13 March

Working for local government is a bit of a hiding to nothing thing. Everybody almost universally hates it, and treats you with contempt. The pay is some of the worst in the job market. And there’s no funding, to do anything, so the only way to try to keep basics running like water, sewer and local roads is to raise rates. The graph explains why. Vertical fiscal imbalance. The federal government historically gets nearly all of the taxing powers, for a variety of reasons that made sense at the time. But State and local governments now provide most of the services people use. And as you can see, they have no money. The feds are sitting on a mountain of it. What do they do with it? They give it away to mates in tax cuts. And buy nuclear submarines.