Thursday, July 31, 2014

Who cares, it's just the general public!

In a world left with few things that are not completely predictable, there are some things more predictable than others.

Ancient water and sewage lines will be about as well maintained as your average post-collapse Roman Aqueduct, until they finally break. 

Unless, of course, something like the Keystone Pipeline suffers the inevitable catastrophic leak...in which case the government will totally give your tax dollars to fix that thing you totally did not want so its corporate ownership doesn't have to reduce their profits.

[cross-posted at Firedoglake]

5 comments:

StonyPillow said...

That Prop 13 is lookin’ mighty fine right about now.

In honor of the tsunami, we should thank the author of that fine amendment. But sadly, Howard Jarvis died about 28 years ago.

Which was kind of the point of Prop 13 to begin with — cashing out your childrens’ future. You’ll be dead before the consequences, and you won’t mind that your grandkids are spitting on your grave.

pansypoo said...

out of sight, out of mind. if we wait, it won't be more expensive. right? RIGHT!?!

Anonymous said...

Though they sold it to the public as saving grandma's house, the real beneficiaries of Prop 13 were commercial property owners. They are held by one owner for much longer than houses, and there are all kinds of legal tricks to sell commercial properties while legally not changing ownership so the tax basis does not go up. So Disneyland is assessed for property tax based on something like one-twentieth of the actual value of the property.
Florida, for all its other stupidities, had the sense to split the tax rolls when they put limits on property tax, so residential houses pay a limited rate and commercial properties another.

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Montag said...

The interesting thing about this is that we are pretty much living on water and sanitary infrastructure built by the Works Progress Administration in the `30s.

Few people today realize just how much of what's underground was put there initially by a jobs program during the Great Depression. One of my many, many jobs in the distant past was working for a city engineering department for a small city in Michigan in the `70s, and one my tasks was updating the master water and sewer maps which, to my surprise, were old ink on linen drawings done by the WPA in 1936, when much of the city's water system was rebuilt and expanded.

The lesson, of course, is that after almost eighty years those utilities are wearing out and are failing, and need to be replaced, and certain morons in government don't want to spend the money to do so because taxes. Here's a clue, idiots: pipes don't fix themselves, and even if they could, they couldn't do it for free.