The predicament of local government

Local government cannot be a proxy for a productive economy, just as infrastructure spending cannot be a proxy for real growth. The demand for viable infrastructure needs to emerge from a productive land use pattern, just as a healthy and viable local government can only emerge from a productive place. If we want stability at the local level, we need to work to make our places more productive. 

Local Govt (52 MB)

Comments

[Jeffrey Jakucyk]

The talk about Medicare and the various other programs that came about around the end of the first life cycle of the suburban experiment makes me wonder about something. Namely, how much of the prosperity and wealth (whether real or not) is actually attributable to our development patterns? I understand how it can create the illusion of prosperity on the local level (city, township, county), but at the state and federal levels we're looking at prosperity captured mostly through income taxes which don't care about development patterns. The local failings are basically being propped up by the broader economy through those income and sales taxes.

Now it certainly seems that things have gotten bad enough at the local level that such propping up has become too much of a burden on the economy, but I'm mainly wondering about the relative scales we're talking about here. For instance, the 2012 budget for the City of Cincinnati, a fairly typical mid-sized city, is $1.3 billion. That's peanuts compared to the overall economy of the city. Now I realize that a lot of our economy as of recent is dependent on suburban development, from roads to houses to appliances to cars to the financial systems to purchase all those things, but there still seems to be a mismatch in the cause/effect relationship in my mind. Can you elaborate on that aspect of the discussion?

[Eli Damon]

So much of what you say makes sense, and from reading and listening to your work I get the sense that you mean it in a a sense that is thoughtful and compassionate. However, some of the language you use is also used by people who are not thoughtful or compassion, and they seem to mean something entirely different when they use that language. For that reason it makes me a little uncomfortable to hear you use that language because I can never shake the suspicion that I am totally misinterpreting it.

For example, the word "productive" is almost always used with the connotation that production is always good, regardless of what is being produced. The intrinsic value to human societies of what is produced is rarely taken into account. Likewise, when a government program is criticized, it is often for the purpose of condemning it out of hand for being expensive, rather than looking critically at its cost versus its benefit to society in relation to all other possible solutions to a problem. This phenomenon is at a level where it is nearly impossible to have a thoughtful dialogue about a government program.

I mention this in the hope that you might make a greater effort to clarify the similarities and differences between you viewpoint and the viewpoint of others who use similar language.