local govt in theory vs. practice: big social goals and poor performance on the basics

From Matt Welch in Reason, examples of the bait-and-switch of political economy-- saying we care about X and then threatening to pull the most vital services instead of dealing with waste and optional efforts that target interest groups...

Washington, D.C., is lousy with rats, and not just of the human variety....it took living full-time in the city to appreciate both the awe-inspiring magnitude of the infestation and the jaw-dropping indifference of a municipal government more focused on giving free money to billionaires than addressing the capital’s legendary civic rot....

What made my reacquaintance with rodents much more difficult to accept was that it came during the very month that the city was congratulating itself for a gleaming new expenditure of local taxpayers’ money—a [$710] million stadium to house the Washington Nationals baseball team....More than 12 percent of the city’s annual local budget....It’s almost as much as the $773 million that Mayor Adrian Fenty is proposing this year to spend on the District’s notoriously awful public schools....

Less than 10 days before Nationals Stadium first flung open its doors, Fenty announced various remedies for a $96 million budget shortfall...Oddly, the Washington Post and other local newspapers didn’t draw any connections to the stadium, despite the $38 million in annual debt service it requires...

It’s not like the non-baseball services Washington provides are famous for their effectiveness. [Welch then details potholes, crime, libraries, and the DMV.]...Unfortunately for the rest of you, the chasm between unsexy nuts-and-bolts services and dazzling new municipal-built edifices is the rule, not the exception, of big-city governance....When a coalition of black, brown, and lefty-white politicians took over [LA] city government early this decade, one local alternative weekly urged the council to “think big” and not get bogged down in mere “pothole politics.”

It’s a startling mindset to observe up close, as I did for two years of jawboning with civic leaders on the L.A. Times editorial board...“Thinking big” inevitably means horse-trading bits of the city’s famously onerous red tape in return for developers delivering preferred social goals, such as guaranteeing “living wage” union jobs, building “green” rooftops, and providing for “affordable housing” units.

After a while, one starts to feel like a lonely crank constantly criticizing a city for delivering ever-worse essential services while spending ever-more money on government salaries and ever-more time butting into the private sector....