Throwing money --- and intercepting it

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Throwing money — and intercepting it

The following is from Thomas Sowell. Is Reality Optional? pp. 88 - 89.

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Throwing money — and intercepting it

ONE OF THE REASONS why throwing money at social problems doesn't work is because someone is always there to intercept it.

Both in Milwaukee and in New York, for example, more than $6000 per child is spent on education annually. In both cities, less than half of money ever reaches the school and less than a third is spent on classroom instruction.

That is one reason why pouring billions of dollars of the taxpayers money down a bottomless pit has resulted only in American schools turning some of the most expensive incompetents in the world.

Barely more than half the people employed by the New York City Board of Education are teachers. There are armies of bureaucrats, bureaucrats' assistants, and bureaucrats' cronies, on the payroll. Moreover, one third of the money that trickles down to the school goes for psychologists and counselors alone.

One of the great untold stories of our time is how psychologists have suckered so many people into thinking that shrinks are the cure for everything from losing the Super Bowl to coping with the "stress" of winning a lottery. But let's look at the bottom line: What has gotten better in American schools after we flooded them with psychologists, counselors, "facilitators" and the like?

Academic performance has certainly not improved. We have yet to see test scores as high as they were 30 years ago. It has been estimated that the average student's vocabulary today has less than half as many words as in 1945.

Maybe the students are happier, healthier, or something. But statistics on cheating, theft, vandalism, violent crime, venereal disease and teenage suicide all say no. At our leading colleges and universities, there is more racial strife than there was 20 years ago.

Educators are uncomfortable even discussing actual results. They are at their best talking a good game, full of lofty buzzwords and puffed-up jargon. As long as we keep buying it, they'll keep selling it.

Education is not the only area where throwing money at social problems results in very few completed passes. The federal government has been fighting a "war on poverty" ever since the days of Lyndon Johnson—and poverty is winning. It has been estimated that less than one-fourth of all the money spent on programs supposedly for the poor actually reaches any poor people.

Part of the money gets intercepted by bureaucrats, consultants, social workers, academic researchers and others who gather around these programs like flies around honey. More important, many programs are sold to the public as being for the poor, while the benefits spread to many middle class people, in order to build up an influential constituency to keep the programs going.

The assumption that spending more of the taxpayers' money will make things better has survived all kinds of evidence that it has made things worse. The black family—which survived slavery, discrimination, poverty, wars, and depressions—began to come apart as the federal government moved in with its well-financed programs to "help".

It's not a racial thing. In Sweden, where welfare state benefits have been far more widely available, for a much longer period of time, families are coming apart more so than in the United States. More than half the children born in Sweden are the result of unwed pregnancies.

You can destroy families in any group with welfare. In the United States, the destruction has been focussed on the poorer groups because the welfare has been focussed on the poor.

'Today, we hear all sorts of people talking about how much money the government should spend to "solve" the homeless "problem." Ask yourself this question: How much gasoline must be sprayed on a fire to put it out?

Obviously, the gasoline is far more likely to make the fire larger. But the very possibility that we are feeding a fire, rather than extinguishing it, never seems to occur to those for whom the taxpayers' money is the magic answer to all problems.

You cannot subsidize irresponsibility and expect people to become more responsible. Many of those who say otherwise, who are urging us to throw more money at social problems, are among the organized hustlers out there to intercept it if we do.

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10 May 2024