Governments provide services because the market cannot provide all that are necessary in efficient amounts. Yet any policy choice involves trade-offs between efficiency and equity because some people believe they pay more in taxes than the dollar cost of the services they receive from government while others pay less than the dollar value of the services received. For example, the person who does not have school-age children may think it inequitable to pay for public education. The person who does not ride the bus may think it inequitable to subsidize public transit. As Hyman (2021) notes, “Government provision of goods and services is justified by the belief that the marginal social benefit of the services outweighs the marginal social cost” (p. 63).
In your local government Annual Budget, find a section that summarizes revenue sources and expenditures. For example, in the San Francisco budget (2014) in this week’s Learning Resources there is a section titled “Consolidated Schedule of Sources and Uses.” If you use a section of this kind in your budget, you will be able to compare and contrast income and spending for the 2 years covered by your budget. Major categories of expenditure are public protection, public works, human welfare, community health, culture and recreation, and general administration. Major sources of revenue are property taxes and other local taxes, business taxes, and transfers from state and federal government.
For this Assignment, in a 2- to 3-page paper, from the Annual Budget of your local government, do the following:
Identify the three largest areas of expenditure, e.g., public safety, social services, welfare.
Analyze how the expenditure levels for these three areas have changed over the last 2 years.
Identify the most important revenue sources and analyze how these have changed over the last 2 years.
Note: You may need to explore your local government’s website to find necessary information. For example, the City and County of San Francisco Office of the Controller’s website, http://sfcontroller.org, has a pull down menu titled “Information and Reports” that includes economic analyses and information on performance evaluations. Another pull down menu titled “SF Open Book” has a report on overall spending and revenue categories.
shortage in an economy, or in such cases – economies, as both local and multinational firms are unable to keep up with the increase in demand for sanitation products. At the standard supply and demand graph, prior to the spread of the virus, the general equilibrium theory explains how consumers interact with the sanitation market, ceteris paribus. However, with the increase in media attention on the infestation, the increase in shortage has, according to the law of supply and demand, cause prices to shoot up at a high rate, inevitably, lower-income families are unable to purchase them for their personal well-being, leading to significant welfare loss as the provision of such necessary products become limited and in high demand. Perhaps, such supply is low in regions or provinces with low income due to the Friedman Theory which states people will make decisions on consumption based on their income over time; thus, suppliers choose not to supply products at required areas, leading to biases and prejudices in where such products are supplied – all without taking into a rational account of how human behaviour may respond in such conditions. The predictable nature of human beings perhaps could allow artificial intelligence to estimate individualized demand and supply using the economic concept of game theory where it understands the current social environmental circumstances that inevitably cause individuals to decide, influencing a society’s microeconomic facets. On the contrary, it is also important to note that, very similar to those who are made aware of their biases, artificial intelligence could be fed statistical biases – which may skew the solution required to accurately target the output. Thus, AI could also have the ability to discriminate; for example, upon identifying that rural areas may have lower literacy rates, it may intensify the Lewis Turning Point situation where there is a surplus rural labour in the primary and secondary sector – hence an increasing in employment saturation of such jobs when there are other applicable job vacancies available or an economy without balanced growth policies. Despite this, when assessing the potential setbacks to using Artificial Intelligence as a data-analysis program to output an individual’s or firm’s interests, economists could perhaps considerable to say that the potential for biased data is, for now, negligible relative to describing our world using models.
In the economic impediment over 12 years ago in 2008, the global economy’s fiscal tightening motifs’ unfavourable effects were magnified, simply due to the government’s