[panarky]

Taken to the extreme, you get Vallejo, California.

Great article by Michael Lewis on how healthcare and retirement costs grow to consume such a large share of a city's budget that very little is left for actual public services.

  Eighty percent of the city’s budget—and the lion’s share of the claims that had
  thrown it into bankruptcy—were wrapped up in the pay and benefits of public-safety
  workers... The public-safety workers thought that the city was out to screw
  them on their contracts; the citizenry thought that the public-safety
  workers were using fear as a tool to extort money from them... the police and
  fire departments have been cut in half; some number
  of the citizens ... say they no longer felt safe in their own homes. All
  other city services had been reduced effectively to zero. “Do you know
  that some cities actually pave their streets? That’s not here.”

http://www.vanityfair.com/business/features/2011/11/michael-...

(Starting on page 4)