The old telephone network has been supplanted a number of times, but thousands--maybe millions of miles of copper phone line are hanging on telephone poles all over the USA. Chronically money losing corporations still operate many of the telephone networks around the country.
The corporate credit world is all about shiny new schemes to make money in the future.The shiny future makes today's credit worth something. However, en route to the shiny future, maintenance needing infrastructure and obligations like pensions or various insurance schemes accumulate rapidly. These obligations and costs tend to pile up where they were most centralized, so the biggest cities and largest states end up with the biggest burden.
Since people in a counry like the united states can move very easily, they leave places like Chicago, Detroit, and Cleveland for green field states and cities. The federal model of government in the USA allows municipalities in distress to shift some of their costs onto the next level up.
Now at the tail end of the neocon/lib corporatocracy era, it'll be interesting to see if the corporate entities in places like San Francisco or New York will attempt to formulate a new arrangement with more city state like governments that flip federalism around. If they do, it'll be extremely important to make sure they end up keeping all their obligations rather than try to pass them along to states or the federal level.
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