Comment by criddell
1 day ago
> Europe built the completely novel floodgates for Venice
That's wild! How do you convince people in Latvia or Norway that they should help pay for infrastructure like that in Italy?
If Manhattan wants flood gates, NY will have to build them. At some point, they will probably have to because the cost of insurance will exceed the cost of the bonds needed to build.
There are typically federal grants for major infrastructure projects. The Hoover Dam, for example, was entirely paid for by federal dollars. Many bridges also have federal backing and the interstate highway system is subsidized. This is because good infrastructure helps increase the GDP and benefits everyone in the country.
The European Investment Bank provided €1.5b of funding.¹ EIB decisions don’t generally attract lots of attention from member states other than those concerned, since it is generally understood that the EIB is funding lots of projects in member states simultaneously. Similarly, the budget of the Commission and similar bodies will generally be set in advance, usually with a formal or informal understanding as to the broad distribution of funds between member states that will follow.
In any case, this project seems to me to be no more extraordinary than the redistributive effects of e.g. Medicaid or Pentagon spending, or the construction of Interstates. The Interstates, in the present US political environment, might indeed seem extraordinary; but the question is then not how one convinces people from state A to spend on state B, but how to convince people to make large long-term investments in the first place.
1: https://web.archive.org/web/20130111042126/http://archiviost...
Wait, doesn't the US Army Corps of Engineers do some of that sort of thing?