Even with the fate of the $371 million South End light rail line up in the air, Charlotte transit officials have just unveiled plans for a Northern leg with a price tag of at least $230 million. Clearly someone might want to make sure such plans make sense. But judging from the reaction Patrick Ballantine received for doing just that the answer is no.

When the Republican candidate for governor suggested that his administration would not willy-nilly underwrite Charlotte’s rail transit dreams, he was blasted for being out-of-touch, and an obstructionist to solutions to Mecklenburg transportation needs. Quite apart from the specifics of dubious mass transit projects, such criticism fundamentally misunderstands how our federal system must function to serve us well.

Our multi-layered government can combine broad burden-sharing with targeted, case-specific solutions to legitimate needs, such as the social safety net which is a patch-work of local, state, and federal dollars. Spreading the costs of such efforts can make them both more manageable and more responsive to real-world problems.

But the flip-side of this approach is the blurring of lines of responsibility, both in execution of the mission and budgetarily. Especially budgetarily. If a $300 million project or program is only represented by a $100 million expenditure at any one level of government, the temptation for policy-makers is to discount the overall cost of the project down to just their share. In fact, it is common for the $200 million coming from other sources to be viewed as “free money” by government officials.

This works from both the top-down and the bottom-up. Congress loves to pass programs that require state and local matching-funds and then take credit for the overall expenditure. And state and local officials routinely trumpet securing federal dollars for local projects. This overlooks that all the tax dollars come from the same source: Taxpayers.

And for taxpayers the taxes they pay – federal, state, or local – all come the same paycheck. The distinguishing feature of taxes is that they take dollars out of the private sector and pull them into the public sector. Exactly where in the public sector and under whose authority is important, but not more so than the fact that those dollars leave the private economy in the first place.

With that distinction firmly in mind, budgeting decisions might begin to look a little different to policy-makers. The question might not be “How can I best wrangle some state or federal money to plug holes in my budget?” but instead “How can I justify taking a dollar out of someone’s pocket to do what I want to do?”

That’s seems to be the crux of Ballantine’s point. He evidently feels constrained to make sure scarce state dollars are spent on projects that make sense on their own terms, not just because the Federal Transit Administration might throw a few hundred million dollars at the idea.

Viewing every single dollar spent on a government program as precious may seem hopelessly quaint, but it is the only way to cut through the matching-funds smokescreen and face public policy choices head on.