things are likely to be good for most, but down the road, inequality rises as the early winners force the playing field to let them keep winning. I speculate that the dominance of FAANG and their ability to buy out competitors is a good case study here.
Another economic theory is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ordoliberalism, which is, roughly, similar to neoliberalism, but undergirded by the notion of welfare and regulation to manage social needs.
[] it's a business newspaper, comparable to The Economist and the WSJ, focused primarily on serving the investment community. It's extremely not leftist. The FT article surprised me a great deal. IMO it would be like the WSJ editorial board publicly suggesting that AOC is good, actually, and patriotic Americans should join the Democratic Socialists.
----
Circling back to my initial starting point: the undergirding of the second half of the 20th C political systems are an unhealthy regard for individuality in contrast to the community. That's one reason why, for instance, Utah can jump in strange ways to the rest of the conservative states. The LDS church places a premium on community. In the liberal areas, it often means that they have no mental tools to address homelessness appropriately, because proper addressing demands a wide-scale cooperation, and on the West Coast, balkanization & fragmentation of many towns/cities, counties, and states: proper solutions involve a wide agreement on housing, mental health, policing, job reentry, early career job support. Each of those are expensive, and the burdens fall unequally. Proper management is going to involve not* handing off contracts to someone's favorite non-profit or private company. Having an ideology that prioritizes "we can't do a government thing because Freedom Demands Private Markets" is going to cripple the motion forward on these topics. I live in Seattle, it's pretty painful seeing the deadlock in progress with homelessness. Millions sunk into programs paying off non-profits, no apparent improvement, no change beyond the local minima(Any meaningful change at this point would be good to see - it would characterize the local ideation as non-stagnant, actually capable of learning from failure....).
My point is the community needs to own - via our government that we choose - things that of broad interest, as well as legally reserve to the community the right to find that new topics are of broad public interest, and to dismiss the ideology that demands private companies and outsourcing.
If being the 5th largest economy in the world and contributing more tax dollars to the Federal government than it receives is largely dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome. California has tons of problems but I can't think of many less dysfunctional states.
For example, Texas has the second largest economy amongst the states, and would be the world's 10th largest economy, but IMO it's more dysfunctional than California because it's on the dole for $50bil annually from the rest of the country. They subsidize their low taxes by sponging off the other states, including California and New York. Also, Ted Cruz.
Texas is also hardly the worst offender. That would be Virginia at $10,301 per capita, compared to $304 for Texas. There is only one state (Utah) between Texas and California.
But if the people of California or New York (which actually is a big net payer) would like to vote away a lot of these federal programs and replace them at the state level at the option of the individual states, I imagine the people of Texas might concur.
“If being the largest economy in the world and extracting from its tax base the largest governmental budget in the world is dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome.” If this is the logic that defines a functional government, then the Federal government seems to be a massive success as well. I’m not sure why this would be the metric for a functional government, however.
Government dysfunction in SF/CA can be seen in the following:
> If being the 5th largest economy in the world and contributing more tax dollars to the Federal government than it receives is largely dysfunctional, that sounds pretty awesome. California has tons of problems but I can't think of many less dysfunctional states.
1. Simply being the 5th largest economy in the world doesn't say enough about how successful it is in its goals. Incidentally, California suffers from the worst amount of income inequality in the Union, and the highest rate of poverty. The income required to afford the median home in California is on average higher than just about anywhere else in the Union, even when you take into account the higher local salaries.
2. Because the largest Federal government expenditures are in 1) Social Security, 2) Medicare, and 3) the military (in that order), the states in the Union that will receive the most Federal tax dollars are the ones that have the most elderly people and the most military bases per capita. That California contributes more than it receives isn't a particular strong indicator of its health as a State. You could argue that states with more Medicaid recipients are more dysfunctional, but because Medicaid only constitutes ~15% of the Federal budget, it's less consequential to the variance than {SS, Medicare, Defense}.
> For example, Texas has the second largest economy amongst the states, and would be the world's 10th largest economy, but IMO it's more dysfunctional than California because it's on the dole for $50bil annually from the rest of the country. They subsidize their low taxes by sponging off the other states, including California and New York.
Okay, but no one here is arguing that Texas is a paragon of functional state governance. The argument is that California is a dysfunctional government. Both Texas and California can be dysfunctional for different reasons! On the flip side, Washington has no state income tax, is less dependent on the Federal government than California, AND enjoys a lower poverty rate. Ditto New Hampshire, Utah, Minnesota, Vermont, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Virginia.
A ranking of states by "quality of life"[1] ranks California at 19th.
Yes, agreed on all points. The parent’s post is exactly what you expect to see happen when the point gets read strictly as being made through the lens of the false dichotomy of left/right, Democrat/Republican, etc. They construct an arbitrary measure which defends their in-group and then without prompting bring in an example of their out-group being worse.
The broad point I was trying to make is exactly that government dysfunction is NOT tied to a singular political party’s attacks on the institution of government. It’s something deeper and more fundamental, represented in both parties.
Do you honestly believe that it’s a good faith argument that housing affordability is not under control of local governments?
