"WE BUILT THAT"

[Rosa Luxemburg]

That exactly what President Barack Obama had in mind when he said recently that the kind of investments in infrastructure that only government can make are the foundation on which America's prosperity is built. Though the president's remarks were deliberately distorted and taken out of context by his opponents on the campaign trail, the fact that Mr. Jindal, a rising star in Republican politics, could so ringingly endorse the ideas they expressed puts the lie to the GOP's dogmatic insistence that government has no crucial role to play in the process of wealth creation.

Try telling that to the people in New Orleans whose homes and businesses dodged a bullet only because of massive government investment in the city's levees and dams. That's what creates and sustains the conditions for prosperity in a city built on a flood plain, where nearly half the residents live below sea level.

If cutting taxes and boosting defense spending were all it took to make America great, the platform adopted by the Republicans in Tampa would make perfect sense. But that's not the way things work in the real world, where a government that can't do the big things can't do much of anything that really matters. No private individual or corporation could have constructed the system that safeguarded New Orleans. But Americans collectively could — and did — accomplish that feat through their government, and they have every right to point to it with pride and say: "We built that."

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/opinion/editorial/bs-ed-hurricane-isaac-20120903,0,5859256.story

[dkf]

1. Why isn't that a state responsibility?

Why can't they locally tax those who directly benefit?

What's screwed up is that states are not taking care of their responsibilities. I don't know why that is a federal issue.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

2. states are too frightened to tax

especially in the south.

[dkf]

3. If that is their main problem getting funds from the Feds won't fix it.

They need to come to terms with what is needed to function properly.

[Rosa Luxemburg]

4. many states are cleaned out

[garthranzz]

5. The levees protect interstate commerce, for one thing

A third of the nation's economy comes through New Orleans and the Mississippi. The wetlands protect ecosystems far and wide. Think of the extent of the Ohio-Missouri-Mississippi basin. One reason Katrina devastated Vermont was the wetlands weren't here to slow it down. Only the nation's technical knowledge can build and maintain the levee and dam systems - the Army Corps of Engineers. Massive engineering projects require federal-state cooperation. Ideally, state and local government participate and cooperate, each contributing expertise and supervision to a project.

The tax question is a different one than infrastructure maintenance. Some infrastructure responsibility is purely state - local roads, for instance - and how the state raises revenue (or doesn't) (and spends it) is reflected by the infrastructure. Some is purely or mainly federal - interstate highways. Some - education, medicare - is a combination.

Revenue comes from property tax - purely state - income tax - in some states, not others, federal - excise taxes (gas) - sales taxes, etc. When there's a focus on finding solutions, methods of raising, distributing and sharing revenue are discussed with a triage understanding - let's rank the problems and allocate resources, knowing we'll never get it all done. When the focus is on ego, personal gain, power, payback, well... we have BushRomney and CheneyRyan.

[Igel]

6. A lot of the levee "system" is old.

So old that figuring out who has responsibility for it is a problem sometimes.

In many cases, individuals built levees. In other cases, local corporations or a joint private/public partnership, with a corporation and the town government working together.

In some cases the levee was built by locals and taken over when the Feds decided it needed maintenance and nobody local was willing to spring for it. In other cases, the Feds just decided it was too important to be allowed to continue. It wasn't usually an interstate commerce decision. You could decide to take over a levee because you wanted to destroy it to allow flooding in order to reduce the water level and not have a less well protected town downstream flood. "We flooded that" is appropriate in that case. (A couple of years ago precisely this happened.)

Complex systems of oversight and funding lead to problems. In NOLA one levee failed because the Feds provided money to the state, which channeled it to the city which gave it to a corrupt business for mostly personal or political reasons. Nobody dared blame the victim. It was entirely the Feds' fault for failing to ride the state to hound the city. Decentralized authority is fine when it works, not when it doesn't work. More authority should be centralized.

In another case a levee subsided (because the ground under it was subsiding). One researcher noticed it and reported it in the spring. The ACoE scheduled a follow up study for the following year to check if the researcher was right--that year's research schedule was filled up already and the guy in DC didn't feel like revising funding allocations. The levee was a few feet shorter than listed. It was overtopped. Centralized work is fine when it works, not when it doesnt' work. More authority should be decentralized.

Yes, it's a contradiction. That's the problem.