I worked closely with local government for a 12 years now. This is just a small rural county (15k residents maybe) in the midwest US, so not much more than cow

I worked closely with local government for a 12 years now. This is just a small rural county (15k residents maybe) in the midwest US, so not much more than cows, fields and meth. I can't think of a single person I worked with and talked about taxes with that wasn't for increasing taxes slightly here. Not too much, but something more than what they have been. I went to whatever meetings I could, wrote to the newspaper, and every single time I got to the board it was immediately shot down without much of a discussion. It's political suicide that none of them want to try, even the ones who are 75+ years old and have been "wanting to get away from this shit for 25 years." It's a power trip for them. Instead of increasing taxes, they voted to spend 1 million plus to fix up downtown to get people from outside the county to come in to spend money. Now a lot of those businesses are still failing, younger people keep leaving and I still get shit on for suggesting the idea. But change doesn't happen overnight... At least, that's what I tell myself anyway.