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.

Pasadena Where?

If anyone needs proof that some major newspapers don't have enough serious stuff to write about, one might consider the New York Times' apparent fascination with a guy named James Macpherson, who has outsourced the local news coverage of his Pasadena news website to India. Today it was Maureen Dowd's turn to discuss this "horrendous" (just a little news-speak, folks) betrayal of American journalism. I had to yawn through six paragraphs before I discovered the name of this online news site, which is called Pasadena Now, and couldn't help wondering why the Times didn't provide a link to it.

Not that there is anything particularly interesting there. It's rather like the local newspapers I grew up with in Oswego County, The Fulton Patriot and the Oswego Valley News, which consisted mainly of photographs, local stories, announcements of pending events, promotion of local people and businesses, and advertisements. You know the kind of newspaper I mean-- if your high school team won a game, your picture would be in the paper a week or two later, and columns of print were devoted to publishing the local schools' honor rolls. Actually, Pasadena Now is more attractive, though not necessarily more substantial, than that. In any case, it's more colorful, and there are more bells and whistles, but I bet if you look deep enough you'll find last week's league bowling scores somewhere.

This isn't the first time Mr. MacPherson and his outsourcing have made the New York Times. Last year, it got coverage in the Times blog "Freakonomics." Could it be because journalists at the nation's flagship newspaper are worried about losing their jobs to part-time workers from Mumbai and Bangalore? No, it has to be the gently bizarre image of someone in India sitting down with various internet references to cobble together news stories for an online newspaper half a world away. According to Dowd, MacPherson pays his writers $7.50 per 1000 words to write local news stories for Pasadena Now. She quotes one of these writers, who lives in Mysore, India: “I try to do my best, which need not necessarily be correct always. Regarding Rose Bowl, my first thought was it was related to some food event but then found that is related to Sports field.”

The Rose Bowl as a food event-- I have to admit that this tickled my fancy enough to make me actually go and look at Pasadena Now and try to figure which stories were being written in India. Of course, they don't just hand you this information on a plate, but the byline "From STAFF REPORTS" appears frequently on brief local news stories, such as "Police Patrols Protect Shoppers." What these articles have in common is that they're short, and most of them are just bare facts. The writing and eccentric punctuation are about standard for newspaper writing these days. If MacPherson and newspapers like the Times hadn't made such a big deal about it, people in Pasadena probably wouldn't have noticed any difference. Well, maybe the seven employees who got fired would have noticed, but I bet no one else would have.

First Snow

Fresh snow on the leaves of a Japanese Maple tree.

Let it be recorded: On Monday, November 17, 2008, in Oswego, New York, I had to clean about four inches of heavy wet snow off my car to drive to work. Most of the snow actually fell the night before. During the day on Sunday, which was overcast and very windy, I heard ice pellets rattling against the windows from time to time, but in the evening we had a snowstorm with thunder and lightning, which I always feel is kind of eerie. This morning, with the temperatures in the low 30's, the snow was so heavy and soaking wet that it was hard to get the snowbrush to lift it off the windshield. The streets in my neighborhood had not been plowed, so there were fairly deep ruts where the tires of the cars had driven their way through the layer of snow and slush. I hate this kind of weather. The only thing worse is ice, and that, no doubt, will be coming soon enough.

Mind you, they have already had considerable snow-- measured in feet-- to the north of us. Up there on the Tug Hill Plateau their most abundant crop is snow, and the high time of the year is when the snowmobilers come to disport themselves on the trails over the fields and in the woods. Thank God I don't have to live up there. If I did, I'd have moved out long ago, not to Florida or someplace like that, but to a place where they have "normal" winters. Oswego, maybe. At least, Oswego would be fine if they would only clear the sidewalks, but people don't always do that. Where my friends live in Germany, the law requires property owners to shovel their sidewalks. Not here. And my employer, SUNY Oswego, is pretty lax about shoveling, too, which simply makes me crazy.

There are, of course, many people who would say that a normal winter in Oswego, New York is one with only eight feet of snow. That may be true, but eight feet spaced out over the four or so months of "official" winter isn't so bad. When you get eight feet of snow-- or ten or twelve-- in the course of a few days, I have to admit that it's pretty bad. In February 2007, for example, the city of Oswego got about ten feet of snow in just over a week. Further north, in the town of Redfield, they got about twelve feet. The Governor declared a state of emergency, and Oswego County, which often meant the city of Oswego, because it was more accessible, was filled with reporters from the national media like USA Today and CNN, standing in front of towering snowbanks and shivering as they reported. ABC News reported that Redfield, located perfectly on the Tug Hill Plateau at the eastern end of Lake Ontario, averages 270 inches of snow a year, and joined the other news media in explaining to the uninitiated the mysteries of lake effect snow.

The fundamental reason why the notion of a normal winter in Oswego is problematic at best is the phenomenon of lake effect snow. All of the area immediately to the east of Lake Ontario gets lake effect snow, but some places get it worse than others. Basically, the places of higher elevation downwind of the lake get the worst of the lake effect, by which is meant the Tug Hill Plateau and towns like Redfield, Boonville, and Carthage. Thankfully, most of the Tug Hill is forested public land with a small resident population. You can well imagine that most people are not lining up to live there, but it is great for hiking, camping, and fishing in the good weather. And, amazingly enough, people do travel there from other parts of New York state and out of state to use their snowmobiles in the winter. I think it's wonderful that there are some people who have a use for all that snow, as long as I don't have to be one of them.

In the meantime, I am reminding myself that it is not uncommon to get a few days of snow in the City of Oswego in November and then have practically no snow until mid January. That is what happened in the winter of 2006-2007. Of course, in February 2007 we then got ten feet of snow. But that was an anomaly, I think. I hope so anyway. I really do.