This is the Cato Daily Podcast for Monday, January 6, 2014.

I'm Caleb Brown.

You may not have heard of special taxing districts, but they're delegates of your state government able to lay and collect taxes.

And they do so largely out of the public eye.

Steve Levinsky is a senior economist in the Goldwater Institute.

He says special taxing districts make state deaths seem smaller

than they really are.

I'm from Kentucky.

And Kentucky has a very high number of small geographically based groups that are called special taxing districts.

And you say that this is a much broader phenomenon. I always heard that there were a problem, they were largely

unaccountable, but you're saying this is a much larger problem for states.

This is a broad phenomenon among all 50 states.

We know this because the Census Bureau tallies up numbers every five to seven years called

the Census of Governments.

What they do is they count the number of governmental units that exist at the local level, county and city level,

and even at the state level, though those don't change because we have 50 states and they have 50 state

governments.

But the number of governments that have grown at the local and county, city and county level, have grown dramatically since the

1950s and they're largely being driven by the creation of these special taxing

districts and a lot of red states have this in fact in greater numbers than some potentially blue or purple

states.

And so some of the question comes in, how much government spending is being driven by the

...