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by throwaway2037 321 days ago
Thanks for the first hand feedback. It is helpful. When I read your post carefully ("laughably underfunded. We are 90 percent volunteer. We have zero paramedics"; "Who fixes that in a volunteer department?"), the first thing that crossed my mind is your tax revenue is just too low. You cannot have nice things with low taxes.

Another way to think about it: Are other highly developed nations seeing the same "crisis(es)" that you mention? (Think G-7 and close friends.) Hint: They do not.
2 comments
coryrc 321 days ago
We're definitely not undertaxed. A big problem is wholesale public corruption. We now pay inflated salaries for current public workers and for extremely-high retirement plans for past workers which was promised decades ago but not funded.

* Seattle cops blatantly defraud us and one gets 1 week unpaid vacation: https://publicola.com/2024/11/07/officer-suspended-for-exces...

* Those same cops retire at 55 years old with retirement packages worth over $4M (boosted fraudulently as above).

* Similarly, Seattle fire calls have a lot of people and a lot of them getting overtime https://publicola.com/2025/01/24/nearly-200-firefighters-mad...

All this means we get taxed a lot more for ever fewer workers.

And this only scratches the surface. NFPA demanding all breakers be arc fault (add $1k+ to every home build), Seattle permitting being years backlog, governments don't have workers which know how things should be built so our construction costs are 10x other developed countries. We're living off legacy and have an ever-dropping standard of living.

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johnisgood 321 days ago
I do not think the issue is low taxes, it is probably resource allocation.
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pas 321 days ago
it's usually both. things are not cost-effective, too many things happen at muni/county level, but of course at higher levels there's a huge backlog (due to lack of competence, due to low spend), plus the US is huge and sparse.

the "developed world" has a lot of problems with high costs (Baumol effect, extremely high standards, etc) and also the problem of low scale. China was able to roll out thousands of miles of high-speed rail at a very low relative cost, because of scale, a bit lower quality and lower standards (human rights, eminent domain, worker safety)

for example when it comes to policing the US pays comparatively less (given the rate of crime it has) even though it pays more than many other OECD countries

https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/police-sp... (see the police per 100K metric, for example France has 422 whereas the US has 242)

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