Have you ever played Sim City? It's a computer game where you start with a plot of land, and you try to build a respectable city with housing, businesses, industry, power supply, airport, roads and railroads, even a sports arena. Seems simple enough, actually, and I could spend hours playing it. I found there were some tricks to being successful. If you built a sports arena too early, you ran out money and had to raise taxes. Raise the taxes too high, or leave them elevated too long, and all sorts of things went wrong; industry moved away, businesses died, and houses became empty and dilapidated. It's no fun trying to recover from that.
Not enough police stations? Crime runs rampant. Not enough fire stations? You run the risk of the Great Chicago Fire. And every time you build one of those necessities, your revenue has to cover the increase in salaries, upkeep and so on. It becomes a balancing game, really, to keep growing and still manage to supply the expected services.
Perhaps a few more politicians should spend a few weeks playing that game. Perhaps they'd figure out that if you build an unnecessary sports arena, people get upset. That if you ask the day-to-day city employees to forego cost-of-living wages for several years (while those in the mayor's and city council's offices got some pretty whopping raises), you have started to choke your own revenue sources, because those day-to-day workers number thousands of families who would like to buy more than they currently can, while the dozen who got those whopping raises aren't likely to make up the difference.
Maybe they'd learn to THINK about the decisions they make, before they make them.
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