Federal revenue sharing and CETA masked cities’ unmanageable payroll obligations

Evidence

The federal role in this aspect of the fiscal crisis is worth noting. Funds available through counter-cyclical revenue sharing and the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act (CETA) underwrote city payrolls for several years. This helped many cities avoid confronting the enormity of their financial obligations to street-level bureaucrats. — Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy, 1285

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to histories of 1970s urban fiscal federalism; a specific institutional mechanism that delayed rather than solved retrenchment.