Great Ideas

It's true that we won't be able to make a significant dent in the deficit with discretionary cuts alone. We need to cut the growth in entitlement programs like Social Security and Medicare, and we could use a serious tax overhaul that simplifies our code and raises revenues more efficiently. But it will say a lot about our political culture at this crucial moment if we can't eliminate discretionary spending that can't be justified by the evidence merely because that spending is protected by some powerful interest group.

Political campaigns are big enablers of this culture of speculative spending because politicians feel the need to woo voters with an agenda of prospective solutions to problems. Back in the 2008 presidential campaign, for instance, as the economy sunk around us, the candidate Obama proposed expanding a federal jobs program, the Workforce Initiative Act, as the centerpiece of his effort to get people back to work. In doing so he ignored studies by the Government Accountability Office and other watchdogs that WIA had joined a long list of failed federal jobs programs, with 60 percent of the money in WIA going to administration, not to retraining. The Obama campaign touted the program even though a federal official had testified to Congress that, "We have little information at a national level about what the workforce investment system under WIA achieves," and that the government doesn't know "what works for whom" in the program. Still, when the federal stimulus act of 2009 came around, Congress loaded it up with new job training money. At best, the spending was a jobs program for people who run and work at job training centers.

http://www.realclearmarkets.com/articles/2011/08/10/we_cant_even_cut_programs_that_dont_work_99176.html

So many great ideas, what a shame we're running out of other peoples' money to spend on them.


Some programs are so sacrosanct the media can't bring itself to confront the evidence that they don't work. Head Start has been the subject of much study by academics who've found the program doesn't do what it is supposed to, that is, give lower income kids a good educational head start. The government keeps commissioning studies hoping to change that, but when the latest study sponsored by Health and Human Services was released in 2010 again showing there were no lasting educational effects of the program, the media virtually ignored it. And so, $100 billion later, we continue to fund a program that fails to accomplish its purpose.