Re:NYC's brand new subway is the most expensive in the world
by saosebastiao on Monday January 02, 2017 @11:25AM
(#13302039)
He's not saying corruption costs less, he's saying that US procurement rules compliance eliminates the competitiveness of contract bidding.
There's basically two different construction industries in the US: contractors that do private construction, and contractors that do public works construction. On the private side, you have thousands of companies ranging in size from some random guy who does drywall all the way up to pipeline and oil rig construction contractors. On the private side, all the small guys have been weeded out because of absurdly high regulatory compliance costs(which have been designed to eliminate corruption), and so it's just a handful of extremely large companies. And knowing they have no competition, their bids are obscenely overpriced.
I'm having a hard time reading between the lines here, but it feels like you're saying that allowing corruption would lower costs, but that really goes against my intuition.
Several Japan infrastructure projects also cost huge amounts of money, and construction companies and gov't are very close.
Japan has better infrastructure. But the way they do it is by spending huge amounts of money. The only way the bullet trains exist is because of massive government spending (during Japan Railway's privatization, about $150 billion of Shinkansen debt was taken on by the tax payer).