Many western countries in general do not care for routine maintenance of
infrastructure / buildings / water lines / busses.
Norway has to be among the worst.
It is not fun and glorious for a political administration to set aside
$$$$ every year that will just go to people doing boring work that the
voters will not be impressed with.
You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings, we did need maintenance of YY bridges, we replaced ZZ parts of the railway that would become problematic with time.
Rather:
"Under my administration we opened up a new large hospital (because the other had near 0 maintannce for decades), we built 2 new bridges etc"
> You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings...
That's just bad politicking then.
"Under my administration we hired hundreds of workers in Anytown who can proudly say they worked to maintain this city's infrastructure and provide a future for not only their kids but all of our kids. Their paychecks put food on the table and money into the local economy."
"If you don't want to pay taxes then who's gonna pay for the roads?"
Apparently, nobody pays for it either way. It's astounding to me how little tax money goes into paying for infrastructure.
In 2023 the US federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure and transferred $81.5 billion to the states. That's $126.3 billion out of a $6.1 trillion budget. ('Only' $4.4 trillion in revenue though.)
Most infrastructure is paid for by states and cities, not via federal transfers. Your quote is actively deceptive, you literally cut out the second part of the same source here[1]:
> The federal government spent $44.8 billion on infrastructure in 2023 and transferred an additional $81.5 billion to states. In 2021, state and local governments spent $218.5 billion on transportation and infrastructure, excluding federal government transfers.
That's true, but states collect a lot of tax revenue themselves. In 2022 they collected $3.66 trillion.[0] the federal government collected $4.97 trillion in the same timeframe.[1]
Also note (a few rows down the table)[2] that the US government spends more than it collects in taxes. In 2022 the expenditures added up to $9.64 trillion.
The vast majority of the budget is just transfers from one person to another. (Social security, welfare, medicaid, etc.) Doesn’t make much more sense to compare this to infrastructure spending than it makes to compare the cost of maintenance on the bank building to the total value of the payments it processes.
Having localities pay from local tax money seems like it would focus money on expenditures that the people that use them and pay for them will approve of with their own skin in the game. There are some interstate highways that serve multiple localities, but these should be the minority, right?
A lot of road infrastructure funding at the town/city level can disproportionately go to wear/tear/usage by people/trucks that don't live in the town and the taxpayers don't benefit (in fact often the opposite). It makes more sense at the state level especially if you factor out interstates and in fact that tends to be how things are handled much of the time in the US.
Most “foreign” aid, especially military aid, is is spent within the “donor” country. Japan is the most extreme in this regard, followed by the USA.
And, like maintenance: foreign aid can avoid local problems, e.g. stabilizing countries in central America can reduce the incentive for people to flee to the US (which for most people is a distant plan C over staying where they are or moving a short distance away).
Its grift. Why does the US have to spend money on military aid to first world countries, even if a very sizable chunk is spent on American weaponry?
That money could be spent on maintenance rather than fattening our MIC.
NGOs are similar. In theory they sound good, the leaders can pull sizable salaries, eclipsing any congresspersons earnings and they are incentivized to keep the bad thing happening—if they solved the problem their reason to be would cease.
To understand why the US government spends so much on rich countries, you can’t just think in economic terms, since that’s not what why the US government is doing it.
The reason is geopolitical. It is seen as necessary to give money to allies to prop up their military so the US hegemony can be maintained. Adversaries (China, Russia, Iran) need to be made afraid not only of US might, but also of Allies’ might. So the US doesn’t wait around for those countries to spend on their military on their own, or god forbid to realign their alliances based on their spending. Checks it is.
It would be ideal if US allies would spend more on their militaries, but the last time a US President insisted on that he was mocked mercilessly.
But contrary to popular belief, the MIC isn’t that fat. They are mostly public companies - you can check out their profits yourself. Here’s one: https://valustox.com/NOC
Their margins tend to be small. Their revenues are incredibly steady (they’re pretty much government departments). Staying ready for war like this is actually a wise course of action - it would be catastrophic to have to ramp up in the next emergency like in WW2.
The military is not exactly ready for war, though. Shipbuilding capacity is greatly diminished and the Navy has massive issues with most of its design and procurement programs. Other services have issues too, though not as severe.
The military is in desperate need of more new contractors like Anduril and SpaceX to provide competition for the incumbents, as well as stronger collaboration with allies like having Japanese shipyards build some of our ships.
Anduril and SpaceX will probably be very good for the MIC. But the incumbents aren't doing too badly - they're currently supplying a proxy war against one of the US's major rivals.
The programs and systems may not be perfect but at least there are programs and systems.
> It would be ideal if US allies would spend more on their militaries, but the last time a US President insisted on that he was mocked mercilessly.
I think the mockery was over how he transactionally framed it rather than the principle itself. But TBH do we really want European countries to rearm? After centuries of fighting they quieted down after outsourcing it to the US. And since they weren't fighting that outsourcing wasn't even that expensive. I am sure it was cheaper to have all those US troops supporting NATO countries than to get drawn into yet another war over there.
> Staying ready for war like this is actually a wise course of action - it would be catastrophic to have to ramp up in the next emergency like in WW2.
It's like insurance -- you hope that it's a deadweight loss but pay for it because it's cheaper than holding the risk yourself. And I do think the western countries overdid it in regards to downsizing after the end of the cold war.
I'm not sure there's that much military aid to first world countries. Where there is like with Israel I think generally the US thinks it's strategically advantageous.
Egypt, on the other hand, has a huge fleet of tanks that they just keep in storage (at their own cost). They basically are taking the military aid in the hope that the US would help them should a war develop.
Bridge repair is further complicated by the United States’ form of government. The majority of the major bridges in poor condition in California (and most other states, I presume) were built with Federal highway funds which started drying up in the 1970s, leaving a huge hole in the finances for maintenance.
Since most income and business taxes go to the Federal government, states are dependent on Federal grants for a lot of infrastructure.
That strange to hear. Why do you have this feeling? After visiting Porto and Italy around and below Napoli, I cannot imagine that there are any place in Nordic countries which has even just similar tolerance to not maintain something. But I don’t know too much about Norway specifically.
Infrastructure maintenance was quite a big issue during the 2015 US election. I'm not sure the Trump administration actually did anything about it – I don't really follow US politics that closely. My point is: people do care.
I think the bigger problem is maintenance is just one cost out of many. There's also education, and health care, and social services, and police, and firemen, and pensions, and all sorts of other things, and that's also important. It's relatively easy to "save" on maintenance because nothing is going to fall down immediately and no one will really notice – at least not for a while. In the long run you're not really saving anything of course.
It's easy to critique this from the sidelines, but the pressures politicians and governments are under make it pretty tricky to do anything else. Saving money in other areas is going to be unpopular. Raising taxes even more so. A lot of times stuff like this is a Kobayashi Maru.
Norway has to be among the worst.
It is not fun and glorious for a political administration to set aside $$$$ every year that will just go to people doing boring work that the voters will not be impressed with.
You dont see politicians "Under my administration we painted XX buildings, we did need maintenance of YY bridges, we replaced ZZ parts of the railway that would become problematic with time.
Rather: "Under my administration we opened up a new large hospital (because the other had near 0 maintannce for decades), we built 2 new bridges etc"