VC Tim Draper has revived his proposal to carve California into smaller parts

Same thing in the Bay Area. We are 20% the state’s population but pay 40% of the taxes.

Repairing and upgrading subways would require local political wherewithal that NYC has not demonstrated so far. If Albany is truly draining fare money from MTA your rides might be cheaper but the changes wouldn't happen any faster. But is Albany really getting money from the NYC MTA? I'm skeptical.

I'm kind of sad it's come to the point where different regions of America claim they're "subsidizing" other regions populated by other Americans.

I mean, I'm sick of "subsidizing" all the black people in the US; why can't we just kick them all out? (this was sarcasm)

Of course, there is no way for me to know whether or not the time difference between the US and Moscow is significant enough to prevent HackerNews IRA shifts from happening.

"Each really favors a different set of circumstances. It was shocking in Switzerland to be there for a few votes where people voted to very directly raise taxes."

You may also be interested to know that it is a routine occurrence in the US at the municipality level. While municipalities frequently have normal levels of taxes sufficient to sustain current infrastructure, if a new school or police building or other significant expenditure is required, the town will often vote for releasing a bond and raising the taxes to pay for it. At least where I live, such votes are almost done deals; those measures will typically pass with ~90% of the vote.

"Interested in the counterpoints to all that."

Well, in a pretty real sense, it's precisely the failure of the powers to successfully aggregate that is the driving force here, where "failure" is defined as successfully meeting all the relevant stakeholder's needs. If aggregating powers was awesome and fixed all the problems, nobody would be having this discussion in the first place.

Communalism

Each US state consists of numerous counties, each typically with a city county seat.

California for example is broken into 58 counties. Oakland is the Alameda county seat.

To follow that premise somewhat, you'd try to give the three new giant regions more independence vs a traditional county. You'd be looking to create a new super-structure above county and below state; the super regions would govern over the counties within (or you'd abolish all the counties and just essentially create three counties in California). If you move to full autonomous (within the US Federal system), then you're really going to have to make them proper separate states or change to the status Puerto Rico has (unincorporated US territory).

Sure. States have a lot of power under the constitution - I'm sure a state could do something like that... but that's not the point of this effort. Tim Draper pretty clearly wants more Conservative Senators, which he thinks he would get by splitting CA into 3 pieces.

Honest questions for discussion: Assuming for the sake of argument that the current status quo is not an option, what would be the particular advantage you are seeking in creating such a structure rather than just having three states? (Obviously the status quo is an option, the default one in some sense, but since that probably dominates a rational conversation I'm discarding it to get somewhere interesting.)

Would it be advantageous for, say, Vermont and Rhode Island to create such a superstructure?

How would you address the question of redundancy? We've got a couple centuries now of the line between federal, state, and municipality to go off of, and since you're presumably not going to create more government powers through this mechanism, how do you propose redrawing the relevant powers in a way that makes sense?

In theory that'd be "counties", but quite a few California counties don't seem to think they have sufficient autonomy (hence this proposal, the Jefferson proposal, etc.).

The senate is two votes per state... though the ratio works out the same. Clearly the new states would vote more heavily Republican on average than California currently does, else he wouldn't be proposing this. I suspect the big win (for him) electorally would be peeling off votes in the Electoral College. The article mentions union-busting as another motive, which squares with the right-wing motivation.

We could also join together Kansas, Nebraska, Oklahoma and maybe a few other plains states into a single state. They always vote together and most people can't tell them apart anyway, plus there's the efficiencies of reducing redundant government functions to think about. And the naked partisan interest is just gravy.