I've seen these cynical rants many times, but can you back any of the claims up with anything substantive? For example, that there is no difference between parties? It's important, because it disarms us; if we don't differentiate between the more and less corrupt, we can't improve the situation.

There is greed and corruption in the world, but that's not all there is. There are plenty of people who want to do a good job, who want to achieve things for society. More precisely, everyone has a little bit of all those things, and we have the free choice of what we pursue, the greed or the good.

The US ranks pretty well on the scale of corruption. It's a good way to get voted out of office (recent phenomena not withstanding), or go to jail.

Maybe unrelated but there was a report about the construction related corruption in Quebec. I read it back in the year 2015 and there was a lot of interesting information.

For example, many construction projects are given to favored parties and government engineers who take care of those projects will make sure that outsiders do not get the tender offer. Occasionally someone from outside of the circle makes a competent bid so there are multiple stages to persuade such party to withdraw the bid: 1) The engineer in charge phones the party, 2) Shady characters riding on motorcycles throw garbage at the door of the said party, 3) I forgot what the 3rd stage is.

Here is the document if anyone is interested:

https://www.apigq.qc.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/rapport_f...

There is a lot of mob involvement in Quebec's construction industry. Are you saying the reason infrastructure is expensive in the US is mobs?

Yes, here in my city, construction is a racket. they get unfair contracts, make them shitty, then when they break they get another one.

I doubt it's organized in any large-scale sense, but nevertheless it's very corrupt.

But how corrupt could it possibly be? The comments are comments are comparing US infrastructure cost with Turkey's. Is the US (or Quebec for than matter) really orders of magnitude more corrupt than Turkey since its infrastructure costs orders of magnitude more?

I would posit there is a certain amount of self organizing in an emergent behavior kinda way.

Absolutely. When people have aligned incentives, the appearance of organization may emerge from the system even when nobody has actually conspired or coordinated with anybody else. Manufacturing Consent describes something like this in the context of media and the government, but I think it's broadly applicable:

> Institutional critiques such as we present in this book are commonly dismissed by establishment commentators as “conspiracy theories,” but this is merely an evasion. We do not use any kind of “conspiracy” hypothesis to explain massmedia performance. In fact, our treatment is much closer to a “free market” analysis, with the results largely an outcome of the workings of market forces. Most biased choices in the media arise from the preselection of right-thinking people, internalized preconceptions, and the adaptation of personnel to the constraints of ownership, organization, market, and political power. Censorship is largely self-censorship, by reporters and commentators who adjust to the realities of source and media organizational requirements, and by people at higher levels within media organizations who are chosen to implement, and have usually internalized,the constraints imposed by proprietary and other market and governmental centers of power.

> There are important actors who do take positive initiatives to define and shape the news and to keep the media in line. It is a “guided market system” that we describe here, with the guidance provided by the government, the leaders of the corporate community, the top media owners and executives, and the assorted individuals and groups who are assigned or allowed to take constructive initiatives. These initiators are sufficiently small in number to be able to act jointly on occasion, as do sellers in markets with few rivals. In most cases, however,media leaders do similar things because they see the world through the same lenses, are subject to similar constraints and incentives, and thus feature stories or maintain silence together in tacit collective action and leader-follower behavior.

I wonder what's the plan to get the money back and prosecute.

It's rather incredible they were able to root cause costs overrun so precisely.

I don’t think arguing both parties are corrupt disarms us. Instead, I see it as a rallying cry to either upend the system or to work outside of it.

Some examples of political action (that work!) outside of the party system:

- participating in a climate strike

- unionizing your workplace

- voting for local candidates that aren’t tied to the 2 party system

- voting for candidates that the mainstream (ie: rich donors) of the party largely reject.

I hear what you’re saying that it sounds cynical on a surface level, maybe we need to do better on the messaging for what actions to take _after_ you’ve decided everyone in power is beholden to capital.

That certainly helps, but the two party system is the power structure, so that's how things get done. While I support change to that system, I am not waiting for it - we need to accomplish things now.

> everyone in power is beholden to capital

That is lazy analysis. I agree that far too many are beholden, but not everyone and not everyone to the same degree. It's like saying 'all software is too buggy' - that's too true, but that's not a reason to abandon all software until we engineer and develop something better.

We need to differentiate and become expert in their individual strengths and weaknesses, strategically make the best of it we can, all while we improve things. If that sounds like a lot, look at what our predecessors did! They gave us a very easy hand, relatively (and we've FUBARed it).

It sounds to me like we have a difference of opinion on how to make change that’s unlikely to be resolved over a hn discussion. That’s okay! My point is just that people who say “both sides are bad” aren’t throwing up their hands in defeat. We’re working on this stuff too, you may just disagree with how effective our work is.

