Government: The Solution to Failed Programs is to Double Their Size
Two great examples:
1. Barney Frank is supposedly going to remake housing finance after having helped destroy it by his actions over the last 20 years. In particular, after his polititization of Fannie Mae's business goals over the last 20 years, and constant fight to prevent any kind of oversight of Fannie and Freddie, which has led to over a hundred billion dollars and perhaps as high as $400 billion in taxpayer losses, Barney is going to do more of the same with Frannie and Freddie now that the government has full control of these entities.
2. A NY state child protective services study shows that all their resources provide little real benefit to endangered children. The solution -- do even more of the same.
And don't forget the classic example, the 10x increase in public school funding to no apparent benefit:
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October 12, 2010, 11:28 pmme:
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October 13, 2010, 4:01 amHenry Bowman:
Coyote, could you provide a source for the charts?
October 13, 2010, 9:57 amMJ:
Do you guys sell those giant flowers that smell like poo?
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October 13, 2010, 12:19 pmcaseyboy:
Henry, the sources are next to the charts? The Cato Institute and Data Sources are noted.
I get so depressed when I am reminded of the incompetence of politicians and bureaucrats.
October 13, 2010, 1:58 pmDr. T:
"A NY state child protective services study shows that all their resources provide little real benefit to endangered children."
Actually, they increase the risks to many endangered children by keeping them in homes with abusive and/or drug-addled parents or putting them into foster homes with abusive guardians. Meanwhile, they'll yank children out of a loving home because a neighbor saw Mom swat the fanny of 4-year-old Billy after he bit two-year-old Sally.
NYS Protective Services also pushed (back in the 1990s) for a law that makes it a crime to leave children under thirteen home alone for ANY length of time. They held and publicized the absurd belief that no twelve-year-olds are responsible enough to be unsupervised at home. (I regularly hired a 12-year-old sitter for my baby daughter. The sitter was more responsible than most adults.)
October 13, 2010, 3:55 pmsmurfy:
I actually think there is an apparent benefit hidden in those education charts. In the 70's, we were throwing much less publicly funded resources at the students, but they were keeping up, academically, with today's kids. I can only assume this is because the kids in the 70's had their public school education chapitalized with more parental involvement*. So if I have to spend less time doing homework with my kids in order to achieve the same results, is that not a benefit?
*on reflection, it could also be that intellect is relatively constrained and there really may not be much we can do to affect aggregate academic achievement? I still think you need a line representing some metric of parental involvement in order to see the missing benefit.
October 14, 2010, 3:52 pmSteve-O:
10x or 150%?
October 19, 2010, 5:46 pm