Governments’ habit of spending your money to convince you to give them more money is getting ridiculous.
Governments’ habit of spending your money to convince you to give them more money is getting ridiculous.
F or weeks before the November 5 election, residents of Madison, Wis., had been inundated with campaign flyers urging them to cast their vote a particular way. But just days before the election, they received a piece of literature that was a little different; the City of Madison had sent out a tiny blue postcard urging its residents to support a $22 million referendum that would add $230 to the average property owner’s tax bill.
“Without this measure, the City will need to enact significant across-the-board budget cuts in order to comply with state law,” the postcard said.
The irony could not be any more vivid. A city claiming poverty evidently has enough money to prepare, print, and send tens of thousands of postcards begging for more cash. (Madison being a progressive enclave, the referendum passed by a two-to-one margin — the mailing likely wasn’t even necessary.)
Using taxpayer money to campaign for more taxpayer money has always been frowned upon, and some states have laws specifically forbidding it. But given that the government’s primary goals are the survival and expansion of government, the use of tax funds to pass referendums and elect big-spending politicians is often too much for government actors to resist.
Take California, where municipalities frequently hire campaign consultants to “educate” the public on why referendums are necessary. In 2017, the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors paid a San Francisco–based public relations firm $1 million to help them pass a half-cent increase in the sales tax to fund “services to the homeless.”
The firm, now known as Props and Measures, boasts on its website that it has a 90 percent success rate in running “advocacy campaigns supporting revenue measures to develop and implement strategies that secure the votes needed to win.”
The 2017 sales tax passed and was so ineffective (between 2017 and 2024, the county’s homeless population increased from 55,000 to 75,000) that Los Angeles had to pass another half-cent homelessness-aid sales tax in 2024.
After a complaint filed by a local taxpayer group, the California Fair Political Practices Commission fined Los Angeles County $1.3 million for its attempts to influence the 2017 ballot measure. But, of course, any time the county has to pay a fine, it is the taxpayers who are actually paying the penalty. So Los Angeles County citizens took two times the hit: for paying the consulting firm in the first place, and to pay the fine for using the consulting firm.
Further, the tax has brought in over $2.4 billion since it was enacted, so the return on investment is more than worth it for local governments that want to skirt the rules. What’s a million dollars here or there when breaking the law could reap billions?
Members of Congress have also recently gotten into the act. In the last election cycle, House members used over $5 million in “franking” privileges to run television advertisements in their home districts. These spots are supposed to be for constituent outreach, but more and more representatives are infusing them with political messages, such as when Representative Pat Ryan (D., N.Y.) ran an ad featuring a portion of a floor speech he gave, ending with a narrator intoning, “Congressman Pat Ryan: Standing against corporate greed, standing up for us.”
Oftentimes, municipalities and counties hire lobbyists with the specific goal of begging other governments for taxpayer money. According to OpenSecrets, local governments were near the top of lobbying industries in 2023, spending $122 million to convince the federal government to send them more money. (The top governments engaging in lobbying activity were the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and — what a surprise — Los Angeles County.)
So while big businesses have to spend millions of their own dollars on lobbyists and lawyers, governments get to spend taxpayer money to do their bidding. In effect, people are paying taxes so their governments can enact policies to get them to pay more in taxes.
Of course, politicians spending money to aid their own reelection is as old as the republic itself. Spending money to activate the erogenous zones of much sought after voting blocs is taken for granted in American politics; when Joe Biden promised to “forgive” student loan debt (read: get taxpayers to fork over billions to pay for it instead), he might as well have been wearing a backward cap and a Chappell Roan T-shirt while holding a “Vote for me, fellow kids” sign. In 2021, Democrats believed the $1.9 trillion “American Rescue Plan,” with its direct payments of $1,400 to individuals and its gift of $350 billion to state and local governments, would excite grateful voters. But instead, it angered them by juicing inflation and very well may have cost Kamala Harris the presidency.
One might think it is strictly liberals who use the public trough to put their thumb on the scales in elections, but Republicans are more than happy to do so. In late October, Florida governor Ron DeSantis held a state-funded press conference urging his state’s citizens to vote against a referendum that would have thrown out a state law generally banning abortions after six weeks. (The referendum, which required a 60 percent “yes” vote to pass, failed.)
DeSantis was never shy about using taxpayer money to further his political aims. Last year, the Florida legislature approved $10 million in public funding for the governor’s plan to round up illegal immigrants, put them on planes, and ship them to Democratic-run locales. While not officially a campaign expense, the fact that it occurred as DeSantis was gearing up to enter a heated Republican presidential primary made it arguably a taxpayer-funded media stunt.
For both parties, government is now a self-perpetuating machine. If you can control it, you can use the public funds within your remit to convince voters that society will collapse if you aren’t solely in charge of taxpayer money. The cycle is clear: As government grows, its tentacles extend ever further into citizens’ lives, making all of us more dependent on government spending.
As H. L. Mencken said, “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by an endless series of hobgoblins, most of them imaginary.” For as long as America survives, politicians will be inventing imaginary problems only they can solve, but it shouldn’t be up to taxpayers to fund their gambit.