One slightly supporting evidence is a higher correlation for budget percentage being road infastructure as opposed to other areas. Not causing it but likely because it is easier to slip corruption and kick backs in those budgets than say education budgets, so it winds up inflated for worse results.

Interesting, but I see other reasons for it: in an era where thins are much more politicized - health research, education, etc. etc. - roads are so far apolitical.

Also, is it more prone to corruption? I don't know. What about military budgets, for example?

Why should it be easier to have corruption in road work vs anything else?

> can you back any of the claims up with anything substantive? For example, that there is no difference between parties?

Corruption doesn't have a party.

What matters is the candidates. Rand Paul and Liz Cheney are in the same party, but they're not the same. Bernie Sanders and Adam Schiff are in the same party, but they're not the same.

> Corruption doesn't have a party.

It's a broad statement, but with no evidence. If you mean 'no party is perfectly clean', that's not meaningful, like saying 'nobody is perfectly honest': some people are far more honest than others. If you don't hold the parties to account for their organized behavior, then they have no incentive to stop.

Some parties tolerate or use corruption more than others, and by far the worst I've seen in the US is the current and recent GOP, following its de facto current leader. That doesn't make the Dems pure, and we do need to focus on individual candidates too. But if you elect members of party A, then party A gets more power, especially if they control a legislative house or executive branch, and especially elected GOP representatives vote almost strictly party line, regardless of the candidates.

> Some parties tolerate or use corruption more than others

Evaluating this is inherently politicized. Is defense spending keeping the country safe from China and Russia and funding the creation of things like the internet, or is it a giveaway to defense contractors? Is government healthcare spending saving lives, or is it a giveaway to drug companies? The answer is complicated and subjective and people will believe what they want to believe.

But it's telling that both parties receive big money from big corporations who don't give altruistically. If one party is more corrupt than the other, it's not for lack of competition.

> If you mean 'no party is perfectly clean', that's not meaningful, like saying 'nobody is perfectly honest': some people are far more honest than others.

Some people are far more honest than others is the point. We have some idea who the dishonest people are. Let's get rid of them independent of which party they're in.

> If you don't hold the parties to account for their organized behavior, then they have no incentive to stop.

So go focus on defeating the specific Republicans who are the most corrupt instead of the ones who are the most vulnerable.

And you don't have to replace Adam Schiff with a Republican. Go replace him with a better Democrat. But spend your resources getting rid of people like him instead of trying to destroy some incumbent moderate in a swing state who was one of the few people doing the right thing in a party doing the wrong thing.

And hey, if you remove some corrupt and dishonest people from the party you like, maybe they'll win the majority more often.

I think you missed Mouse’s point and reframed his statement in terms of false deductions and the statement structures are entirely different; laterally but missed the dart board.

You both have entirely different points here, both valid but for very different reasons.

Bernie is an independent.

There is only one political party, you can see it in effect of their governance. Locally they might do things differently, the “land/city” way regardless of their party.

You can't see the difference between the current Democratic Party and GOP? I heard that argument for years, but now it's like saying there's no difference between day and night.

What changed?

Locally you can see Democrats who would be considered Republicans or Republicans who act like Democrats. Bob Dole did many “democratic” things: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/05/us/politics/bob-dole-dead... and Clinton was a copy of a republican.

> Russell Republicans approached Mr. Dole in 1950 to run for the Kansas State Legislature — they saw the hometown war hero as an easy sell. But he had not yet picked a party, though his parents were New Deal Democrats. He said later that he had signed on with the Republicans after he was told that that’s what most Kansas voters were.

>He opposed many of the Great Society programs of President Lyndon B. Johnson, but he supported the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

> He was most proud of helping to rescue Social Security in 1983, of pushing the landmark Americans With Disabilities Act of 1990 and of mustering a majority of reluctant Republicans to support Mr. Clinton’s unpopular plan to send American troops to Bosnia in 1995. (Mr. Dole was not wild about the deployment either, but he long believed that a president, of either party, should be supported once he decided something as important as committing troops abroad.)

Politics has become increasingly hyper-partisan since the 90s [0]. It has become been more about your team vs my team + purity testes and less about politician's policies. As a result, conservative democrats and moderate/progressive republicans of the yesteryear are becoming increasingly rare nowadays.

For example, 13 house republicans voted for the infrastructure bill b'c their constituents will benefit from the bill. Shortly after, Trump and the ultra-right wing members of the house republicans publicly called them traitor, RINOs, and even democrats [1]. Additionally, they've received angry messages and death threats from their constituents b'c one of the house ultra-right wing republican shared their phone numbers on her twitter account.

0. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2014/06/12/political-po...

1. https://www.businessinsider.com/republicans-criticize-13-col...

2. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/10/us/politics/republicans-b...

