The Hall of Gimmicks
6th July 2013
Aaron Renn turns over a rock.
Localities have also been in a fiscal vice as their tax receipts have collapsed thanks to the Great Recession and especially the decline in housing values, while at the same time the chickens are coming home to roost from the accumulated unfunded liabilities that had been racked up from sweetheart pension deals and the like.
And state and federal retrenchment have cut into municipal budgets. Aid to municipalities is easy to cut. Also, it’s easy for states to make municipalities bear the brunt of tax caps and other disempowerment items since living with them is Somebody Else’s Problem for state office holders. And most states radically under-empowered local governments to begin with.
Combine these and there’s little room to maneuver for many cities and mayors. They are hemmed in on all sides. So what do they do? Unsurprisingly, they’ve increasingly turned to gimmicks, especially in bigger cities that have the talent firepower to dream them up.
Just as the cash-strapped and moribund government of ancien regime France attempted to fix its financial problems by farming out the collection of revenues, a short term fix that long-term merely made thing worse, modern state and local governments are trying the same sort of financial handwaving rather than bite the political bullet of actually correcting the stupid practices that got them in trouble in the first place.