BRUH ARE U KIDDING ME THE HIGHWAY I LIVE NEAR HAS BEEN UNDER CONSTRUCTION FOR LIKE 4 DAMN YEARS AND IT TAKES THEM 6 MONTHS JUST TO FIX A DAMN POT HOLE
The hell do you mean “capitalism could never”??????? Last I checked, the UK is still a capitalist nation. The US could never because the US doesn’t invest in public works to the same level as other comparably large economies because we spend all our money on the military.
Whaleologist is right but….fuckin what? You can seriously do that shit in 15 hours. I honestly am amazed. That’s how you know I’m a fucking American, like, my goddamned mind is blown.
This isn’t an issue of capitalism or even public works investment.
This is an issue of how American budgets work, because America is the most idiotically designed country you could ever imagine.
American budgets are not organized by need, they’re effectively PRESCRIBED. There’s no pool of government funding that is assigned according to where money needs to go at any given time. We assign budgets in advance and they’re extremely difficult to change. Guaranteed if you ask any American politician about this, they’ll tell you it’s to “reduce government waste” by making people use their resources carefully instead of taking on unnecessary projects.
This is not what actually happens.
Because if you DON’T USE 100% of your budget every year, you will be assigned a lower budget for the next year, “to prevent government waste.” So they prescribe you a budget in advance and then you HAVE to use all of it, or else it’s a NIGHTMARE to do anything new in the future – you have to go through a billion hoops to get funding for a new infrastructure project that is a one-time expense. It’s not cheap to build a new thing, but because it’s a public good that will last a long time, you don’t need to budget for it every year – but the one year you do need to budget for it, it’s an enormous pain in the ass because everyone responsible is desperate to “cut government waste.”
So with American construction projects, especially on roadways, you basically have a system where people are FORCED to take longer than necessary just to use up their budgets. It is literally a regular occurrence in America for a road to be torn up for no reason, just so they can spend money filling it back in for the next four months.
And that’s why the crumbling, outdated, and underfunded infrastructure in America is an embarrassment to western civilization.
And the fact that this fucks up transportation, stresses people out, makes us all sicker and more miserable, and forces us to sit in traffic wasting gas that we have to spend a bunch of money on because one of the things we never invest in is mass public transit (because of heavy lobbying by the automotive and oil industries) – all of that should probably not be considered a coincidence.
In the name of “efficiency” and “cutting government waste,” we’ve invented the most fucked up, purposefully wasteful mandatory maximum budgeted spending that has totally eliminated our ability to respond to short term budgetary needs. Potholes take years to fix, construction goes on for years even as nothing actually gets done, etc. All because the budgets HAVE to be wasted in order for anyone to keep their funding – and notice how much of American budgets go toward things like “administrative costs”.
Our entire country is a money laundering conspiracy.
American capitalism is the most wasteful garbage budgeting system on earth.
It is fundamentally designed to be inefficient and stupid, because doing it this way allows us to keep government spending (on public goods) as close to the absolute minimum as humanly possible in order to preserve the lowest possible tax rates on the people who ‘matter’ to the people who are making the decisions – which of course means the wealthy donor class created by the dramatic shift in economic policy under Ronald Reagan.
Because every single goddamn problem in America is Ronald Reagan’s fault.
In order for disabled people to receive any sort of financial assistant for their housing, food, bills, medical supplies, etc., they cannot ever have more than $2,000 of resources to their name. Ever.
It doesn’t matter what it’s for.
You’re saving up for a new wheelchair?
For college?
To put a downpayment on a house?
Hell man, you just happen to budget for once in your life so that you can have some extra money in case something bad happens?
Your benefits immediately get cut off if you’re a cent over $2,000.
And, even worse, you usually end up having to pay back every dollar the government gave you that month.
So say you get $400. If they find out you’re twenty dollars over the resource limit, you have to give them all $400 back and you undergo an investigation of your funds to see if you will continue getting money.
“What if I spend the money that day?”
Doesn’t matter. In fact, from what I can tell, people who do this are actually put under investigation for fraud.
And yes, this system literally kills people.
Remember when “Guardians of the Galaxy” came out? one of Rocket Racoon’s creators, Bill Mantlo, suffered an accident in 1992 and has irreparable brain damage.
before the movie came out, Marvel gave him an exclusive preview screening. SOme people were upset because they felt if Marvel was really wanted to thank mantlo, they should have donated money to Mantlo’s family.
Bill Mantlo’s brother had to come out and explain: If Marvel gave them monetary aid, Bill Mantlo would lose his financial assistance.
That’s so utterly depressing.
disgusting
I have friends on welfare who won’t pick up a penny in the street because they’d risk the welfare they struggled to get for 10 years.
oh look another fucked up thing in this world. let’s just add it to the list. number 63858b
My brother has been on California State SSI for autism for the last 10 years, and he absolutely has to (no joke, HAS TO) spend all 720 bucks of his SSI every month, because if he puts it in the bank he risks losing his SSI altogether.
Sometimes, at the end of the month, he has no idea what to do with his money because the whole month went by and he still has 400-ish bucks in his account, and he fucking panics because he doesn’t want to get anywhere near 2,000.
And here’s the funnest part of the story!
One day he did a huge commission on Second Life and wound up earning 1500 bucks off of it, and he told the guy to donate it 500 bucks at a time over 3 months. The guy didn’t want to, and just donated all 1500, which put my brother at 2,036 bucks.
The state IMMEDIATELY (I’m talking less than an hour) called him up to tell him over the phone that they were canceling his SSI, because they noticed he had gone over the 2,000 buck threshold. He had to tell them that someone had made a charitable donation to him and that this was not a common occurrence in any way shape or form, and upon not believing him, my mother had to call to talk to them as his legal caretaker and say basically the same thing until they called off the cancellation of his SSI money.
He also had to cancel his renter’s assistance because it put him to 1,062 a month, so if he went 30 days without spending any money they’d cancel his SSI altogether. Like, none of us in the family have any fucking clue why that regulation is in place and it’s the stupidest shit in human history.
Please, legal side of Tumblr, tell me what positive reasoning this law has?
Happy 4th of July everyone! This is what the “nation of opportunity” looks like.
To me, it’s like there’s a horse loose in a hospital. Like I think everything’s going to be okay, but I have no idea what’s going to happen next. And none of you know either. We’ve all never not known together. And on the news they try to get people like, “We’ve got a man here who once saw a bird in an airport” and we’re like, “Get the hell out of here. This is a horse loose in a hospital.”
It’s not good. It’s confusing because every day we just have to follow the horse, and some days it’s like, “The horse used the elevator?” You know those days when you’re like, “Is the horse smart?” And then we’re all just like, “Why hasn’t the horse-catcher caught the horse?” and then the horse is like, “I have fired the horse-catcher.”
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