Both-sides-are-the-same is lazy analsysis that avoids the difficult and essential question: Where is the problem?

Moderate Democrats dominate the party, as can be seen in the people in the White House, leading and controlling Congress, and even the next mayor of NY. In the GOP, arguably the most radical candidate ever was elected to the White House and dominates the party, with much of the party at the national and state level taking unprecendeted, radical steps to gain power, such as attempting to overthrow the will of the people: Most Republicans in Congress voted to overturn election results. You won't find both sides doing these things.

If it’s so different what changed? Many Obama voters voted for Trump, and then Biden.

Did blaming Russia for the entire time not count? Everything you blame a “party” for the other “party” did the same thing, it’s just a political class.

Apparently you don't see (don't want to see) the point of the discussion. The context here is not about their ideology or superficial talking points. It's about the mechanism of the power structure. No matter which party gets in control, it will always want to increase national debt, always go for more money and more concentration of power. This is the same mechanism applies to everybody, anybody who doesn't want to play the game would have been excluded from the game long time ago. Anybody who doesn't want to play with the established power structure will be easily destroyed.

Only one party is remotely supportive of trans rights.

Broad brush social issues like "trans rights" or "traditional christian values" have approximately zero effect on how politicians from each party deal with city and state level economic issues like transit.

It kind of does though. The modern Republican Party despises almost all government spending, including infrastructure. Infrastructure, and trains in particular, are communist.

"[T]he real reason for progressives' passion for trains is their goal of diminishing Americans' individualism in order to make them more amenable to collectivism."

-- George Will, 2011 https://www.newsweek.com/will-why-liberals-love-trains-68597

Federal infrastructure spending is a "communist takeover of America, via so-called infrastructure".

-- Rep Marjorie Taylor Greene, 2021 https://www.newsweek.com/gop-rep-adam-kinzinger-mocks-marjor...

The republicans are happy to spend money on infrastructure where their constituents are. Of course they hate rail transit because it benefits blue cities. Look at what state and local republicans actually do and not what people say for effect.

I'm kind of inclined to agree that federal infrastructure spending is shit. The fed takes a bunch of money then gives it back with strings. The states should just be keeping that money and spending it as they see fit. This isn't exactly an uncommon opinion either.

To be fair... and I really don't want to be fair to a lunatic who believes forest fires are caused by Jewish space lasers... Rep. Greene was stripped of all of her committee roles by unanimous (including Republican) consent due to her supporting political violence against Nancy Pelosi and the FBI. So she (at least) isn't likely to be influencing policy any time soon absent an actual Trump second term. Even the article you just posted mentions her being ridiculed by Republicans, who voted for the bill mentioned there anyway.

that said, I remember similar things being said about the Trans-Texas corridor when it was being proposed years ago, that it was just a secret way for Democrats to allow NWO troops into the US through Mexico to take over. So there definitely is a weird fear of mass transit infrastructure being some kind of socialist/communist plot among the American right. It still seems to be fringe, though. Rural voters want and depend on infrastructure spending, and it's an easy way to be seen "doing something."

Thank you.

From the article, Istanbul gets things built a lot cheaper, partly because:

> Whereas Boston might only build one new transit line every few decades, Istanbul builds dozens.

Seems like building dozens of times as much would even more effectively "fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure." So why aren't we like Istanbul?

From the article:

Contrast all of these issues with a city like Istanbul, where the M5, an 18-mile subway line, was built in seven years and for just $630 million.

-

That is roughly $35 million per mile. And it is one of the deepest subways in the world. Almost as deep as Moscow's. Meanwhile the 2nd Avenue Subway cost $2.5 billion per mile. That is a difference of 71x.

The big bogeyman that is ignored is the incredible corruption involved with the politicians, contractors and "consultants" who rig these absurd outcomes.

And let's not forget the incredible corruption in Boston and the Big Dig that became a smaller dig with massive cost overruns and delays:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Dig

One other thing is that in countries like Turkey they build a lot of infrastructure with private funds who run it like a concession for a certain period of time (say 2 decades) and then it reverts back to the government. The private contractors have an incentive to build build inexpensively and quicker as their IRR is ticking.

Examples of such Public Private Partnership projects are:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Istanbul_Airport

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%C3%87anakkale_1915_Bridge

The concept of PPT:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public%E2%80%93private_partner...

-

By the way the awesome website of the quoted and mentioned Alon Levy which I discovered years ago when we had a discussion on the disparity of subway costs per mile between the US and places like Prague:

https://pedestrianobservations.com/construction-costs/

The more regular an activity is the more likely you're going to have people specialized in it - you'll have much more accurate estimates around costs and time to deliver since people will have more recent experience getting it done and you'll have infrastructure around building infrastructure. When these projects are rarer it becomes infeasible for a company to dedicate itself to the labour so you end up with residential construction firms digging tunnels and laying road foundations - and needing to learn a lot as they go or bring in consultants.

