California has an infrastructure failure problem that involves everything from its roads to its dams and other water control facilities. Governor Jerry Brown (D) says it will cost $187 billion to fix its infrastructure, and he wants $12 billion per year of Federal funding to help with that. In actuality, Brown doesn’t want Federal funding, he wants what Federal funding consists of: money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of financial straitened New York to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of nearly bankrupt Illinois to help pay for his needs, he wants money taxed by the Federal government from the good citizens of fiscally responsible and so flush Texas and Utah to help pay for his needs.
He doesn’t care that his State’s infrastructure is in such poor shape because he and prior administrations of both parties deferred maintenance they knew at the time was promptly needed.
When asked why California hadn’t spent more on infrastructure before, Mr Brown said it wasn’t seen as a priority before. “This is the way the world works,” he said. “The immediate takes precedence over the more fundamental.”
Leadership wouldn’t acquiesce so meekly to the immediate, though. Leadership would push the matter and get his bosses, the citizens of California in the present case, behind the more fundamental.
Oh, and there is the “green” lobby, too. Amid all the current plenty of water, all that’s happening is flooding (those badly maintained dams are part of this problem, to be sure), denial of that plentiful water to farmers, and routing of plentiful water that isn’t flooding straight to the sea. For instance,
the Central Valley Project Improvement Act[] diverted 1.5 million acre-feet of water—roughly a fifth of the total water delivery—annually to wildlife and green hobbyhorses. That ultimately means flushing it out into the ocean. “Basically, they’ve now legislated a permanent drought in the San Joaquin Valley,” Mark Borba, a cotton farmer….
That’s still going on. And this:
The San Joaquin River Restoration Program, the result of a 2006 settlement in a lawsuit over fish habitat, took away another some 225,000 acre-feet of water annually.
Progressive-Democrats are willing only to spend OPM; fiscal responsibility, discipline in spending their own money is an alien concept.
It’s certainly true that in a republican democracy all of the States are in the nation together, and all of the States need to, are bound to, support each other, as Brown and others have also claimed. But a major part of that mutual support is each State not creating itself a burden on any of the other 49 through its own wanton profligacy.