For everything else, there are parallel infrastructures for the haves - private education, private healthcare, privatized transit, etc. It's something I've thought about a lot in the last few weeks.
On top of that, there is some research that suggests communities rate smaller police forces better than larger ones [1].
> To test this, Ostrom worked with the Indianapolis government and her students to measure the quality of policing. Surprisingly, against common assumptions, they found that the smaller the police force, the more positively residents evaluated the police services they got.
> "Increasing the size of [the police force] consistently had a negative impact on the level of output generated as well as on efficiency of service provision… smaller police departments … consistently outperformed their better trained and better financed larger neighbors.”
> But why did this happen? To explain this, Elinor Ostrom argued that in small communities with small police forces, citizens are more active in community safety. Officers in smaller police forces also have more knowledge of the local area & more trust from people.
And here is GDP in 2010 dollars: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.KD?location...
State and local governments went from spending 10% of $23,000 per person to 15% of $55,000 per person. Per-person state and local spending went up by a factor of 3.5, even after adjusted for inflation.
With respect to public infrastructure specifically, there has been no austerity. For example, here is a graph of NYC subway ridership from 1970 to 2014: https://i0.wp.com/plot.ly/~millerstephen/4.png?w=773&crop=0%.... Subway ridership is up 75% since 1980. The capital budget during the 1980s averaged $3.4 billion annually in 2020 dollars: https://wagner.nyu.edu/files/faculty/publications/rescue.pdf (fig. 5). The 2015-2019 capital program (5 years) averaged about $6.5 billion 2020 dollars. So a 90% increase in capital spending for a 75% increase in ridership. Punchline: MTA is so massively wasteful, that wasn't enough. The system deteriorated the whole time leading to catastrophic failure in the last few years.
The London transit system, by contrast, spends about $3.2 billion in capital expenditures to run a system that is very similar in terms of age, size, etc: http://content.tfl.gov.uk/tfl-budget-2019-20.pdf. Despite spending half as much money, London has been able to significantly grow the network while keeping maintenance current and maintaining on-time performance.
Honestly, invocations of "starve the beast" and "austerity" are nothing more than gaslighting. It's a cop-out for why our public services are so shitty, even though we spend vastly more on them than we used to spend.
Just because the spend per rider increased over that time doesn't mean the system is getting what it needs though. A newer system will usually function better than a starved system years later naturally because of deferred maintenance and other aging infrastructure ailments even if the per rider numbers have increased. Comparing it just on the per rider spend assumes that the earlier number is enough.
Though I suppose you would have to look at the state of thr system in the 1980s. NYC may have had more deferred maintenance.
