As a former rail fan, I’ve gotten over it. We don’t build infrastructure because we don’t value it. Not just in a “we don’t want to spend the money”—but we don’t want to make the political compromises necessary to make it easy to build infrastructure.
Dropping taxes on companies has nothing to do with it. Many European countries have lower corporate taxes than we do, and no OECD country raises significant revenue from corporate taxes. It’s a red herring and a distraction. The issue is we have a political system that makes infrastructure enormously more expensive and hard to build than in Europe (much less China). In Maryland, people are lobbying to get light rail stations torn down that have already been built! The average time spent in “environmental review” for a government project is 5 years, and its really just an opportunity for a small minority to hold up and delay infrastructure projects. But that system is a reflection of our values. We don’t build things because we would rather prioritize other values.
That is what it is. We are good at other things! We’re good at things like Silicon Valley, that don’t require centralized cooperation and people falling in line. Lots of countries have the political discipline to build rail. But there is no other Silicon Valley! (What more needs to be said about why California doesn’t have rail, beyond noting that the state’s most significant industry is based in the suburbs/exurbs of an otherwise second tier city?)
Dropping taxes on companies has nothing to do with it. Many European countries have lower corporate taxes than we do, and no OECD country raises significant revenue from corporate taxes. It’s a red herring and a distraction. The issue is we have a political system that makes infrastructure enormously more expensive and hard to build than in Europe (much less China). In Maryland, people are lobbying to get light rail stations torn down that have already been built! The average time spent in “environmental review” for a government project is 5 years, and its really just an opportunity for a small minority to hold up and delay infrastructure projects. But that system is a reflection of our values. We don’t build things because we would rather prioritize other values.
That is what it is. We are good at other things! We’re good at things like Silicon Valley, that don’t require centralized cooperation and people falling in line. Lots of countries have the political discipline to build rail. But there is no other Silicon Valley! (What more needs to be said about why California doesn’t have rail, beyond noting that the state’s most significant industry is based in the suburbs/exurbs of an otherwise second tier city?)