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That level of risk aversion has been burned into policymakers, especially at the local level. Wasting taxpayer money by letting an inefficient system continue to degrade makes less news than doing so by investing in a risk that failed, and gets a lot fewer people screaming at you in public and sending you death threats.
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Yes! "We tried nothing and we're all out of ideas" is not inspiring! Mamdani threw cash at the problem of snow on the streets and now, huh, suddenly there's not so much snow on the streets of NYC compared to previous blizzards, who would have thought.
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A large chunk of problems faced by regular Americans can be solved by money equivalent to a rounding error compared to how much we spend on military, private health subsidies, interest payments, corporate benefits. Yet the "who will pay for it??" narrative never comes up when talking about any of these, only school lunches and buses.
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