Welcome back to the Ten Blocks podcast. This is Brian Anderson, the editor of City Journal.

Joining me on the show today is

Sarah Anzia. She's an associate professor of public policy and political science at the University of

California, Berkeley. She studies American politics with an emphasis on state and local

governments, elections, and interest groups. She's written for City Journal in the Washington Post, among other

publications, and her work widely appears in scholarly journals. She's the author of local interests,

politics, policy, and interest groups in U.S. city governments, and timing and turnout,

how off-cycle elections favor organized groups. Today we're going to

discuss her essay Stranglehold, which appears in our recent special issue devoted to California,

entitled, Can California Be Golden Again? And her essay examines the power that public employee

unions hold over California's municipalities and some of the

consequences of that. So Sarah, thanks very much for coming on 10 blocks.

Thanks so much for having me. It's a pleasure.

So many California cities and school districts, as you note in your essay, spend more than they

receive in revenue.

A sharp rise in the cost of compensating public employees makes up a big portion of many

local government's budgets and a growing portion of those local budgets.

And so this is really has a significant part to

play in the spending deficits that a lot of the municipalities are looking at. Um, you know,

public employee unions have a, uh, a real interest in maintaining those costs, you write. And their

influence over a local politics and government is enormous. So, you know,

one question is, why has the cost of compensating public employees outpaced revenue growth to such

...