Representative Carey recently sent out an email about his supposed accomplishments. A sentence from it reads “In the City of Obetz, I was pleased to help secure approximately $1.9 million to replace the city’s aging water tower.”

This is representative of everything that I think is wrong with Washington and our political system, and the reasons that I entered this race.

The federal government is meant to perform its duties within the scope of enumerated powers. Responsibility for local infrastructure historically did, and today should, lie with state and local governments. However, as federal grants for local services have increased, the incentive structure has changed. States, counties, and municipalities have increasingly abrogated their duty to consider carefully what public works and services should be paid for and how. Instead, they go with hat in hand to DC, which funds projects without considering broader questions of whether the localities can afford to maintain them, whether their societal benefits justify their costs, or why exactly taxpayers on the other side of the country should be forced to pay for things which are essentially local and have no substantial effect on interstate commerce. Rather than compete to draw taxpayers and entrepreneurs to their jurisdictions with sound policies, low taxes, and cost-effective services, they compete for handouts from DC.

This causes obvious harm to our political processes. Incumbents make the argument (as Rep. Carey did in his email) that their seniority and connections make them better capable of steering federal largesse to their districts than their challengers would be if elected. Questions of national interest, personal integrity, and principles of liberty are pushed aside. Rather than asking what is best for all Americans or what they can do for their country, voters are encouraged to ask “what’s in it for me”. Powerful members of Congress sit in office forever, even as they grow out of touch or cognitively decline, because they can “bring home the bacon”.

It is part of a broader picture of a DC government that is trying to do everything, not merely what the Constitution says it should. This is unaffordable, which is one reason national debt is over 100% of GDP and the deficit is $2 trillion. But more than that, it creates the mentality I spoke of elsewhere that control of DC is far too important to risk handing to “the other side” and so any nastiness, trickery, or illegality is justified to keep that power and avoid national calamity. That every election feels like Armageddon today is not something that just happened; it is a direct result of all these trends. When decisions about your community’s services and indeed level of wealth are made not in your town hall or state capital, but in Congress and the White House, it becomes only natural to focus on the elections which determine who holds power in those places.

I present an alternative: end these grants, and cut the taxes that fund them.

Because here is what Mike Carey doesn’t say in his email: for every Obetz water tower, there are thousands of other projects just like it, scattered all over the country, which are paid for by taxes on Ohioans and residents of Obetz. Most do nothing for us. We should not be forced to pay for infrastructure in states too fiscally irresponsible or economically dysfunctional to pay for it themselves. They need to have incentives to fix their governance so those with the ability to pay substantial taxes will want to live there, which they will not do as long as the DC government, i.e., we the federal taxpayers are bailing them out. They need to decide for themselves what to build and how to fund it, and the 50 states and thousands of municipalities can try different things and see what works both generally and for local residents with their distinct cultures.

My final pitch to you, then, is not to send more money from DC. It is to keep that money from going to DC in the first place.