Since moving to a new town three years ago, I have become aware of how municipal bonds are a SUPREME ripoff of taxpayers! I have tried searching internet for this phenomena, and there are only vague references to it; almost all links that show up are about investing in them, not about what a ripoff to the taxpayers they are! Where I live in NY, I found that at least one multi-million dollar bond was passed more than 20 years ago (still trying to find out if it was even voted on; I suspect it was just passed through a backroom deal between a private utility company and the county government officials) to pay for connection of a new group of customers to a municipal water supply. The original bond resulted in 402 property owners paying for this bond, which increases annual property taxes by about $600 per property owner! (the water isn't even fit to drink, so we have to supplement it with bottled water. All together, we are paying equivalent to about $140/month for water!) Cities all over the country use these bonds to pay for things, while passing on the cost to the taxpayers, who are essentially just paying the interest on the bonds, for decades (just like a home mortgage, for the first half or more of a loan, payments almost go exclusively to interest, rather than principal). In my local case, the private company that runs water supply systems all over our county, pretends they are a government entity. The project they passed at least one bond to cover appears to have actually cost about half of what they claimed, meaning the bond was just a cover to pad their budget. I urge everyone here to look at your tax records to see if you are also being ripped of by one or more bond issues of the past.