[quote=livinincali][quote=no_such_reality]
BG, per CAPITA, adjusted for inflation, MORE is collected now.
The problem you highlight is that spending has grown even FASTER than inflation and population growth.
No economies of scale, no efficiencies, it’s gotten more EXPENSIVE faster than inflation and population growth.
For every person in the state we had previously, if we collected $10 in property tax, today, after factoring inflation, we collect $11 per person in the state.[/quote]
This is exactly the problem. Salaries and benefits of public sector employees have grown faster than the economy as a whole. For awhile they’ve been able to hide that growth by allocating an increasing portion of the budget to salaries and benefits and then use bonds and other measures to pay for other costs such as maintenance. Of course now that we’ve run out of easy options to keep public sector salaries and benefits growing faster than the economy we’re seeing an attempt at productivity improvements. I.e. cut the low level employees, privatize services so the expansion of benefits and salaries can continue for top tier of employees.
At some point he public sector will be reset and the standard of living for your average public sector employee will be reduced, but it certainly won’t come without a fight. There’s going to be some winners and a lot of losers, but the math dictates the exponential growth in public sector salaries and benefits is pretty much at it’s end. In the future public sector salaries and benefits will have to grow slower than the economy or significant productivity improvements will have to be made.[/quote]
The primary reason for the increased govt spending on salaries is because they have hired more people, not because each individual is making more money. We used to have 32-40 kids in a classroom, but we reduced class sizes to 20 kids in K-3 — a good move, but expensive, and they’ve been trying to back away from it now because of the costs…but parents are whining about it, naturally. That HUGELY expanded our costs without bringing in any extra revenue. Additionally, the demographics have shifted to a much higher-cost demographic because of additional personnel in the classrooms and outside of them, as well as more free lunch/breakfast students, more students for whom all educational materials are provided (as opposed to parents helping), etc.
We’ve also greatly expanded our prison population (research the privatization of prisons and the inmate population growth, too), and have had to hire more people and build more prisons as a result.
Adding more and more people to an already overburdened system will create more costs, and when those many of those additional people tend to require more services and infrastructure than populations in the past, and when they bring in fewer tax revenues, you’re going to have problems.
