The website (and article) makes a shrill but intriguing point - American municipal finance is a ponzi scheme. I was briefly exposed to it while working on a financing project through a commercial lender. I was astounded to learn that you can actually get the local city to issue bonds in <i>your</i> favor to fund roads, utilities etc for your <i>private</i> project. The bonds are against future hypothetical tax revenues from that very project but guaranteed by the city. It is borrowing from the future in every sense hypothetical and hypothecated ;) Fascinating.<p>At some point, those land improvements - the malls, the shopping centers or housing complexes empty out and stop paying taxes. Alternatively, increases in maintenance do not match increase in taxes. Perhaps that has never happened yet in most of the growing west/southwest/midwest. When that happens you will hit a death spiral like Detroit.
It seems like every time they update their website it ends up on HN and everything the discussion is the same. Unless the website actually introduces new facts or plans I wish it’d stop popping up.
There's obviously a much deeper message here but gee whiz building vs maintaining a city sure feels like it has some basic parallels & similar tensions to adding to vs working on software projects. The mandate for growth is real.
This makes a lot of sense to me, and so do a lot of other things on that website. I'm intrigued.<p>I'm also trying to see if there's anything shady here. Is Haliburton lobbying for a big infrastructure repair contract or something?