Your laments are the focus of the right, who point to the inherent inefficiencies and incompetence of government. Government workers don't get fired because there is poor oversight, no immediate financial incentive to fire them, political reasons to protect the people, the departments they work for, and those who run the departments, and employment protections not provided in the private sector. Add to that many public jobs don't pay that well and aren't exactly intellectually stimulating, and you just end up firing one low level employee and finding a carbon copy to replace him with.

If McDonalds serves bad hamburgers, then everyone goes to Burger King. If the line at the DMV is long, it's not like I can take my business elsewhere.

And no, this isn't an anti-government rant. It's just pointing out the inherent problems with a system that doesn't have immediate rewards and consequences.

I was thinking higher up the ladder than the speed with which DMV clerks are processing transactions. Yes, it is maddening to wait in line and watch civil servants at work. But in fairness, retail can present exactly the same problem. For instance, both Wells Fargo and US Bank have (apparently) established a policy that requires the tellers to engage in happy chat with each customer. Hey, just give me a receipt and shut up! I don't want to discuss what I am planning for the weekend. At US Bank I wanted to open a simple second account and the officer was hell bent on making her presentation of their account options last at least 20 minutes. I finally told her she was taking too long and left.

In Flint, for instance, the MI governor's office didn't seem to engage with the gravity of the water problem. Certainly, the court appointed manager of Flint wasn't engaging with it. I don't think it was just because Flint is broke or the residents mostly black.

In the case of Porter Ranch, 90,000 metric tons of methane have gushed out of a broken pipe in a gas storage field (old gas wells) in the last 3 months. The adjacent affluent town of Porter Ranch has been partly depopulated by people who were getting sick, and the city is getting coated with a brownish residue. Old wells, old pipes, rust... leaks are bound to happen, especially if inspections don't keep the owners of the field focused on necessary maintenance.

Infrastructure decay, just one kind of problem, are endemic from coast to coast. How do citizens get their representatives to pay attention before the bridge collapses, the gas storage blows up, the water poisons the whole town?

Infrastructure decay, just one kind of problem, are endemic from coast to coast. How do citizens get their representatives to pay attention before the bridge collapses, the gas storage blows up, the water poisons the whole town? — Bitter Crank

Or, better yet, how do the residents get the city to build higher levees before they predictably overflow and flood the entire city?

It's sort of like my roof. Every few years I hope to get a few more years out of it. It's just too expensive to replace when it seems to work just fine, and what fun is a new roof?

We can build new schools, add new lanes to a packed road, give our struggling firemen raises, or we can replace a pipe that the engineering schedule says should be replaced this year. It's easy to just push it off and wait for the moment when it's politically popular to replace the pipe, which should be right about the time it bursts and not a second sooner.

Having been the President (yes, President I said) of my HOA, I can tell you that when the savings account number rises, the neighborhood citizenry comes up with all sorts of creative expenditures (and this is in deep red country), none of which include saving it for the day when the tennis courts will predictably need to be resurfaced. Fortunately for them, they have a President who feels free to say no and then to offer them my job when they object. It's the same thing I think at all levels, but some politicians actually want to preserve their jobs and weren't elected simply because someone said "Hey, you're a lawyer, you should do it."