The main problem is, revenue and spending are rarely done by the same people. The UK can blame the Scottish Parliament on reckless spending, and be forced to r

The main problem is, revenue and spending are rarely done by the same people. The UK can blame the Scottish Parliament on reckless spending, and be forced to raise taxes. A local government can recklessly spend (or neglect infrastructure), and force the Scottish to bail them out. Should a state government fight to create jobs (even if it annoys special interest groups), or just rely on welfare from the federal government? If there's a government that is in charge of major infrastructure, health, education, social welfare, and taxes, then there's far less buck passing. States spend the big bucks, so states should be responsible for raising the big bucks. The other problem is that people only care about the highest level of government. Probably because it's more efficient for news organisations to only report on the Federal level (since the story will be more widely read). Look at the US. It seems that virtually everything gets blamed on Obama or the House, despite the fact that the real decisions are generally done at the state level, with far less scrutiny, because it's cheaper for the newspapers to just send a single correspondent to Washington, and report on what's going on there. I don't even know the current Premier (governor, in US terms) of my state. Not since a "memory lapse" in front of a corruption inquiry forced the last one out a few months ago, after the previous party lost a string of premiers also due to corruption - I just can't keep up. So there's two problems - no-one cares about anything other than the top level of politics (since the papers are all national now, and it's more efficient to just look at what happens at the Federal level), and there's too much buck passing between the level of government that has the money, and the level of government that spends it.