1 - Introduction: American Politics in 3D

Summary

Over the past 50 years, a new government was created somewhere in the United States roughly every 18 hours. From cities and counties to school districts and transit authorities, there are now nearly 90,000 governments in the United States. The vast majority of them have the power to tax.

The proliferation of local governments has resulted largely from the layering of jurisdictions on top of one another. Territorially overlapping, single-function jurisdictions, including 35,000 special districts and 13,500 school districts, today constitute the majority of local governments. Collectively, these single-function jurisdictions have more civilian employees than the federal government and spend more than all city governments combined. As overlapping jurisdictions pile up, citizens increasingly receive services from–and pay taxes to–a multiplicity of independent governments.

The vertical layering of governments with independent tax authority raises fundamental issues of representation and taxation, which form the two major themes of this book. Representation in single-function governments operates through elected governing boards, which together employ a total of 173,000 local officials. Because these jurisdictions overlap, individual citizens today are represented by dozens–in some cases even hundreds–of local elected officers. Participating in so many elections places unprecedented demands on citizens. A citizen of Cook County, Illinois, for instance, would have to go to the polls on six separate dates over the course of four years in order to vote for each of the 70 different local officials that represent her.