In a guest post at The Infrastructurist, author and infrastructure geek Scott Huler recounts his dispiriting experiences touring the country and talking about our dire need to improve the grimy physical foundations of our marvelous futuristic society:
People usually enjoy the beginnings of my presentations. They forget to think about this stuff, and when they learn about it they are charmed. I’ve been invited to speak to civic and engineering groups, to architects and water managers, and by now I know the exact moment in my stump speech where I lose my audience – and my spirit.
For 20 minutes or so I talk about our quotidian miracles of pipe and wire, the complex interactions between pedestrians and vehicles and roads, the tradeoffs we hate to even consider. As I sing the praises of this world we’ve made, this daily miracle, I look out into the crowd and I see erect postures, smiling faces, open shoulders. People like to be reminded of the amazing things around them, our great common accomplishments.
And then I talk about cost. About the $2.2 trillion the American Society of Civil Engineers cites as the amount we’re behind in our maintenance (and this was the number two years ago!). About how things like water towers and sewer pipes end up where they are, and where the money comes from. And I openly endorse the obvious next step: Opening our pocketbooks and paying for this stuff we need, in the form of higher taxes.
And then I look out in the crowd and all I see are people folding their arms and studying their belt buckles, showing me the tops of their heads instead of the smiley faces I saw a moment earlier.
Huler places the blame for this kneejerk hardheadedness at the feet of the war on taxes. Fanatical twits like Grover Norquist go unmentioned, but you can practically see them curled like gargoyles up near the ceiling. The professional and upper classes of America hate taxes the way Medieval Europe hated witches: a lot and with no understanding whatsoever.
Despairing of the government ever raising another dime to pay for maintaining and rebuilding our “quotidian miracles”, Huler ends with a question:
But if it’s not with tax money, then I want to know: How do we pay for all this? We need the money; we can’t do without the systems. If not from taxes, where does it come from?
I’m begging: somebody give me an answer.
It isn’t a complete answer, but Huler may want to consider visiting The Monkey Cage’s recent post linking a paper about how FOX News mainlines national politics into local and personal events and aggravations:
Vanessa Williamson, Theda Skocpol and John Coggin argue (gated) that Fox News exemplifies a new and interesting mechanism of social movement organization. They suggest that Fox News is a key intermediating force between national level politics and various, more localized Tea Party organizations.
[…]
While Skocpol at least is no friend to conservatives, it is not hard to detect a certain hint of admiration in this piece. She has written eloquently in the past about the need to revive mass-movement politics that connect individuals at the local level to national level struggles and conflicts. On this account, Fox News serves as an example of how to build the necessary connection.
Huler’s concluding question gives up on the idea that tax revenue can be used for public goods, and having done that he doesn’t see how else genuinely necessary things can get paid for, even though the only arithmetically sane answer is taxes. The real problem isn’t one of revenue, $2.2 trillion over a decade or two is peanuts compared to our economy, it’s one of politics.
As FOX News demonstrates, the issue is connecting big numbers and IRS forms to the day to day lives of citizens. We have to give people something for their money, something they can see on the news and go up and touch. And while there will always be the approximately twenty percent of the country that hates everything that isn’t Bush the Younger’s America, the vast majority of the population isn’t that rigidly foolish.
Even before the 2009 stimulus bill passed, plenty of people said it was too small to do what it was supposed to do and jump start the economy, and they were right. But the stimulus bill was also too small to change the way people perceive where their tax money goes. The goofy recovery act symbol cropped up in a few places, but it wasn’t enough to change the way large numbers of people live their day.
During both the New Deal and the post-war boom, you didn’t need to wonder where your tax dollars were going. Electrical wire was being strung to even the most remote places in the country. Dams were being constructed and highways laid down. Schools and hospitals were thrown up with abandon. Shiny new airports knitted the country together.
In 2009-20010, what did the recovery act do in your neighborhood? Are there any lasting monuments to the civic power of the federal government and the grandeur of the American people? The Recovery Act spent plenty and did a lot, but it didn’t do the kind of things that stir national pride in one’s breast and bring a tear to your eye. Even granting the fact that there are less big and obvious things left to build in 2011 than there were in 1945, it’s not like every postcard worthy structure this country needs is already in existence.
On a more mundane level, the great lie of the stimulus bill opponents was that there weren’t things that were “shovel ready”, a daringly bald faced lie in a country with as many collapsing bridges as this one. Bridges are things people use every day, and if the federal government paid for one to be rebuilt there’s no need to take down the sign that says so once the concrete has hardened. Leave it up; make people drive by it every time they cross it and at least some of them will understand that their tax dollars go to things other than welfare queens and sodomite states they don’t care to visit or inhabit.
The same goes for virtually any public building that could use a replacement or a renovation. Outside of junior’s clean, modern school parents won’t be able to miss the logo that says it was built with their money. You want to reach a lot of people for not a lot of money, how about highway rest areas? All over the Lower 48 people have to pull over to stretch their legs, buy some candy, and take a dump, and plenty of those buildings are in bad shape. Those signs would be seen by tens of millions of Americans annually.
What’s needed isn’t alternative means of funding; what’s needed is better marketing. The government, especially the federal government, is fucking terrible at promoting what it does, which is all the stranger when you remember that it’s run by 537 people whose only real job qualification is the ability to sell themselves to their fellow citizens. Of course, the half of them with “R”s next to their names generally don’t want that to happen, for reasons if ideology or self interest, but that’s hardly an insurmountable problem.
Teabagger prophet Rick Santelli is probably too stupid to tie his shoes without instructions, but it’s no coincidence that he used the word “losers” in his foundational rant. That’s where people think their money is going, and it’s no wonder they don’t like paying taxes for it. Show them what they’re getting, in everything from infrastructure to student loans to clean food to safe travel, and more than enough people to win some elections might not mind the taxes so much.
