Corzine Cuts Spending on Small NJ Towns

The NYT reports.

“It’s just not fair,” said Denise Jawidzik, the business administrator in nearby Jamesburg, where officials have joined with their counterparts in Helmetta to call on Trenton to reconsider the cuts. “People are getting punished just because of where they live.”

While I'm not unsympathetic to this kind of plight, I think it's as myopic as not. For a long time now, at least since the mass adoption of the automobile, people living in rural and suburban areas have never realized the true cost of where they decide to live.

This is in part due to cheap oil and transportation costs, but for this post I want to focus on the other infrastructure costs.

In order to see whether Corzine's cuts are fair or not, an analysis needs to be run that compares the costs and benefits of all the services provided by the government across geographies. While I'm sure individual small towns have much lower absolute [government-provided] cost bases than cities', it's unclear to me whether their per capita costs are lower than cities'. E.g., you have fewer police officers in rural areas, and probably fewer per capita, but that police building is still going to cost a boatload of money to build/maintain/etc. Furthermore, cities often have more government subsidized benefits than rural areas have, such as museums, transportation and others.

I'd bet that for the services they provide and the benefits that residents accrue, small towns cost more and pay out less than urban areas. How did things get to be this way? Probably your usual dose of corruption and pandering: after all, that's what bringing home the bacon - delicious, delicious bacon - is all about.

If this is case, then Corzine is correct in cutting their budgets. If something's gotta give, and the government gets more bang for its buck in urban areas, then good for him.

The truth is the shorter distances and less space in cities have their upsides in both time and money. In a city a cop doesn't need to spend as much time traveling from one place to another. The city also needs to physically lay fewer miles of sewer pipes and as a result less maintenance needs to be performed at a lower cost and so on.

It's not that people are getting punished for where they live - it's that people need to have more realistic expectations about what they get for where they live. I don't mind my tax dollars going to subsidize someone who is poor and needs money to clothe, feed and house himself, not to mention pay for good public education and other services, but I also don't mind being stingy about subsidizing someone who wants to live out in bumblefuck and wants more for it.