It's Easy to Spend
“We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”
—President John F. Kennedy in 1962
“We choose to spend other people’s money not because it is hard, but because it is easy.”
—Federal politicians in 2022
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We have plenty of large complex problems in this country. To fix them requires acquisition of data, a time to think through and test solutions, and choose a solution, including timely monitoring results to see if the solution is working.
We don’t do that. Several recent examples come to mind. FDA has:
Failed to solve food safety problems
Failed at keeping baby formula available by not thoroughly inspecting a plant and keeping the number of firms to six
Failed in several areas of response to COVID-19
Kept many useful drugs and medical devices from being on the market
Put people at risk by discouraging vaping, which is nearly harmless compared to cigarettes
Taking all of these failures together, they propose that we double their annual budget (from 2019 to 2023).
What should we have done with the IRS, particularly given their slow responses to refunding money to taxpayers. What was needed, particularly by small business, was a simplification of tax rules. What did we do instead? We doubled the number of inspectors.
By most accounts, we are failing in public education. The proposed budget increase from this year to next is 15.6% which will be the 10th year in a row that spending has increased. Between 2002 and 2020, inflation adjusted per-pupil expenditures for kindergarten through 12th grade grew by 25% (inflation adjusted), or $3,211 per student. Globally, the U.S. is ranked 17th out of 40 in education yet spends 35% more per pupil than OECD countries.
The next big plan is to end hunger and to solve the obesity crisis. In a White House planreleased Tuesday in advance of a conference, there is already a plan to spend more on free school meals, expanding Electronic Benefits Transfers (EBT), expand eligibility for SNAP, Medicaid and Medicare, front-of-package labeling schemes, reducing sugar and sodium, increasing CDC’s budget to fund state parks, and increasing data collection for more metrics and research on equity and access for nutrition, and food security. While there are a lot of citations in the document, which of these measures has evidence of causation, i.e., the policy intervention causes better health outcomes? Without that, this is just throwing money at a complex problem.
Finally, a 2015 report from the Standish group found that large government tech projects, over $6 million, only succeed 13% of the time.
In a sense, government spending is a lot like Nicolas Tesla’s view of Thomas Edison’s inventions. Tesla said that, “If he [Thomas Edison) needed to find a needle in a haystack,… he would “examine straw after straw until he found the object of his search.” “His method was inefficient in the extreme… a little theory and calculation would have saved him 90 percent of the labor.”
That is precisely like throwing money at problems without evidence that they will work.
It’s easy but it’s incredibly wasteful.