Comment by mvdtnz
1 day ago
How does a town in the richest nation in the history of the planet not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?
1 day ago
How does a town in the richest nation in the history of the planet not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?
Presumably because they are spending their money prosecuting people complaining about bad water.
Money does not grow on trees, you know!
Water is handled at the city level, not the federal level. If you have incompetent local leadership, this can happen. Incompetent local leaders can (and have!) bankrupted their cities.
Texas also is all about no/low taxes.
Theoretically. In practice, the total tax burden in Texas is above average for US states.
You must not own property in Texas
Meanwhile in Flint Michigan…
1 reply →
The US is a huge country. In general it has excellent water; the US averages better than the EU. The Environmental Performance Index is a report that measures many things, and they have a handy section where they measure DALYs lost from sanitation and drinking water. For this section the US scores 96, within a few points of Switzerland (100), Sweden (97), Austria (96), Denmark (94), Belgium (93) and comfortably above the Netherlands (91), France (88), Poland (80), Czechia (79) and Japan (78.)
There are isolated incidents of poor water quality in each of those countries, and especially in small towns of eight hundred people in rural areas, but generally speaking, clear drinking water that is free of bacteria is standard.
On the other hand the US often relies on relatively crude chlorination to reach those levels, which those 'top' European countries don't. They instead put a strong emphasis on protecting the source water and then treating it via ozone, UV, biofiltration and slow sand filtration.
The taste of chlorinated water generally isn't tolerated.
The US isn't a monolith and neither is Europe. Overall, yes, the US uses more chlorine than Europe, but Spain and France both have _minimum_ water chlorination levels (about 0.2-0.3 mg/L depending on the regional situation) and France has no cap on max chlorine, which is very different from the US, where you can drink completely unchlorinated water in countless places around the country and there is a nationwide cap of 4 mg/L. For example NYC (average 0.5 mg/L and many places with zero.)
3 replies →
> How does a town in the richest nation [...] not have the resources to get clear drinking water
It's a large country. Texas is a very large state, larger in size than France.
Texas recently voted to approve a $20 billion investment in water.
https://www.texastribune.org/2025/11/04/texas-elections-2025...
>How can X in the richest nation in the history of the planet be...
I've honestly grown absolutely sick of this type of comment as I get older. If you're not from the states, it's maybe understandable, but throughout my life most of the folks with me on the left that make these statements are completely ignorant of how their own government works and just assume "shit should be taken care of" without actually having to put any work in. It drives me crazy.
The vast majority of our electorate doesn't pay attention to politics, and then votes for feel-good measures (often very expensive), and almost universally avoid actual long-term net positive investments, like urban density and avoiding bond issuances wherever they are impractical.
As you see small towns welcoming -- even courting -- data centers while everyone in the town hates and protests them... yea, it's almost certainly because the town is broke, and the only folks who realize it are the city officials.
>How does a town ... not have the resources to get clear drinking water flowing through their taps?
Many, many, many, towns in America are functionally insolvent! The amount of cost it takes to maintain our road/sewer/water/refuse/emergency/energy systems is very often more than the tax revenue that the town can bring in. This is literally the entire point of the Strong Towns organization: https://www.strongtowns.org/journal/2020-5-14-americas-growt...
Rebuilding a water system is one of the most significant municipal finance events that a city will have to deal with, and more and more cities across the nation are requiring federal bailouts; e.g., the Jackson, Mississippi water crisis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jackson,_Mississippi,_water_cr....
It's just so frustrating as someone who cares about municipal finances that American cities' sustainability that most people think that it's just supposed to work itself out when cities are just lighting money on fires... often to the cheers of the electorate who voted for it.
Well I'm not from the states and I stopped reading at that point. If you're "absolutely sick" of this conversation don't participate in it, but if you're going to you should do so politely and in good faith, not starting with a tirade like that.
If my tone is off-putting, I apologize. I'm currently in San Francisco, living through a combine federal, state, and local politics budgetary nightmare. Here, even the most politically passionate folks seem to struggle with basic civics (especially who has the authority to impose taxes and how) and most don't understand municipal finance, which has real world consequences. The "how can San Francisco not afford X with all the tech/ai money here" sentiment is prevalent. Currently, it is the potential collapse of the Bay Area public transit system.
It can all be exasperating. If you're curious about why a nerd like me can be so exasperated and scared by all this, I'd suggest a recent episode of Derek Thompson's Plain English podcast: https://youtu.be/OXKAfcgl7eU
We have more than enough resources, but a lot of people don't want to pay taxes to clean it or restrain corporations from polluting our water supply inn the first place. I'm guessing that plenty of people in this woman's own town were cheering Trump's slashing of the EPA's budget and deregulating clean air and water. Just this week the administration announced plans to kill off or delay limits in the amount of PFAS in the drinking water. They argue it's too expensive to limit or filter the poison but then give no-bid contracts out to their unqualified friends for tens of millions of dollars and spend a trillion bombing other countries for no reason so it's pretty clear where the priorities are and it isn't with us.
You are mixing local and federal politics. This is a town issue and would likely have happened regardless of who occupied the Oval Office
The poster was pointing out the irony that the town's residents support pro-water pollution policies at the national level.
[Given that Henderson county went for Trump by 30 points, the probably also support pro-pollution policies at both the local and state level too.]
complete and utter incompetence by local elected officials. If one of the richest towns in America (average home price of >$2m) can do it - just imagine how bad it can be in "average" towns...
https://observer.com/2010/07/the-collapse-of-east-hampton-ho...
Cuz all that wealth belongs to about 14 people and everyone else gets police harassment and poison water
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The country is the richest, but the money is not distributed equally. One factor to keep in mind is that the state would rather give the richest man in the world tax breaks rather than make sure everyone has safe drinking water.
Because the US is a third world country cosplaying as a developed nation. Much like their president is a corrupt and morally bankrupt fool cosplaying as a politician.
It doesn't matter in the US. Just pretend.