The more you build - especially the more you commit to build in the future - the cheaper it will be. If everything is billed as a one-off then the specialized labour doesn't settle in the local market and you end up paying large costs over and over.

Yes, that's why doing so many projects helps Istanbul do them cheaper. But my point to GP is that doing so many projects would fund the politically-powerful infrastructure contractors even more effectively. Yet we aren't doing it, which seems to imply that maybe GP's explanation doesn't actually explain our situation.

I want to point out that The Netherlands has a similar dynamic. They build a lot of infrastructure all the time. Very little corruption. I suspect there is a healthier relationship between the private sector and government. (The US is weirdly anti capitalistic when it comes to government. In the Netherlands, so many public services are delivered by private companies, by concession. Like, the equivalent of Amtrak is a private company. Also, private companies selling coffee/beer/ice cream in parks, which for whatever reason rarely happens in the states)

I’m an expat, but maybe a local could explain how/why the Netherlands has the best infrastructure in Europe?

This is stupid af because there are plenty of other countries with similar incentives & similar levels of corruption who don't have this problem. This sort of low-effort "lol everything bad" adds nothing to the discourse.

It's not just vote-buying, it's also buying support for the project. They cite an example where some transit stations started simple and became more and more complex. I've seen this happen with local transit projects where basically some NIMBY or supposed "community group" shows up and places all kinds of demands that wildly increase the costs of the project. There is either a lack of appetite or a lack of authority to tell these groups to fuck off, which results in enormous cost overruns.

This seems needlessly cynical. While I don't doubt there is some actual corruption and plenty of rent-seeking from political donors, the cited factors of poor project management and little expertise also play big roles, as you can observe the exact same thing in private construction projects that are self-funded by bad builders. I'm in a neighborhood that has been sort of the last Dallas neighborhood near downtown still "up and coming" and have seen this ever since moving here, from my own builder and also from effectively everyone else. They seem to have no relationships with tradesmen or subs, no ability to schedule or budget. Everything is late. Work happens in fits and starts, sometimes with nothing at all happening for months. Projects frequently outright fail and the project sits idle waiting for some other builder to come along and purchase it.

It's totally different in exurbs where they throw up new cities seemingly overnight. Working in pre-existing cities is an entirely different animal. There seem to be a lot reasons, but at minimum:

- Skilled tradesmen don't exist in large enough numbers to meet demand

- Subcontractors willing to do urban work are less skilled and scrupulous

- Onerous compliance at many overlapping levels of government that all have jurisdiction over the same land

- It takes forever to run new utility lines through a city because of how disruptive digging is

- Neighboring property owners fight you every step of the way

- Historical preservation and community culture councils come out of the woodworks with new requirements and restrictions on what you're allowed to build

That's just to build on existing empty lots you already purchased and have a permit for. For something like this infrastructure bill, now we're talking new roads and rail and you need to worry about clearing whatever is already there plus getting those permits. And work stoppages can happen for ridiculous reasons even in the middle of nowhere. It makes me remember being in the Army, when we trained at the National Training Center out in the Mojave desert, we had to constantly be on the lookout and stop if we saw an endangered desert tortoise we weren't allowed to touch, and basically just wait for it to get out of the way.

Japan has what amounts to the retired civil service concrete construction complex. Lots of civil servants in their retirement get involved in the lucrative and salary cow that is pouring concrete everywhere including bridges to nowhere… yet, construction and infrastructure costs aren’t extortionist the way American infrastructure projects after the ‘70s have been.

It's sad to see a constructive HN thread derailed by a polarized rant like this.

Notably, the OP only mentions the current infrastructure bill, it isn't about that, whatever your opinion on that.

I, too, am against the permanent government. But this is just invitation to unconstructive engagement.

Another word for it is "pork-barrel".

Same old both sides argument. It’s getting old when the republicans are authoritarian snakes and are efficiently gutting this country and filling their pockets. The modern democrats are ineffectual and that’s their only crime.

> This misses a fundamental point - the goal of this is not to fund infrastructure - it's to fund people who vote for people who vote for infrastructure.

You say this like wanting to repair/replace infrastructure is a bad thing. Are collapsing bridges a good thing?

* https://fox23maine.com/news/i-team/ask-the-i-team-cars-still...

* https://www.commercialappeal.com/story/news/2021/07/28/i-40-...

* https://www.arkansasonline.com/news/2021/sep/08/county-sets-...

Or perhaps locks on the Mississippi so that goods can be transported:

* https://wnax.com/news/180081-grassley-wants-corps-to-priorit...

They usually take longer than 2-4 years