How do Mayor's run a city?
If you are elected mayor, how do you raise funds to complete construction/public work projects for your city/town? What are the streams of income? Expenses? Essentially how do Mayor's run the finances of their city/town?
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Streams of income: whatever you decide to steal from your citizens this year.
Expenses: whichever projects you need to raise your ego and also give contracts to your friends and family.
Taxation is legal. Theft isn't.
Really basic concepts.
Taxation is (legal) theft. Legal just means it is allowed by the state. It was also technically legal when Caligula fucked that guy's wife right in front of him during their wedding but I sure hope you won't be making posts saying how it is okay for emperors to fuck your wife.
I commend you for never using any roads or public transit, refusing any police, fire, or EMT assistance, swearing off all public parks, and volunteering to single handily fight ISIS without the full backing of the United States armed forces.
This is such a dumb take. At the local level taxes are mostly enacted through voter referendums. At worst they are enacted by a representative body that you helped elect. The fact that you disagree with your neighbors doesn’t make it theft.
why is this place such a haven for ancap dipshits
They're 18. I was a libertarian when I was graduating highschool too.
Luckily politics weren't so toxic back then and I didn't run around saying things like "Orange man bad" thinking they were intelligent political insights.
BRI baby! #UncleXiwillhandleit
Not well - at least in the case of bigfoot deblasio.
Watch The Wire and you'll find out
great show
Maybe I can add something here. My firm forms P3's with city governments in the North America, South America, and Europe. I can speak to the US and Canada since I only work on North America deals. This is anecdotal as I have only worked directly with about ~10 mayors and his/her staffs thus far.
We fund city wide fiber optic broadband, cellular service (4G & 5G) expansion, and augment city utility and public safety services.
The majority of the time the mayor is thinking about the types of projects and actions that will earn him/her reelection. Cities never provide any capital. The city governments do not provide any value add and tend not to understand project finance. Since our concessions are 20-30 years long, the mayors only care about how the city is going to earn money in the near-term with little to no regard for long-term planning. IE: For two different projects, the mayor and his/her advisors don't understand how the project is generating revenue and has positive NOI, but they are not receiving distributions even when we show them CFCF is negative (the city is a small GP). They don't understand that all the investors need to be paid back before the city can receive its share. They contribute nothing and expect everything.
I have worked with mayors in cities in Canada with populations of 150,000 and in counties in the US with populations more than 2,000,000. They all have about the same understanding. It blows my mind every single time dealing with their lack of competence when it comes to understanding long-term finance. I really do not understand how cities run given all the holes in their understanding except for the fact that there is a large enough bureaucracy to catch it.
Hey, like they always say, if you stack up enough pieces of Swiss cheese you are likely to plug all the holes.
TLDR: Mayors care about reelection; they focus on the short-term; they do not understand project finance; blows my mind cities can function; but in the end, bureaucracies can insulate against stupidity
Arguably city governments become more incompetent the larger the city is.
Los Angeles is categorically failing its citizens, in terms of housing costs, the homelessness crisis, employment, healthcare, traffic, public transit, and more.
To me this is an argument for more competent, intelligent, experienced people from the private sector to seek public office or spend some time applying their talents in the public sector. It did New York a lot of good to have Felix Rohatyn intimately involved with its restructuring in the 1970s because he actually had a firm understanding of public finance.
Bump. Public finance, while not as sexy as IB/DCM/etc., is still pretty interesting, would love to learn more if anyone works in this space/has a good knowledge of it.
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