The Austerity Class is Wrong: Budget Cuts Hurt Our Economy

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6. The other side to this argument is ...

large bloated state and town governments that overlap and provide redundant services. RI is a perfect example - I live on an island with three towns each with a population less than 20K. Each town has fewer than 2500 students and student populations are dropping. Yet we have three school districts with three separate organizations. State wide there are 38 separate school districts - there are many single school districts in America that have more students then all of RI. And it is so damned wasteful.

The second issue is municipal pensions. That is what killing cities in RI. The city of Providence is going broke. Several decades ago the corrupt mayor made a deal with the city unions that resulted in automatic annual increases in pension of 6 percent. 20 years of compounding later the city finds more and more of its budget going to.pensions. We are a high tax low income state so there is not enough new sources of revenue to pay for it all.

And third, there are unnecessary government workers. RI, for example, has a entire organization devoted to nuclear safety and regulation despite there being no reactors in the state. The bigger issue is too many administrators and not enough workers. They could collapse the organizational tree, consolidate departments and still retail all the skilled workers. However many of those management jobs are patronage plums that politicians want to keep to reward their supporters.