[rayiner]

“Starve the beast” is a rhetorical boogeyman. Conservatives tried it, and we just decided to run a structural deficit instead. Nobody’s budget ever gets cut. CDC’s budget, for example, has tripled since 1992, adjusted for inflation.

But my point is, even if you think that phenomenon actually exists in practice rather than theory, shouldn’t Democrat-run state and local-level places be a counter-example? School, police, transit, etc. are all mainly state-level services. In places like Illinois and New York and California, it’s Democrats that set the taxes and Democrats that set the budgets and Democrats that oversee spending. In those places, you should see a marked difference between federal services (where big bad Republicans have a say) and state and local services (where it’s all controlled by a one-party Democratic system). But you don’t.