Trickle-Down Economy

Economy, as in "take care of your needs and watch out for your greeds." Unsure whether the federal cash cow is going to deliver any milk, the City of Atlanta is looking at some serious belt tightening. Well, not serious, as at least one member of council has suggested there are some weighty salaries that are not needed. 

How can this possibly be? How did we come to a situation where we're handing out hundreds of thousands in burdened costs to unnecessary employees? Surely our leaders are prudent care-takers of the public purse. And if you believe that, Elon Musk has some swampland on Mars he'd like to sell you.  

This fiscal prudence seems to be a direct consequence of the feds turning off the previously free-flowing tap delivering beaucoup bucks to urbanity insanity across the USA. What is interesting about the proposed budget for the next fiscal year is the lack of a revenue line item for "Federal Largess." 

Clearly the feds were funding a significant portion of previous years' income, so what, were they simply not reporting this on the budget? Or did they remove it from the upcoming budget because they expect it to be zero? Even so, they should list this as a source of revenue even if is drier than the Sinai. But what if it didn't show up on any budget? Was this federal money obfuscated? Was it a slush fund, perhaps used to fund six figure salaries for unnecessary employees? Were these friends and family? 

More importantly is this trickle-down, fed-driven "economy" we're seeing in Dunwoody, though woefully inadequate, merely a smaller version of what we see in Atlanta? It begs the question: how many unnecessary bureaucrats with excessive salaries do we have on the payroll? How will we ever know?

Frogs And Oceans

Incrementalism is an effective tool when the goal is to impose something on "the people" that the people don't really want. It looks a lot like intentionally pushing folks down the proverbial slippery slope, but more subtle. The undesirable changes need to be added much more slowly so as to be as imperceptible as possible, so that in the end no one can figure out how we came to a terrible end. What started out as a warming bath became boiling a frog, a frog that never new it was what's for dinner. 

It turns out you cannot un-boil a frog. Just cannot be done. The only option is to boil the ocean, radical, dramatic change, done with urgency and purpose, the purpose of throwing out that pot of water and the frog it cooked. Now a lot of folks will say "you can't boil the ocean" and these folks would be incrementalists, who'd much rather boil a frog and further insist that no one else should be allowed to do anything else. Then along comes someone who can, and will boil the ocean. 

That's where we are.

While we can only watch what is happening at the national level, at the local level we may, only may, have time. Maybe not, but we have a little time to find out.

There are voices on social media touting expansion of our local administrative state, advocating mission creep, costs and financial consequences be damned. Well, to be clear, there is one outspoken voice harping on "investing in ourselves" without offering any credible notion of ROI. That voice is shrill, delving into insults and ageism, often targeting the very voters who voted FOR the city referendum, without which this voice would be mute. Or at least totally irrelevant.

What's missing is a bit of history, and a decent respect for it. Before there was a City of Dunwoody, there was a marketing effort, a damn good one, to get voters to support the referendum creating the city. The Big Tent of this effort, under which all other issues were discussed was Local Control. The three rings in this big top were: zoning; police; and paving. Notice anything missing? Like parks, and interstate lanes paved in other peoples' front yards paid for with other peoples' money? What the electorate was sold was zoning to slow apartment development, police that wouldn't start every shift driving down to Buford Highway, and fixing our pothole riddled streets, backed up by the CVI study saying this could be done on $18M ($27M in 2025 dollars). That's what 81% of the voters thought they were getting, and that's what they still want. 

Now that is not what they got and what they actually approved was a mini-me of a the federal administrative state which has followed the lead in mission creep and bureaucratic expansion. And the water will slowly, inexorably heat, until we must confront the necessity of boiling our own little ocean of rancid frog stew. 

Unless we do something now.