That stopped my mothers vegetable garden.

infrastructure isn’t anywhere in there. most voting or money-donating constituents don’t care about it unless it is wrapped up in jobs, or unless an emergency like this occurs. because both parties are complicit there are no perks they’d withhold if the representative ignores infrastructure issues.

I’m curious: what are political scientists’ opinions about how U.S. federal, state, and municipal election cycle lengths influence policy debate and decisions concerning long-run infrastructure investment or maintenance? I’d suspect that mostly incumbents who’d believe they’d have another ten to twenty years in the game and folks who’d believe they were highly likely to become long-term incumbents would have strong enough incentives to think and act seriously about long-run infrastructure issues. And, I’d suspect that most U.S. politicians, especially U.S. Representatives, are more likely to operate in short-run “wham, bam, thank you ma’am” mode than long-run “let’s take care of our children and our children’s children” mode due to special interest groups’ incentives, revolving doors of the sort described in Dan Briody’s The Iron Triangle, and the high probabilities that their political careers would only last two to six years.

But this assumes constant maintenance. Which also assumes money to pay maintenance workers, to train maintenance workers. This also assumes education to train people to become maintenance workers. It is easy, perhaps too easy, to blame the current administration.

Conservatives have a solution to that problem you know….,