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Mon, 31 Jan 2005
Tom Coyne, the proprietor of www.ripolicyanalysis.org, had a column in yesterday's journal. The gist of it was that RI is generous, but we get little for it. Over here, he'll get agreement that, compared to other states, RI is generous towards the poor. But his analysis is a bit funny.
Tom Coyne: R.I.: Lots for poor, to little effectTHE STATE of Rhode Island spends much of its general-revenue budget on helping the needy -- more, in fact, than the federal government mandates.
For fiscal 2006, the governor's proposed budget for human services is $1.2 billion. This covers spending by the departments of Children, Youth and Families; Elderly Affairs; Health; Human Services; and Mental Health, Retardation and Hospitals. An analysis by the Barrington School Department estimated that in fiscal 2003, Rhode Island school systems spent an additional $362 million on special education. We thus appear to be spending roughly $1.6 billion a year to help Rhode Island's neediest.
Special education is not aid to the poor. There is a correlation between special ed and poverty: poor communities have lots of special ed students. But there are plenty of special ed children whose parents are not poor. I count a few among my neighbors here in a perfectly "nice" neighborhood.
The rest of the column is equally confusing. For example, he complains that our high welfare spending goes with a high level of teen pregnancy. Our response is just confusion. Perhaps he maintains that generous welfare benefits cause teen pregnancy. Some have. The ones who do typically subscribe to the economists' view of human motivation. Very roughly, they see free benefits as an incentive to pregnancy. But this view of human nature is pretty bizarre, and most economists only use it because there isn't anything systematic to replace it yet. Ask yourself how many of the things you've done in the past (especially in matters of sex) were done because of the cost-benefit calculations you made.
Logically, this raises two questions: How much is Rhode Island spending in comparison with other states, and how effective is this spending?
It's fine to ask these questions, but the fact is (or should I say "logically") that people disagree about how to measure the effectiveness of welfare spending. Over here, we believe (all of us) that the effectiveness of a welfare program should be measured by the quality of life of the people it is meant to help. Less poverty equals more effective.
Mr. Coyne claims, as do many others, that the measure of a successful program is the number of people who are no longer on the welfare rolls. But this is a warped definition of success. It's fine to be guardedly pleased when the demand for welfare goes down, but to use the decline in rolls as the important measure of the program's success is to overlook the many other reasons that the rolls might decline.
What a lot of policy analysts don't realize is that for almost everyone on it, going on welfare is a choice: you can always eat dog food. The point of welfare is to preserve some dignity and quality of life even for the people who have no money, and to help those people through a difficult time in their lives. That's what the program is for. To the extent that people who need it can't use it, it is a failure. It is conceivable that Rhode Island can't afford a successful program. This is a testable proposition, and might be true for all I know, but I'm not aware that it's really been tested. But measuring the success of the program by the number of people it doesn't serve is a strange choice.
There are a million Rhode Islanders, leading a million different lives via a million different paths. Many of those paths take people down into unpleasant circumstances, some for bad reasons, others not. Unfortunately, the people who craft our social policy tend toward limited imaginations, so our welfare policies tend to have only a few solutions. Too bad one size doesn't always fit all.
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