Preventing or Eliminating Planned Deficits: Restructuring Political Incentives
研究美国城市应对税收基础侵蚀和支出膨胀导致的赤字问题，分析当前政治激励如何助长赤字，并提出重构激励以促进平衡预算的方案。
In the past few years, many United States cities have been coping with tax base erosion, and other revenue problems. Rapid inflation in expenditures has exaggerated the problem.' As a consequence, many cities have been faced with potential deficits and have had to make a series of difficult political and administrative decisions to close the widening gap between revenues and expenditures.' The political incentives in most urban politics are overwhelming in favor of either raising new revenues or denying the existence of a gap, while deficits begin to build and budgetary practices become less conservative and more creative. Once a strategy of obfuscation has begun, it becomes difficult to know how large or important deficits are. As long as incentives support obfuscation and the magnitude of the problem is unknown, there is little motivation for politicians to return to more conservative, balanced budgets. This paper discusses the possibility of restructuring the incentives for politicians, so that it would be more to their advantage to maintain or restore a balanced budget. The paper outlines the incentive system as it currently operates; suggests some changes in these incentives, and describes the kind of incentives actually operating in a case study city that eliminated large deficits without being forced to do so by its state government or by imminent default.