Comment by mschuster91
5 days ago
> Says the country that is to politically paralyzed to even maintain roads and sewers.
German here, to be fair, we have our difficulties with that too, thanks to 40 years of neoliberalism and tax-cutting orgies eroding the financial base making that possible.
Not replacing expensive infrastructure before it really needs to be replaced is simply the economically better choice. If you replace it earlier, you have all the same issues with not being able to use it while construction is ongoing and the same costs and so on, so all you achieve with a replacement ahead of schedule is to artificially cut short the lifespan of perfectly usable infrastructure.
> Not replacing expensive infrastructure before it really needs to be replaced is simply the economically better choice.
I'm not talking about replacement. I'm talking about basic maintenance, because turns out when you don't go and, say, regularly paint over steel parts to save money, eventually rust will creep in and force an expensive replacement of the entire structure that would not have been needed with regular maintenance.