It actually isn't very expensive when the same country spends more than the next couple of countries on defense contractor salaries^W^W national defense. The hardest thing is a change of mind and priorities, nothing actual or tangible in terms of cost.

Considering that a local government can't just spend the money allocated to "national defense" even if they wanted to, I'd consider that a pretty tenuous argument to make.

It's not that tenuous. Taxpayer dollars go from the fed to military contracts. Instead, the fed could fund local government projects through per project funding schemes or increased budget allocations.

How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?

> How do you think the national road network was built in the first place?

part of the justification for building it was national defense.

>Or you’re NYC and already have an existing subway. But instead of 10s of millions it needs HUNDREDS of millions (or more) to ‘fix’, minimum.

Remind me how much money is in NYC?

The fact that money exists they are does not mean that it’s accessible. If it was there wouldn’t be new stories about how the subway system is about to fall apart every 12 months.

SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.

>SV would have the best public transit on earth and wouldn’t have any homeless or housing problems.

They should. All that would be required is raising municipal taxes.

Won't let me reply to you. A tax on housing is different than a tax on business. You've got the priciest real estate in the U.S. If you can afford that, you can afford to pay more in taxes.

If you can afford pricy real estate, that doesn’t mean you can afford more taxes. That means that you are spending more on real estate.

It’s where it is because of happenstance. It’s not a city that needs some specific natural resource that’s only produced right there.

There’s nothing stopping Silicon Valley companies from migrating to other areas in California or even other states. I’m sure there are more than enough places that would be willing to throw out ridiculous tax advantages to lure big companies there.

They built vta and no one uses it.

I have a bunch of issues with the VTA light rail. Mostly it’s slow and doesn’t always come at the “right time”. If the choice is not to go somewhere, or take the light rail, I’ll almost always choose not to travel there, or take a taxi. Sitting in a light rail for an hour vs 20 minutes in a taxi just doesn’t make sense.

I mean this is my issue with public transport throughout the Bay Area really, except BART at commute hours. I'm visiting NYC right now and taking the subway, and the difference is night and day.

If only NYC got to keep all that money. NYC is part of NY State so the money largely lines the state coffers where it is used for pork-barrel projects in far flung places most NYC residents will never even visit.

The state is very enthusiastic about taking the money out of the city but not so interested in investing much back into any transportation infrastructure to support its' cash cow.

Norman Mailer once ran for Mayor of NYC and part of his platform was for NYC to secede from NY State:

'New York City would be split off from the rest of New York State, and achieve independent statehood as the 51st State of the U.S. The campaign sought to free the city from the control of "upstate legislators who don't care about the city but control our schools, police, housing, and money."'[1]

And perhaps more topical is that part of that platform was also to ban all cars from Manhattan except Taxis and buses. And this was in 1969 :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_City:_the_51st_State