I loved the part where they couldn’t actually refute most of your points & strawmanned some crap about marijuana instead. Also shows how they misunderstand how most civil infrastructure is actually paid for, i.e. federal grants.

Also, comparing a single city to an entire state is a completely fair assessment 🙄

Not necessarily.

I grew up in WA where we mostly wasted money on unfinished projects in downtown Seattle. There wasn’t really any push for worker protections, affordable healthcare, etc at the local level, and just some lip service about “improving infrastructure” and whatnot. But we got recreational marijuana, so I guess that’s nice.

I’m now in Utah, and we have way better rail infrastructure despite having far fewer people. A lot of that was from the Olympics, but the commuter rail (Frontrunner) came years later and was way safer Seattle’s Sounder line and has way higher ridership (like 2-3x). We have plenty of other issues (e.g. notably regressions on trans issues), but in general, things work okay. I think Utah’s UTA has done a better job than WA’s Sound Transit in rolling out rail (e.g. light rail and commuter rail work together in Utah, in WA, they’re completely separate systems).

There’s a lot I miss from WA, and a lot I like about Utah, but the main common factor between them is the things I dislike are generally rammed through on party lines in both states, they’re just different things each state rams through.