People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

So not only is the cost of service to be thought of, but the quantity of services.

The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.

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robswc an hour ago | parent | next [-]

> People, as a rule, do not want less service. Services generally function like a ratchet, where once one has been added it is incredibly difficult to get rid of.

Makes sense, totally agree... however I don't think generally citizens want to pay _more_ taxes... or at least eventually there's a point where they say enough is enough.

https://www.kut.org/politics/2025-11-05/austin-tx-prop-q-fai...

> The same happens within services too. The police got a helicopter 5 years ago, are they going to turn down another one, or are they going to explain why the new one needs to be more expensive with more capability? Multiply that across every agency.

This should be stopped. Creates exactly the sort of ratcheting effect you described. Mind boggling to me. I've been in-charge of small budgets and buying more stuff after making more money is a big decision, not taken lightly because we can't assume present returns will match future returns.

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c0balt an hour ago | parent [-]

> we can't assume present returns will match future returns.

Funnily enough, after spending some time in public service albeit in another country, genereally budgeting for public agencies works almost inverse to this.

If you get allocated X budget but only spend 0.8 * X, then next time you will almost always get <X. This is in itself reasonable, you don't get more allocation than you need. In practice though this means you are incentivised to not save money from your allocation iff you expect to need more in the next period or do not want to lose your allocation (maybe a renovation or smth similiar has been pushed back due to external factors).

	▲	robswc 36 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, always felt this was ridiculous. There has to be a better way to solve this.

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gpt5 an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think this misses the important point of how governments tend to get less efficient at scale, and over time.

You could pay more and still get worse services.

	▲	robswc 38 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Oh for sure, just ask the residents of Austin if they feel services have improved over the last 10, 20 years! I imagine there will be quite a bit of bias and "rose-tinted glasses" but generally speaking I don't think they feel the price tag is reflective of the services they're getting. On that note, not sure why people seem to think of governments as some sort of subscription they pay for and get services in return... but perhaps that is a discussion for another day :)