On Nov. 8, voters where I live in Fairfax, Va., will be asked to approve general obligation bonds to finance subway maintenance, park renovations, and other run-of-the-mill local spending. There will be hundreds of similar questions on ballots across the country to issue billions of dollars in new debt.
Voters typically approve state and local bonds by large margins. Bond Buyer data show that bond approval rates in presidential election years have been more than 80 percent. Apparently, voters think that there are prudent and practical reasons for governments to issue general obligation bonds. But there usually aren’t.
Using debt allows politicians to claim credit for spending while evading responsibility for the resulting higher taxes, which hit citizens down the road. By putting bonds on the ballot, politicians are really asking voters to hike taxes, to enrich finance industry middlemen, and to make government budgets more complex and opaque.
Read the rest by Chris Edwards at the Cato Institute.
