Parched residents of Kemp, a small East Texas city whose water mains keep crumbling in the season’s record heat, told local reporters at the height of the emergency this week, “According to the weather forecast we got no relief coming. We’re believing and we’re praying for rain…”

The plight of a place like Kemp illustrates the much broader problem faced by villages, towns and cities across the United States: a decaying infrastructure that a decadent political class won’t rebuild because that would require raising tax revenues. Transportation, water, sewer, health and education systems constructed by earlier generations that ought to have been upgraded years ago have been left in disrepair, and today the consequences of such conduct are coming due. Texans like Hensarling and Perry tend to mock places like New York as high-tax hellholes, but at least when you turn the tap, clean water still comes out.