[accountyaccount]

I definitely support paying more taxes to improve the infrastructure/rural areas of the country, but I also start to think that maybe the country is just too big.

Are there any countries that are nearly this large that have a consistent quality of infrastructure for everyone? I live in a large city and it seems that even we have trouble maintaining up our roads/bridges/grid/telecom systems and we pay a lot of state taxes comparatively — I can't imagine how a much larger, less dense, less wealthy area filled with people staunchly against taxes could even begin to keep up.

[nightski]

It's amusing there is so much misinformation on rural America on HN. You'd think it was mostly 3rd world by reading most of the comments on this post. I come from ND, which is an extremely sparsely populated state. However, don't let the rural nature fool you - per capita tax revenue was one of the highest in the nation. It's filled with rich farmers making more than many engineers here on HN. Most of the income comes from Oil & Farming but that excess money is being invested in developing a growing technology scene.

I regularly visit CA/SF as I have clients there. It's a beautiful place, but many things about living in ND are much more attractive.

[adpirz]

I feel like ND is a bit of an outlier though, I can try and find the data to back it up. I lived in rural MS for a while, and parts of it felt close to parts of rural India that I've visited.

[accountyaccount]

I don't disagree with you, but ND is a bit of an outlier. There are huge swathes of the once-prosperous rural south and midwest that are slipping into developing nation territory as their infrastructures degrade over time.

Many of the prominent examples of a successful rural area are either very self reliant (parts of NH serve as good examples, but the opioid epidemic is taking a toll) or reliant on a single industry that might just up and leave (airline manufacturing or fracking come to mind).

[boomboomsubban]

You're ignoring large chunks of your state, the reservations. They tend to better than the SD ones, but still have things like 50% unemployment.

[satsuma]

ND is in a weird place thanks to the oil fields. I grew up in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, and while it was a pretty good living and I never felt like I was in a developing region, there were places that was closer to reality.

[BoiledCabbage]

That's not a very good analogy. If you're going to compare ND and it's oil boom, then you need to contrast it with somewhere like Saudi Arabia which has very little economically except for it's oil production.

Or more accurately compare any of the non-oil related rural areas in the country. Or any of the particularly poor rural areas of the black or white southern US.

[earlyriser]

Canada is bigger and with just 30 million people and the infrastructure is good. I live in a small city of 30k and sometimes I'm surprised how deteriorated the infrastructure is in big cities like Montreal (I also lived there for some years).

[ojbyrne]

Having lived in both Canada and the US, it's a reasonable counter-argument, but I'm not sure "bigger" is really applicable to this argument. Most of Canada is empty, the population lives on a narrow strip of land near the US border. And having driven most of the trans-Canada, I'm not really convinced the infrastructure is good.

[accountyaccount]

I'd argue that majority of Canada essentially lives on the equivilant of an US coastline. The US population is larger by a factor of 10 and while we have population hubs, our overall population is less centralized than Canada.

[kevin_b_er]

The less dense areas don't or won't soon: http://www.oregonlive.com/pacific-northwest-news/index.ssf/2...

The Republican philosophy means rapidly shrinking public services. These area already have super low taxes and the conservatives who moved there don't want to pay anything that might benefit someone who isn't them. Such is the price to pay when selfishness is the primary political philosophy.

[tuna-piano]

Yes, it would be great if we could sub divide the large country into smaller areas, and give each of those areas control over most of the roads / bridges / etc.

If spending and benefits are primarily local, shouldn't the decisions be as well?

[dcdanko]

You mean like the States?

[accountyaccount]

Sure, but there's no regional intermediary. Government scales from city, to county, to state... then straight to federal.

[AnthonyMouse]

> Sure, but there's no regional intermediary. Government scales from city, to county, to state... then straight to federal.

There are only 50 states. The median state is larger than Greece.

The true problem is that the federal government is responsible for spending three times as many tax dollars as all the states put together. The county government knows they need to fix the bridge, but the feds took all the money the local taxpayers could spare and spent it on not-the-bridge.

[breatheoften]

How many of those federal dollars spent are for the military?

[greedo]

Roughly 16% of Federal expenditures go towards the military.

[AnthonyMouse]

Federal Outlays: ~$3.8T

Federal Defense: ~$0.7T

[Balgair]

Not always true. SF is both a city and a county, for example. Also, different states do it differently. Colorado has many cities that span county lines. Yes, going across the street in the same city means you now are under different laws. This isn't all that different than, say, a school district and it's tax base. We do also have regional systems, like the Mississippi/Colorado river watershed districts that help manage and maintain water usage in those areas. These inter-state issues have been cropping up for a long time (Bleeding Kansas, for an extreme example) and we mostly manage them pretty well and pretty silently. Turns out, the constitution actually does work alright.

[dgzl]

It's my understanding that, from a constitutionalist perspective, states were meant to be sovereign and the Federal government was meant to have minimal presence. The idea is that states would be responsible for themselves only, through both success and failure.

[accountyaccount]

I'd also imagine this could calm a lot of the "all our taxes go to the coastal elites" mentality and drum up support for local taxes (even though it's generally an errant stance).