2010-03-26 18:54 | fche blog politics right level of government
Every budget season, almost every lower level of government whines and moans about how it needs some sort of handout from a higher level of government. This sucks, and here is how you can see it sucks too. The key is to ask “Why should X pay for Y?”, where X is some sibling place and Y is some supposedly threatened local expenditure. It only sounds rhetorical.
When a city like NYC is asking for state money, ask yourself “Why should taxpayers in Buffalo, Rochester, or Springville be made to pay for a park worker in NYC?
When a city like Toronto is outraged about not getting enough from the province, ask yourself “Why should taxpayers in Sudbury and Windsor pay for a Toronto streetcar?”.
When a state like California is asking for a bailout from the feds, ask yourself “Why should a taxpayer in North Dakota and New York pay for health coverage for illegals in Los Angeles?”.
See, that’s not rhetorical. That’s absurd. All that transferred money comes from someone’s piggybank – whether direct taxes now, or unconscionable debts on their children, or stolen assets in the form of inflation.
Local problems should be dealt by the locals. If local taxes are not high enough to pay for all the locally voted expenditures, raise them there. If a higher level of government has enough cash that they can consider transferring the money, give all that back to the taxpayers and reduce the rates in the future. People who had nothing to do with you getting into financial trouble, people who have their own problems, should not be treated like a remote piggybank, anonymized and disempowered by aggregation, casually raped on demand.