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What's the alternative of long-term bond investments? Republican-style tax cuts? If I understand the article correctly, Carmel's Republican mayor Jim Brainard broke off from his party's motto.

> The prevailing model of austerity, low taxes, and limited government in many Republican-led states and cities has often failed to improve the quality of life. Meanwhile, Democratic-led cities struggle to effectively address issues like homelessness, housing affordability, and public safety despite greater willingness to invest, just not in actual services and infrastructure.

discuss

pas|1 year ago

No, there's nothing wrong with bonds, if the thing they get invested into has good positive ROI.

The elephant hiding in the rural balance sheets is boring economics, meaning that there's usually no such high-ROI thing within city limits, because to get good and affordable services the city needs economies of scale, and that requires both sizes and density.

This basically translates to things that these cities could do: rezoning and waiting, joining up with neighboring cities for deals (but this is usually already the case, school districts and water districts).

Homelessness and public safety is worse in urban cores, and this would require a lot more spending to fix. [0]

(These cores are usually poorer, have funding issues, crowding out effect of rich suburbs means that the police force of the urban core needs to sort of match the salaries, etc. [1])

Also ideological differences lead to worse outcomes in public safety definitely. (Again, especially in these metro areas where - as other comments have mentioned - it's relatively easy to push poverty and crime around.)

It's not a uniquely American problem, but the combination of wealth and income inequality, extremely fragmented hyperlocal institutions, gang and gun violence, plus senate veto make progress extremely hard. And in practice it serves as the perfect fuel for political radicalization.

[0] https://www.slowboring.com/p/fixing-the-police-will-take-mor...

[1] https://www.slowboring.com/p/the-police-are-in-the-wrong-pla... - https://pastebin.com/PHzjrCU6