Michael Lissack As the 1980s turned into the 1990s, governments at all levels in America were cutting services to cope with budget deficits even though demands for services continued to rise. Public works are not the only part of the nation’s infrastructure that the federal government has neglected. States haven’t the resources or powers of the central government. Except for Vermont, states cannot legally run deficits to wait out recessions that rob them of revenues. Thus, most states have no choice but to raise taxes to offset budget shortfalls, an action that often is a death knell for elected local politicians who are held closely accountable for the communities’ living conditions. As times got harder for state and local governments, the national gov- ernment made things tougher yet. As one component of the 19% of dis- cretionary spending left in Congress’ immediate control, federal grants in-aid to states and cities became obvious targets for cutbacks. In the 1980s, the federal Revenue Sharing program was eliminated entirely, and federal grants-in-aid to states and cities fell from about 21% of domestic spending in 1980 to 17% in 1988. States felt such reductions in virtually all areas of policy. In the 1980s, federal dollars for clean water, sewage treatment, and garbage disposal shrank by more than $50 billion per year. The federal share of spending on local transit shrank by more than 50%. Federal spending on new public housing collapsed entirely. And as Washington crunched the states, the states just turned around and crunched the cities. State aid to cities plummeted from 62.5% of locally generated revenues to 54.3%. The cities, like the states, have to make up the revenue somehow or go without. In either case, they too are on their own. At the same time that Washington has shirked much of its funding responsibilities, however, Congress has not been shy in imposing costs on others, mainly the local governments. New regulations designed to protect drinking water and enforce pollution laws are expected to cost billions of dollars at the local community level. There is little dispute that most of the federal government’s environmental mandates will provide benefits in the long term, but its increasing inclination to make local communities bear the burden for improvements is part of an overall trend by which Washington, in recent years, has handed off its responsibilities without the commensurate
134
Made with FlippingBook - professional solution for displaying marketing and sales documents online