Almost all of the “other states send their homeless to SF” stories are primarily tall-tales. I’ve yet to see anything document it as a major source of SF’s ills with anything even approaching hard data and not anecdotes.
That some of the infrastructure projects receive Federal funding does not excuse the local control of those projects being massively over budget and/or behind deadlines. Not to mention the cost differential as compared to infrastructure costs in other developed countries.
Are state budgets and pension obligations now primarily the realm of Federal control as well?
What if I add in education outcomes? https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/06/20/public-e... Is this also outside of state control? What is inside state control that could be referenced to understand the successes/failures of state governments?
> Do you honestly believe that it’s a good faith argument that housing affordability is not under control of local governments?
In California, yes local government hands are tied by prop 13, as is, in a sense, the state government.
> What if I add in education outcomes? https://www.economist.com/special-report/2019/06/20/public-e.... Is this also outside of state control? What is inside state control that could be referenced to understand the successes/failures of state governments?
Exactly, it's hard to have a functioning local government when hamstrung by a federal one that is actively dysfunctional.
> In California, yes local government hands are tied by prop 13, as is, in a sense, the state government.
Prop 13 stops state and local governments from working towards affordable housing how? Even if you can establish a link between the two that I can’t see, I’m curious how you think that a state law is not in some way a part of state governance? Isn’t this definitionally a part of the failure of CA state government?
> Exactly, it's hard to have a functioning local government when hamstrung by a federal one that is actively dysfunctional.
So why can MA have great public education? Does the Federal government treat CA differently than MA?
> Prop 13 stops state and local governments from working towards affordable housing how?
It doesn't, but it does make them less effective in the long run. CA has a much higher than average rate of just...empty housing because of how Prop 13 incentives things. It can also make property acquisition more difficult.
Functionally you have two ways to make more affordable housing: build more housing, or build specifically affordable housing. In CA, Prop 13 makes the first option less attractive to developers, since it costs very little to hold on to "existing" land or housing. An empty mansion costs relatively little because property taxes are so low. But selling, renovating, or redeveloping it will suddenly bump the property taxes.
So you're left with option 2: create specifically affordable housing. This puts further limits on redeveloping, and state housing projects are both morally questionable and really expensive, so you either need to raise taxes a lot (but you can't raise property taxes, which would be the "right" tax to increase based on the tax-as-a-behavior-incentive idea) to pay for it.
> So why can MA have great public education? Does the Federal government treat CA differently than MA?
I'm a bit confused here. I'm not particularly familiar with CA's educational system, but it appears to be solidly "above average" on the whole, with college education being one of the best. Not everyone can be rank 1.
> Goldwater was the first major presenting symptom
Can you please elaborate? I'm briefly aware on who Goldwater was and his influence on Reagan's election, but this phrase puzzles me. (I'm not from the US, maybe I lack some context)
A lot of libertarianism was invented in the late 40s as a response to Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. "How do we avoid totalitarian states" - their answer was to simply remove the power of government to regulate/oppress/etc. It is important, IMO, to recognize the root problem that Libertarianism was aiming at solving and not laugh it out of the room.
Anyway, this dovetailed into the prior opposition to FDR's New Deal, and misc refugees from the USSR such as Ayn Rand. Remember, this was during the Second Red Scare and McCarthyism. The Conservative wing of both parties choked on the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. Goldwater happened to agree and win the 1964 nomination of the Republican Party. He was roundly defeated, in part because Americans broadly disagreed with him. A lot of his campaign alumni and supporters went on to be influential in the 70s and beyond. A lot of today's old partisan hands in the GOP trace were either in that campaign or mentored by people from it. Much of the GOP history since Goldwater has been how the "Rockefeller Republicans" were turned out by the Tea Party or its ideological forebears.
Note that all of this essentially wound up reorienting the Republican, Democrat, and regional politics in the US to the configuration you see today. For sourcing - Kevin Kruse is a historian at Princeton - he's tracked this reconfiguration and has the documentation of how this played out. I'd start with his documentation if you want to dig into it.
I'm not a historian but my understanding is that Goldwater was the first major Republican candidate to go big on the whole "the government can't solve problems, the government is the problem" political meme, when he ran for president in 1964. Meaning, the notion that governments doing stuff, any stuff, is inherently bad. It dovetails somewhat with libertarian thought but only in the most handwavey, BS ways possible, because somehow the result is always less fiscal responsibility and even more wasted money.
Republicans have leaned on this talking point hard ever since then, in part to justify tax cuts for their donor class (but not spending cuts, ironically). They also use it to justify inaction, because if the government takes action, then that's the government "doing something", which is bad, get it? This is a much easier argument for them to make than actually coming up with alternate solutions to things. It's nihilism disguised as trying to save people money, but the reality of the last 56 years has been lower taxes for their donor class coupled with vastly increased government spending, which is the opposite of anything resembling fiscal conservatism.
I don't know the story about republicans and their donors, but, coming from the USSR, I have to admit that I find Reagan's "A time for choosing" speech extremely convincing.
This is best illustrated by Reagan's phrase:
> “In this present crisis, government is not the solution to our problem; government is the problem"
That is to say, if you wage an idea war on the idea of government, you'll have a government which doesn't work.