Texas’ problems are of interest to us all because Texas is producing a huge chunk of the nation’s future work force with a system that goes like this:
• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.
• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/opinion/21collins.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
One of the best family-planning efforts in Texas is the Women’s Health Program, which provides an annual health exam and a year’s worth of contraceptives to poor women. For every dollar the state puts into the plan, the federal government provides $9.
The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year.
And if the State's estimates are accurate, I'm sure their savings will be realized and they will return the saved money to the people from whom it was taken, aren't you?
Or will just be included in the gaping maw of other incredibly necessary and useful programs?
Will they ever measure the actual effect of the programs? Can they? If they were shown not to produce savings, would the programs be cancelled? These programs survive and thrive in assumptionland, in estimationland, and no matter how inaccurate the assumptions and estimations, they never die. If one dares oppose them one finds oneself the object of scorn for failing to be sympathetic enough to the intentions of those who think they can make the world better through the coercive power of the State. If these programs don't work, it's only because they weren't more extensively funded ... not because it simply isn't possible to make utopian outcomes via the fiat of the political class.
How much taxation would it take to satisfy the dreams of those in assumptionland and estimationland?
• Terrible sex education programs and a lack of access to contraceptives leads to a huge number of births to poor women. (About 60 percent of the deliveries in Texas are financed by Medicaid.) Texas also leads the nation in the number of teenage mothers with two or more offspring.
• The Texas baby boom — an 800,000 increase in schoolchildren over the last decade — marches off to underfunded schools. Which are getting more underfunded by the minute, thanks to that little tax error.
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/04/21/opinion/21collins.html?src=ISMR_AP_LO_MST_FB
One of the best family-planning efforts in Texas is the Women’s Health Program, which provides an annual health exam and a year’s worth of contraceptives to poor women. For every dollar the state puts into the plan, the federal government provides $9.
The state estimates the pregnancies averted would reduce its Medicaid bill by more than $36 million next year.
And if the State's estimates are accurate, I'm sure their savings will be realized and they will return the saved money to the people from whom it was taken, aren't you?
Or will just be included in the gaping maw of other incredibly necessary and useful programs?
Will they ever measure the actual effect of the programs? Can they? If they were shown not to produce savings, would the programs be cancelled? These programs survive and thrive in assumptionland, in estimationland, and no matter how inaccurate the assumptions and estimations, they never die. If one dares oppose them one finds oneself the object of scorn for failing to be sympathetic enough to the intentions of those who think they can make the world better through the coercive power of the State. If these programs don't work, it's only because they weren't more extensively funded ... not because it simply isn't possible to make utopian outcomes via the fiat of the political class.
How much taxation would it take to satisfy the dreams of those in assumptionland and estimationland?
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