GET WOKE, GO BROKE: The Music City Meltdown: A decade ago Nashville’s rise seemed inevitable, but fiscal recklessness left the city ill-prepared to absorb the pandemic’s economic blows.
For more than a decade, Nashville, Tenn., has been one of America’s hippest and fastest-growing cities. Anchored by the country-music industry and boosted by a hospitable state tax climate, the city and surrounding region attracted businesses and residents. While its music scene made it a tourist mecca, Nashville also lured a generation of college-educated transplants, earning a position as one of the country’s new “brainpower cities.”
These days Nashville is making its way onto other, less distinguished lists. The Institute for Truth in Accounting recently ranked it one of the country’s five worst “sinkhole” cities, with $22,000 in debt per resident. Its bonded debt alone has increased by more than $1.25 billion in 10 years. City leaders have used deficit financing to balance Nashville’s books and spent much of the city’s reserve funds. The Tennessee comptroller has threatened a state takeover, and even the Biden administration’s lavish stimulus isn’t enough to plug Nashville’s budget hole. Amid all this, angry local groups are trying to spur a special election to roll back a gigantic property tax increase. What was once called a miracle in Music City increasingly looks like a meltdown.
That’s quite a dubious record of achievement for a city with enviable economic growth. Rebounding robustly from the 2008-09 recession, greater Nashville gained nearly 300,000 jobs between 2010 and early 2020, an almost 40% increase. Employment in its hospitality industry expanded by 53% as developers added thousands of hotel rooms. Financial-services jobs grew by 46.9%, while professional services employment leapt by 69%. By March 2020, Nashville boasted an unemployment rate of only 3.4%.
With economic growth came more government revenue. Sales-tax collections increased by $200 million, or more than 70%, in a decade. Receipts from other fees and levies grew even faster. Nashville’s main tax, its property levy, increased more slowly. A state law limits the effect of rising property values on taxes, but even so the city’s total budget expanded over a decade by 50% to $2.33 billion.
Still, Nashville had trouble making do. Its leaders cultivated an ambition to make it a world-class city. Nashville built bright, shiny new things with debt. It spent more than $600 million to construct the Music City Center with bonds financed by hotel taxes and other fees. City leaders also built a minor-league baseball stadium for $91 million and a downtown amphitheater that cost $52 million. Now they have pledged city debt to help construct a $275 million soccer stadium.
No amount of money is enough when your city is run by shitty leftist politicians. And that’s been Nashville for at least a decade.