Comment by dghlsakjg
8 hours ago
People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.
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.
> People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.
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.
I should be more clear that people are not at all logical about this. They want ever more services and to pay less taxes (themselves).
Crucially, many people do not see that as an incongruous thought.
> 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).
Yes, always felt this was ridiculous. There has to be a better way to solve this.
1 reply →
I think this misses the important point of how governments tend to get less efficient at scale, and over time.
You could pay more and still get worse services.
Oh for sure, just ask the residents of Austin if they feel services have improved over the last 10, 20 years! I imagine there will be quite a bit of bias and "rose-tinted glasses" but generally speaking I don't think they feel the price tag is reflective of the services they're getting. On that note, not sure why people seem to think of governments as some sort of subscription they pay for and get services in return... but perhaps that is a discussion for another day :)
Don’t ask them.
Look at actual metrics. People are notoriously awful at doing complex analysis of things like level of service across multiple domains across a long time frame while personal life transitions happen.
I also think that most people have no idea what they are getting for their money. Exclusive of policing (the huge majority of city budgets), cities are actually extraordinarily good at keeping things running in my experience. Most people have no appreciation for what it takes to keep the sewers flowing, roads paved and the traffic lights on. Anyone who has ever lived somewhere where road maintenance or garbage is privately handled will tell you how much cheaper and easier it is to have that handled by government.