Over a generation, Whitewater’s big-ticket public spending (where big ticket means a million or more per project in a city of about fifteen-thousand) has come with two, often-contradictory justifications: (1) that residents needed to spend so much because Whitewater was the very center of things, or (2) that residents needed to spend so much to assure that Whitewater would keep up (something hardly necessary for a city that was already the very center of things). Over the last thirty years’ time, the city’s residents have spent hundreds of millions on public projects.
(This tiny town might have saved up enough over the last thirty years to buy a gently-used B-2 bomber. New ones go for $700 million each, but a used one would be less, and no one – no one – ignores a city with a genuine B-2. Nearby towns like Palmyra or Fort Atkinson wouldn’t be laughing if Whitewater had its own strategic bomber.)
We also have a public university in town, supported with hundreds of millions in state funds spent to keep the campus going. The claim that the state doesn’t reimburse the city for the full cost of services in a university town skirts the clear truth that the university brings more to the city than she costs.
One hears now from town officials what any reasonable person would have surmised years ago: that the City of Whitewater and Walworth County are low-growth communities (“we do not have a lot of growth like a lot of communities, like the those adjacent to Madison or Milwaukee”). That’s disappointingly right – Whitewater is a low-growth community, as is Walworth County.
And yet, and yet, much of this spending was meant to spur growth, either to catapult Whitewater to new heights or assure her supposed position in the stratosphere. Despite all that’s been spent, here Whitewater is – belatedly but admittedly – economically stagnant.
If proximity to Milwaukee or Madison were the key to success, and if (as is true) Whitewater’s still at the same place on the map as a generation ago, then why did anyone bother touting the city for all these years?
It’s because neither vast public spending for a small town nor proximity to Milwaukee & Madison were assurances of economic success. It’s because public spending on whatever comes along accomplishes little, nothing, or worse than nothing (worse than nothing – that is, both stagnation and debt). It’s because closeness to Milwaukee or Madison is not necessary for success. (There was a time when policymakers insisted we would succeed precisely because we were relatively close to those bigger cities; now, when this town is obviously struggling, the same distance to the same destinations has become an excuse.)
We’ve reached – and we reached them long ago, really – the limits of public spending as a so-called catalyst for private growth. It’s not impossible that such schemes might initially work elsewhere, but it’s next to impossible that more public money in a small town already saturated with public money will achieve solid, sustainable growth for residents.
American prosperity rests on private enterprise and initiative. A useful project over the next few months will be to outline ways to liberalize Whitewater’s economy.