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Comment by exhilaration | Hacker News Reader

Just to explain the last three paragraphs of that article, what happens in town after town is that the anti-tax folks decide that there's no need to fund a local police department when the PA State Police is obligated to take over policing. There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these towns for this service and their state reps fight any effort to put one in place. So year after year the State Police's budget grows out of control and infrastructure funds and fuel taxes are an easy way to cover the costs.

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> There's currently no mechanism for the state to charge these towns for this service

That's a poor excuse. The state police were underfunded and so they stole money from the bridge fund. They could have raised state income taxes or simply said "no" to the increased funding. Instead, because they couldn't charge people in Small town X for their police force, they charged the citizens of Pittsburg by giving them worse bridges than they paid for - to help small town X.

i'm unsure if its not a good thing to encourage local towns not to have their own police, but be policed by the state. we see many towns that basically have unprofessional police forces that are turned into revenue generation vehicles for the town. However, if one want to have the more professional state police take on more of a role, it does have to be funded and fighting against the funding is problematic.

As a PA resident, it’s interesting how other large states are able to get by just fine with fewer taxes than PA takes out of our paychecks (and adds to our receipts). Call it less of an anti tax issue, and more of a “the state needs to reign in its spending” issue.

Every day I edge closer to the conclusion that local democracy and public participation is a net negative.

The more we insulate people from the repercussions of their actions the more we get perverse behavior.

Let the towns go unpoliced. Either everything will be fine or they'll quickly refund thr police like every other city that tried that is doing.

Boy do I have a great country for you to consider

So only one level of democracy?

The loss of local journalism is definitely a contributing factor to this. Politicians are much more willing get away with stuff if they know there's not a reporter in the back of the city council meeting taking notes.

The local newspaper in my city that's been there all my life is still there, and a few months ago, I was disgusted with the national media and thought, well, I'll get a digital subscription to support local journalism.

But (and this has been my experience with other subscriptions too) I still had trouble accessing what I wanted to read. I expected the paywall would go away, but it's not that simple.

I'm pretty sure that this was because they have some sort of tiered system, but I felt cheated regardless of how it might be rationalized. Bait & switch. So I cancelled.

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