Communities Can't Afford Their Own Infrastructure

We had a couple of days of very heavy rains in late March, which is quite common here in northeast Ohio. However, it caused a "flash flood" of sorts through the East Branch of the Chagrin River and pushed dozens of trees up against Wisner Road Bridge in Chardon Township and washed out a section of the road. Wisner Road is a tertiary road at best, but I ride my bike through there regularly because it leads to the base of one of the longest hill climbs in our area.

Anyway, the township does not have money to repair the road and it certainly won't have money to repair the bridge if it's damaged, which would cost millions of dollars to replace. It really doesn't have money to maintain the road, either. It's been in rough shape for several years, so the township is turning to the County and the State of Ohio, neither of which really have the money either.

This is a problem all over the country and around the world. All the infrastructure out there, especially the public infrastructure, is really just an ongoing debt and expense--basically because of the model of "payment" that comes from and makes the financial system function and extract wealth from the entirety of the economy.

For all practical purposes, the local jurisdictions, like the county and the township "own" the infrastructure and more or less collect tolls to operate it in the form of property taxes. However, they don't maintain a surplus or any form of savings apparently and every entity needs to borrow money to operate. This is actually very weird. Typically, taxpayers are funding debts in the form of bonds in their jurisdiction. The bonds is the source of money in the accounts of an entity like a township. The taxes don't just accumulate in the form of savings accounts, or gold or whatever, and are then spent as needed.

This results in the kind of crappy, nonsensical outcomes we see in a state like Ohio, like the "indefinite" closure of Wisner Road and bridge. A common model appears to be much of the infrastructure is left to rot until it falls apart completely. Then treated as "an emergency" even though it's 100% guaranteed to happen in a given time span. Households behave in a similar fashion. Rather than save up a bunch of money to regularly repair and improve a house, people will go into debt with "home equity" loans and the like.

Anyway people have been trained to follow this model, even though it's entirely contrary to their interest. The debt based money is created ex nihilo, then the public works to pay it off through productive activity. The debt is essentially magically monetized labor and resources, the banks essentially do a leveraged buyout of all the people in the country.

It's actually quite weird people keep going along with this trashy scam system. This system makes the real cost of infrastructure higher than it otherwise should be, just like cars cost more, houses cost more, college costs more because of "finance". It's all so dumb.