So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.
The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.
Makes sense, totally agree... however I don't think generally citizens want to pay _more_ taxes... or at least eventually there's a point where they say enough is enough.
https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-11-05/austin-tx-prop-q-fai...
> The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.
This should be stopped. Creates exactly the sort of ratcheting effect you described. Mind boggling to me. I've been in-charge of small budgets and buying more stuff after making more money is a big decision, not taken lightly because we can't assume present returns will match future returns.
Funnily enough, after spending some time in public service albeit in another country, genereally budgeting for public agencies works almost inverse to this.
If you get allocated X budget but only spend 0.8 * X, then next time you will almost always get <X. This is in itself reasonable, you don't get more allocation than you need. In practice though this means you are incentivised to not save money from your allocation iff you expect to need more in the next period or do not want to lose your allocation (maybe a renovation or smth similiar has been pushed back due to external factors).
You could pay more and still get worse services.
It’s when the value of money decreases that government has to choose among reducing spending (often by reducing services), increasing tax rates, and electoral losses. Most choose incremental tax rate increases because it’s easiest and the people likely to complain are unwilling to run for office to replace the people who raised the taxes.
One-time money from development runs out, but services like sewers, roads, power, emergency services, snow removal, and so on, need to be paid or saved for every year. Most US cities are sprawling, low-density affairs, meaning they're developed (and paid for) once, but all those roads still need money to maintain. Quoting from [0] to draw attention to what I'm talking about:
> What the tax productivity data shows is that "rich-people housing" with big lots and plenty of room for cars, which were subsidized when the neighbourhood was developed, continue to be subsidized throughout their long existence. Suburban single-family houses on big lots simply do not cover the municipal expense of things like repairing all that asphalt and clearing all that snow
People have asked previously how, if this were true, we would see more cities declaring bankruptcy - and some do [1], while others do what you've noticed, and raised taxes. The car-centric, driving-as-the-only-transportation-method way of life is financially unsustainable.
I'm not going to yell death to the automobile, but to make it the default, and in many cases only way to get around, is not a good long-term plan for cities beyond a certain size.
[0] https://www.cbc.ca/news/business/evs-cities-climate-column-d...
That is an insane statistic. Surely the state can throw some weight around to say enough is enough?
I just had my own insane encounter with healthcare. They "accidentally" billed us insurance rate which was about 4-5x more than self-pay. Why is there 4-5x overhead when dealing with insurance? (I know there's the negotiation stuff) but also seems to be quite a mess. I'm actually more mad at hospitals and clinics lately than insurance. Seems they have agreements with companies to "dispense" things at 4-5x the actual price, expecting insurance or taxpayers to pick up the tab. Seems like blatant fraud.
Sorry for the rant, I agree with everything else you mention :)
The answer is almost certainly large scale fraud by organized criminal groups, but investigating and publicizing this is, currently, extremely politically inconvenient.
Went to clinic for fractured arm. Was given a sling, told it was included with the visit, verbally by the staff.
Later get a bill for nearly $500 for the sling that costs $50 if you get it outside of the clinic. Was told they think they accidentally billed me the insurance price. I can understand "convenience" being baked into the price but not at a 10x markup. The more I talked with the clinic trying to get them to fix it, the more it sounded like they had a partnership with the stupid sling company where they put slings on people and bill the insurance 10x the cost of the sling.
How do you know that it's enough? Baby boomers are old now, which means demand for healthcare has skyrocketed. There's an odd thing I've noticed in political commentary where nobody really thinks that healthcare is expensive, but it absolutely costs a ton to keep people alive. America might have problems with too much overhead, but even here in Ontario, healthcare is by far the province's biggest expense.
Because that is 17% above the US average, at an average of $13k per year per patient. This is _after_ medicare handles the bulk of the cost. I'm not disagreeing that healthcare is expensive, just the costs are excessive.
Taxpayers are getting milked by providers and insurance. I was given an arm sling that cost almost $500. If I got it outside of the clinic it would have been $50.
Chicago..hold my beer. 80% of taxes here go to funding pensions for 2% of city population. Our parking meter money goes to gulf countries because we sold them to pay for city services back in 08.
As the cost of living increases, so does the cost of providing public safety workers and their union-guaranteed pensions and benefits. In most cities, public safety eats up a large chunk of the operating/general fund budget (in Austin it's 71.2%)[1, pg. 30], and reducing public safety budgets kills your representative's clout. You yourself can advocate for lower hiring rates or pay and pensions if that's a concern. Any new hire comes with long-term costs for your local government, even after they've left service.
Extracurricular services are highly visible and therefore highly defended by the advocates that claim they reduce crime (by providing structure to youth with nothing else to do, for example). Representatives are typically replaced with those that defend those highly-visible services. They will instead reduce less-visible support services (like IT) that make public safety more efficient/effective.
Since you can't outlaw homelessness, citizens that complain about homeless activity motivate local governments to provide more services that make homelessness less visible/likely. Without those services, public safety budgets need to increase to address more desperation on the streets.
As the population ages and needs more medical care they can't afford, demand for EMS and senior services increases. I've seen arguments to freeze or eliminate property taxes for seniors, but balanced budgets mean non-seniors have to pay more to cover their service costs unless the local government finds additional revenue (fees, fines, more local sales tax that increases living costs, etc.)
You can outlaw abortion for unfit parents, but that also likely creates more welfare service demand over time.
To me, private businesses not increasing wages to meet a standard cost of living means an increase for demand of welfare and public safety services. Local governments can attempt to hold private businesses to a higher tax burden, but are usually preempted by state law in Republican-led states. Your local government has no control over that and has to respond somehow.
To me, the frustration is best placed with private businesses that can afford to provide for their workforce, but instead rely on welfare services to give their workers what they need to survive, so that executive officers can earn more and deliver more to their investors. ~55% of households in the U.S. earn less than $100,000 per year (before taxes). [2]
[1] https://austin.widen.net/s/x8q5hmnwtw/fy-2026-27-city-of-aus...