Tiebout and the current Congress

With the new $1-3.5 trillion infrastructure bill being debated in congress, I thought back to Tiebout’s theory of local expenditures, as well as the political science theory of devolution, which similarly to Tiebout theorizes that governments make better decisions, both with expenditure and legislation, the more proximal they are to the people they affect. This theory would suggest moving government power from the Federal government to states, and from states to localities.

Knowing the tendencies of the current Congress and the Biden administration, it would be reasonable to conclude that localizing expenditure is not one of their priorities, but I would like to contrast the infrastructure bill with another bill that was passed into law in may that does focus on local expenditures.

This bill grants $315 Billion to states and localities in order for them to help remedy their communities’ issues coming out of the COVID pandemic and recession. I believe that Congress and the Biden administration were forced to realize the merits of Tiebout and Devolution in this issue, as the vast different localities all across our country need to spend money in different ways in order to for Federal assistance to succeed in its goal of repairing localities and local economies.

The last point I would like to make is to contrast the amounts that Congress and the President allocated to localized relief vs a federally administered infrastructure package which all proponents will be pointing to on the campaign trail to get themselves re-elected. Setting aside the issues at hand in each of these bills, I conclude that our current politicians only care a fraction as much about Tiebout’s useful theory as they do about being able to take credit for solving problems rather than passing the credit down to Government actors at a lower level.