So If You Want To Move To Austin
You'll see lots of this:
That's five mega-cranes, in case you're counting.
But wait--that's great, right? Jobs for everybody! Well, yes--if you can fog up a mirror, you can find full-time employment.
There's one problem, though.
Texas has enormous growth through a kind of governmental pyramid scheme. Growth requires infrastructure, and infrastructure requires expenditures by government that are funded by taxes.
Ooh, taxes.
Wonder how we got all these companies down here in the first place? Enormous tax breaks. So they're not paying enough taxes to support the expansion of infrastructure.
Hey, don't look at me. Texans have a spectacularly irrational hatred of taxes, so regular citizens are paying unsustainably low taxes, too.
Wait a minute. If corporations are paying abnormally low taxes, and so are citizens, where does the money to build infrastructure come from?
Crickets chirping.
In Austin's case, we have a severely limited number of roads, and we're not building new ones. That means you can get a full-time job, but you better hope you can tele-commute, because you can't physically get there at rush hour(s).
Based on this article from Forbes, we are #4 in traffic in the country. Ahead of us are Los Angeles, Honolulu, and San Francisco. That's it. And we'll be #2 in another five years, easy.
At some point, this is going to blow up, and spectacularly, in the state's face.
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