There's plenty of money to fix roads and bridges, but not enough workers
The managerial class has a death grip on our society, fueled by decades of low interest rates and business schools teaching that the people who do the real work should be treated as expendable cogs. Given the choice between doing back-breaking construction work at the crack of dawn, or sitting on your ass processing TPS report type A into TPS report type B while listening to corporate kool-aid sermons <i>for higher pay</i>, which would you choose?<p>My aunt recently hired a plumber, who decided that ~12 feet of drain pipe needed to be replaced (exposed in basement, not the main stack). The bill, with &quot;senior discount&quot;, came to something like $1200! I stopped by to look over his shoulder and inspect. Looking at the guy and how he worked, I knew he wasn&#x27;t taking home much of that at all. It&#x27;s the entire management structure cancer that&#x27;s sitting above him, skimming the majority of his pay, while treating the person doing the skilled job as some mere implementation detail.<p>FWIW if I had known that is how much she was going to end up paying, I would have been temped to drop everything and just do it myself. I suspect that is where the affordable end of the market has disappeared to - DIY repair or informal under the table to the right friend, especially with Youtube videos that explain everything. You either figure out how to work with your hands, or you pay through the nose.<p>It&#x27;s taken us a few decades to get into this mess, so it will probably take a few more decades to get out. Assuming LLMs can lay bare the unnecessary complexity that is TPS reports, and continued political will for the existence of interest rates.