Cutting taxes has consequences.
Americans have enjoyed a huge increase to their living standards over the years and have become decoupled from many of the services that their taxes fund. In turn, large swaths of the populace are insulated from the consequences of degrading government services and infrastructure. This has caused a shift in attitudes towards taxes as most of these Americans no longer see the benefit of paying their taxes, incentivizing politicians to focus on cost reduction and tax breaks.
The problem here is that this attitude of Anti-Taxation has translated into no longer addressing the root cause, and people believing things like unproven stories of government corruption as being the sole cause of these degrading services despite the evidence for such being low to non-existant.
They dont want to address the real cause, so look to a convenient scapegoat that explains the degredation without accepting that they should pay more taxes.
Just like how at the federal level DOGE found almost no waste and corruption during their crusade against the federal services (stoked by similar anti-tax sentiment) it seems that every time a narrative of "corruption" takes hold enough to actually tackle the issue and launch a program to handle it, the program in turn finds its just wasting money.
People just need to accept paying more taxes in order for their society to flourish.
red tape, regulations, corruption, low pay, inflated prices, a gamed system.
Although the topic is unrelated, I came across this the other day ... makes one think https://youtu.be/JTEJH-tKv9Q?t=910
They retrofit Yorktown in 3 days instead of 3 months. The Japanese thought Yorktown was a different aircraft carrier-they could not imagine such a fast retrofit.
It was 2 days, and they thought it was a different ship because they thought the Yorktown was sunk in the previous battle, not because they didn't think it could be repaired that fast (although that's probably also true).
Your own citation says that the original estimate was at least 2 weeks, and further looks found that important components were undamaged, and most of the damage was easily patchable, like the flight deck and hull. Her damaged boilers were not fully repaired and she was not able to make full speed.
This isn't that abnormal for 20th century warships. They were designed to be mostly flooded and still floating, had significant redundancy, and especially in the USA, massive efforts and training and resources were spent on damage control and management.
The USS New Orleans Cruiser in WW2 had 150ft of it's front entirely blown off by an ammo detonation. One quarter of the ship just gone.
The spent about 11 days on a crippled boat, patching things up and putting out fires, and then she sailed backwards to a friendly port, and was eventually fully refurbished and refit.
This wasn't some era of magical American super productivity. It's what these ships were designed to do in some way. They were built to be hit by rather large weapons after all, and attempt to survive. Look at what efforts it took to finally sink the Bismarck and the Japanese super battleships.
Its easy to build when your goal is just to build the thing. But theres so much code and regulation crap (like ADA). I know someone building a small residential home, they have literally 1000s of pages of documents to be submitted for every tiny thing you can imagine. Regulations have completely spiraled out of control in this country. Nobody is keeping any of them in check.
