[guptaneil]

In the US, one party has dedicated itself to making sure the government is dysfunctional for a _long_ time so that it can run on the platform that government doesn’t work and we should privatize everything. This is not a fact of nature, it’s a willful decision. For example, the US used to be a leader in education. The thing that changed since then is one party started defunding education and moving that money to private prisons and defense.

If we as a people collectively agreed that we are as smart as other countries, there’s no reason we can’t have a functional government that can handle public education and vaccine efforts and keep us safe and maintain our infrastructure and everything else we expect our government to do for us.

[vorpalhex]

If your statement was true, Chicago and California would be bastions of government efficiency and capability. Instead we see both Republican and Democratic cities do terribly on most measures, and those cities that generally prosper have very little to do with who is in control other than it not being a single party and they have the right conditions for job growth.

School funding happens at the state level too, not just the federal grants.

[guptaneil]

It's funny you bring that up, because my comment originally even included a bit about how a lot of our current problems can be traced back to Reagan's presidency. He was previously governor of California. Guess when California stopped offering free higher education?

Chicago is in Illinois, which has had a lot of flip-flopping between red and blue governors and has an infamous history of governors going to jail for corruption.

Also I'm not claiming that Democrats haven't done shitty things. Daley bankrupted Chicago and privatized a lot of our public services while running as a Democrat and some of those jailed governors were democrats, but I do think the GOP is more homogeneous in its efforts to break down the government. I mean privatizing everything is a platform they openly campaign on!

If your claim that prosperity has nothing to do with who is in charge were true, we wouldn't see a pattern of blue states outperforming red states economically or a national pattern of economic growth after a democrat president and decline after a republican president.

Coincidentally, I live in Chicago and used to live in California. People love to use both places as punching bags when talking about national problems, despite one being a state and the other a city! It's different types/scales of problems.

[kortilla]

> He was previously governor of California. Guess when California stopped offering free higher education?

And why hasn’t California added free public education or expanded housing in the last 20-30 years then?

[komali2]

Many cities have and are. It's worth pointing out that there are literally millions of Trump supporters here, and plenty of Republican politicians to boot. It's not like California is pure blue.

Plus, democrats are conservatives, so, it's not like they're automatically leftists just because they're blue.

[kortilla]

> Many cities have and are

No, there is not free public education anymore so in California than Texas.

> It's worth pointing out that there are literally millions of Trump supporters here

Don’t try to blame them. They have no power at the state and even the extremely Trump-devoid Bay Area (iirc <10% support) has failed to offer anything approximating a solution to housing or good education. The answer to shitty schools in the bay was a lottery to make sure everyone got to suffer the shit, rather than you know... fixing the shitty schools.