Are Government Spending Programs a Waste? Who Cares?

FDR's Works Progress Administration employed a lot of artists, so why not give a chunk of money to the National Endowment for the Arts?

While President Obama and all the members of Congress make themselves look foolish wrangling over the "stimulus package," and executives in the banking and financial industry keep giving their employees bonuses and riding around in corporate jets, and while Rush Limbaugh, the Loser-in-Chief, keeps braying that he hopes the Obama administration is a failure, you still can't help asking yourself whether most government spending programs are indeed a waste.

At least, I can't help asking myself that question, and my worries got a major boost this week as I listened to a presentation by a person who worked in a particular state educational program. I don't want to say anything bad about this person, so let's just say it was one of those situations where the state government had recognized that not enough students majored in certain important academic disciplines. The point of the program, as far as I can make out, is to get more people to study these subjects and give both emotional and material support to students who do. The problem is that not enough students have materialized to take advantage of the program. What does one do then? Well, one could re-assess the goal and decide it was bad. Or one could re-assess the program and decide it was faulty. If the goal is worthy but the program has flaws, one could work to fix those flaws so the program would work better. Right?

Not exactly, because there is another choice, a very common "Plan B" for government programs, which is to keep the program as it is and just reinterpret who it applies to, so you have enough people enrolled to keep the program going and spend the money allocated to it. And that is what the education program in question was obviously doing. This happens so often that it makes me want to tear my hair out, or at least tear somebody's hair out. Why is it that failing programs are not assessed and, if needed, corrected or eliminated?

I hope you don't expect me to have an answer to this question, other than to say that our government doesn't operate in a rational way. Maybe it's inertia-- once you set the old ball rolling, it continues to roll. In this example, it even rolls uphill. If I were in charge of it, something would have changed already, but I'm not sure anyone knows what happens to a lot of the taxpayer money that is spent by various governments every year.

I'm also not sure how to determine which spending is "good" spending and which isn't. If you are a Republican, any spending that doesn't benefit the rich or "the base" is bad spending. If you are a Democrat, nearly all spending is good spending, but spending on the so-called "liberal agenda" is the best spending. Honestly, I don't care if Congress gives the National Endowment for the Arts $50 million in the stimulus package. It probably won't be used any more wastefully than any other money that is included in the bill. But I really don't understand why one would cut out the $16 billion for K-12 school construction. Hey, we've got some of those "shovel-ready" school projects here in Oswego County, and we could use both the jobs and the schools. And even though the states are wasteful, they need that $40 billion that the Senate cut out of the stimulus package to help keep from going bankrupt. Yes, a lot of it will be wasted, but some of it will help, so keep it in.

Of course, you have already seen where my twisted logic is taking me. Yes, government spending programs tend to be wasteful, and yes, once they come into being they never seem to be fixed or eliminated, no matter how flawed they are. Yes, indeed. But guess what? The members of Congress may expect applause for proposing to forgo their next scheduled pay raise, but it won't help anybody, and nobody is going to applaud. Just get off the dime and spend the goddamn money already, and let's cross our fingers and hope that some of it does some good.