Civic education · rick4treasurer.org/micro · July 2026
Macroeconomics is the story of the whole economy — national debt, interest rates, inflation. (That's what The Money Map tracks.) Microeconomics is the close-up: how households, businesses, and local governments make decisions when there isn't enough money, land, water, or time to do everything. It's the economics you can see from your own front porch — and it's the lens I use when I look at how public money is handled in Chelan County.
None of this requires a textbook. Microeconomics is mostly a handful of honest questions, asked consistently. Here are the ones I think every taxpayer — and every public official — should carry around.
Every dollar, acre, and hour can only be used once. Choosing one thing always means giving up another.
Locally: Chelan County has a fixed budget and a fixed amount of buildable land between the mountains and the river. A dollar spent maintaining one road is a dollar not spent on another; an acre used one way can't be used another way at the same time.
The real cost of any choice is the best alternative you passed up — not just the price tag.
Locally: when public money sits idle and un-invested, the cost isn't zero — it's the interest it could have safely earned. When any property sits unused for years, the cost is what that land could have produced or paid in the meantime. Good stewardship means counting those invisible costs too.
Prices aren't arbitrary — they're signals that tell buyers and sellers what's scarce and what's wanted. When prices are allowed to work, they quietly coordinate thousands of decisions nobody could plan centrally.
Locally: orchard land prices, housing rents, and hourly wages in the valley all carry information about what our community needs more of. Rising rents, for example, are the market's way of saying housing is scarce relative to the people who want to live here.
People respond to rewards and penalties — reliably, and sometimes in ways rule-writers don't expect. If you want to predict how a policy will actually work, look at what it rewards, not what it intends.
Locally: late-payment penalties, senior tax exemptions, building-permit fees — each one changes behavior. The question to ask of any local rule is simple: what does this actually encourage?
Some people and businesses can shrug off a price increase; others are operating so close to the margin that a small change pushes them out entirely. Economists call that sensitivity "elasticity."
Locally: a fee or rent increase that a large company barely notices can be the final straw for a family farm stand, a small repair shop, or a first-time homebuyer. Sound policy asks who is actually carrying the weight of a change — not just the average.
Competition disciplines prices and quality. Where there's only one seller, one landlord, or one buyer in town, that discipline disappears — and whoever holds the power sets the terms.
Locally: in a small county, some markets are naturally thin — one hospital district, a handful of industrial landlords, limited waterfront. Where competition is scarce, transparency and public scrutiny have to do the work competition would normally do.
Every action has a visible first effect and quieter downstream effects. The mark of careful economic thinking — what economists since Bastiat have called "the seen and the unseen" — is following the chain past step one.
Locally: a decision that helps one district, employer, or neighborhood can shift costs onto others in ways that never appear in the headline. The discipline is to ask: and then what happens?
Questions, corrections, or a concept you'd like explained? I'd enjoy hearing from you — this page will grow with the conversation.