alt Hacker NewsI don’t disagree with what you are saying. But the rise in spending per capita, even if you adjust for inflation or population growth or other factors, doesn’t make sense.
I agree the demand drives up certain costs like housing. But those are in the private markets. But I don’t understand is what the state government and local governments are spending all of the money on. And there are certainly some prominent wasteful programs such as the high-speed rail project or various programs for homelessness. I expect there’s more of those kinds of waste.
In the end, I think simply giving people money is an effective way to make society better. I’m not against the taxation as much as the low return for the additional spending that has happened in the last few decades.
It looks like the increase in spending has come from expansion of Medicaid, K-12 education, housing programs and homelessness programs.
I can't speak to the Medicaid expansion or K-12 funding that much, but I do know that the spending on housing programs have been a boondoggle, mostly to fund more first-time purchasers chasing after the same fixed supply of housing, driving up prices even more. And the homelessness problem is created by the refusal to allow housing to be built. Even the supposed successes, like SB 79, have been minor, and not allowed much more building at all. And in more conservative places like Southern LA, state laws attempting to force cities to permit more housing have been met with extreme resistance, even for the small gains that the state laws make.
For K-12 spending, that's been a disaster ever since Prop 13 gutted property tax systems and forced the state to step in to make up the difference. And Prop 13 is at the core of the housing problem as well, incentivizing underuse of land by giving such massive tax breaks to those who stay in a massive house after they have an empty nest (mostly fixed very recently), and inducing severe tax penalties to those who would like to stay in the same location but build a bunch more housing (like Greece's polykatoikias, which solved Athen's severe housing crunch...).
And high housing costs means that all labor is far more expensive than it would be otherwise, which makes building the housing expensive, which makes it difficult to expand the workforce to build housing, etc. etc. etc. Lack of housing is at the core of all rising costs in California, and the bad policies such as Libertarian Prop 13 and NIMBYs are most of it.