[ComradeTaco]

Unfortunately every odd administration is hostile to the concept of anything outside of a car being useful for transportation and reflects that accordingly in funding.

If you're an advocate for transportation options, this is a good thing.

[pkaye]

Unfortunately lots of public projects seem to skyrocket in prices as they progress. Look at the high speed rail in California. Originally I think it was priced $10B and now it might be approaching $77B.

[ComradeTaco]

Right, there is a real and serious problem with public infrastructure costs massively ballooning, worse than any other developed country.

But on the other hand, if you don't build and replace infrastructure now, you're going to have tons of problems that have real, tangible costs. Imagine you're a patient with a disease, but you don't have health insurance and you know the cost is for treatment is high. You wait several years to get treated but the cost for treatment hasn't changed or is higher and you've suffered all that time.

That's our conundrum. We can choose to not treat the disease and that's been the choice of a fair number of public officials but it's only cost us.

[jacobush]

Ballooning? Yes. More than other developed countries? Maybe. The new hospital in Stockholm cost like 2 Burj Khalifas and when opened was unusable due to design flaws and shoddy construction.

[isostatic]

Depends how it's run. Look at crossrail, on time, on budget[0]

Sadly those that pay for crossrail are the workers who pay marginal tax rates of 45%, 55%, even higher than 70% in some cases, on the money their employer spends on them.

Those that benefit are the non-workers, who pay very little in tax (unearned income is taxed far less than earned income), and benfit from £5.5b increase in land value [1] from their monopolization of a common asset.

[0] https://www.civilserviceworld.com/articles/feature/crossrail... [1] http://www.crossrail.co.uk/news/articles/crossrail-predicted...

[walshemj]

Not sure where you are coming from the highest marginal rate is I believe 60% there is an odd band around £110k for a few k

An I would love for my next job to be paid in London a similar to salaries FANG pay in SV (housing costs are about the same) and pay additional rate tax as that would give me a lot more options for pension contributions could max out my ISA that's 20k pa removed from any future tax.

Also when I buy RDSB (Shell) shares the dividend and capital gain I get is in return for risking my post tax money its defiantly not unearned income from my perspective.

[isostatic]

Every £1138 that comes out of my department budget on my overtime, I keep £400 of (£138 employer NI, £20 employee NI, £400 income tax, £180 child tax). That's 65% tax. At £100k to £120k you keep 33%. With 4 kids between £50k and £60k you keep about 25% of the money.

At the "higher tax" threshold, you can earn an extra £118, but end up paying an extra £268 in tax as you lose married couple tax allowance -- i.e. do some overtime and end up with less money.

Meanwhile those who are wealthy and powerful enough to structure their earnings as capital gains pay a mere 28%

[walshemj]

Ah "child tax" which is not a tax but a means tested benefit.

Sounds like your one of those people who earn enough several times the UK median wage to have some child benefit removed.

Ranting about people who put equity at risk and receive capital gains seems strange for such a high earner such as you why haven't you done salary a sacrifice into a pension.

[isostatic]

1.85 times UK median wage (1.6 times the median for my age bracket). About the same as a train driver [0] [1]

If you look at households with two adults and two children, this kicks in just below the median [2]

The upshot is that I do £1k overtime, which costs my employer £1138, and I keep £400 My collegue who earns 50% as much as me keeps £600 My contractor collegue who is paid twice as much gets paid that £1138 and he keeps £682 My part time collegue who does 5 days a fortnight and gets paid more per day than I do keeps £670 (as does her husband who does the same shift pattern - so they have the same pre-tax household income but far more post-tax)

Not exactly progressive.

[0] https://www.virgintrainscareers.co.uk/VacancyInformation.asp... [1] https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/03/15/how-well-off-are... [2] https://www.theguardian.com/money/2014/mar/25/uk-incomes-how...

[dionidium]

Right, but we also spend billions on automobile infrastructure and nobody complains at nearly the levels they do about one high-speed rail project. It's clearly not just the money. People are particularly critical of rail projects and particularly unconcerned about the cost of new highways.

Consider for example that every single American (at least) on this forum has heard about California high-speed rail and how much it costs, but I had never heard of this $8-billion highway project until I just googled "LA highway projects":

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-high-desert-fr...

Projects like that one are running all the time and nobody cares or complains.

[forapurpose]

> lots of public projects seem to skyrocket in prices as they progress

So do lots of private projects. Large-scale projects in general have this problem. I'd like to see a comparison of private and public.

Also, at the end of a public project, the public owns valuable assets.

[pkaye]

Can you give an example of a large scale private project with skyrocketing prices?

[tialaramex]

Essentially all EDF Nuclear power plants? Apple's replacement for the classic Mac operating system scheduled for the mid-nineties as an internal project but eventually achieved by buying an entire OS company?

A large number of movies, split roughly equally between masterpieces like Alien and forgettable failures like Water World?

[isostatic]

> forgettable failures like Water World?

I don't think anyone who was around in the 90s will forget Waterworld, just not for the reasons the studio wanted!

[ubernostrum]

Almost any major corporate IT project?

The idea that the private sector is somehow more efficient at large-scale projects can only be believed by people who deliberately ignore the track record of large-scale private-sector projects.

[ceejayoz]

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533563/it-project-man...

> In 1993, FoxMeyer Drugs was the fourth largest distributor of pharmaceuticals in the U.S., worth $5 billion. In an attempt to increase efficiency, FoxMeyer purchased an SAP system and a warehouse automation system and hired Andersen Consulting to integrate and implement the two in what was supposed to be a $35 million project. By 1996, the company was bankrupt; it was eventually sold to a competitor for a mere $80 million.

> In 1998, two years after filing for bankruptcy, FoxMeyer sued Andersen and SAP for $500 million each, claiming it had paid twice the estimate to get the system in a quarter of the intended sites. The suits were settled and/or dismissed in 2004.

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2533563/it-project-man...

> Installed in 2003, the system promptly ran into what were then described as "horrendous" barcode-reading errors. Regardless, in 2005 the company claimed the system was operating as intended. Two years later, the entire project was scrapped, and Sainsbury's wrote off £150 million in IT costs. (That's $265,335,000 calculated by today's exchange rate, enough to buy a lot of groceries.)

Target's failed expansion to Canada makes for a fun read, too: http://www.canadianbusiness.com/the-last-days-of-target-cana...

[forapurpose]

Speaking of dramatically inflated costs, you could have made the same point in just three bytes: S A P

[Graham24]

OS/360?