Our Charlotte-based colleague Jeff Taylor certainly does in his analysis of a proposed 12 percent spending increase ? and accompanying property-tax hike ? in Mecklenburg County:
The entire point of a priority ranking is to provide a guide on how to allocate scarce resources. But if you are going to always find money for low priority items, it is a waste of time. In fact, the resulting process strongly builds in a bias toward ever-higher spending levels as budget choices become unhinged from reality. The result is spending on auto-pilot with tax hikes the first-resort to feed the machine.
Yep.
