An interesting op-ed piece in the New York Times Nicholas Kristof nicely sums up what many conservatives have known all along that leaving aside that conservatives want to push grandma in her wheelchair down the stairs, keep children from getting a good education, and are generally racists to boot, when it comes to being charitable, conservatives are far more generous that those compassionate caring liberals.
Many studies have been done on the subject and a number of them by liberals, who started out with the objective of proving how cold and uncaring conservatives are, only to find the opposite is true. Liberals are generous as long as it’s not with their own money. They insist on using the overwhelming power of the state to steal your money (increasing taxes) and give it to special interest groups in return for votes and by extension, power. Do I seem too cynical?
Let’s take education. The Department of Education was started in 1980 at the end of the Carter Administration. From 1980 to 2008 Congress appropriated $1.06 trillion dollars to the Department of Education. What have we gotten for our “investment” as liberals like to call expenditures? The statistics are hard to come by but I found a comparison of math scores of fourth and eight graders between 1995 and 2007, about half the time the Department of Education has been in operation. In that period test scores improved about 2% in fourth grade and 4% in eight grade. If someone came to you in 1980 and said I’ve got a great deal for you, if you give me a trillion dollars, I’ll improve test scores 2-4% over twelve years, would you buy it? Imagine where we would be today, if we kept that trillion dollars in the hands of taxpayers to use as they saw fit?
If all that money didn’t improve test scores, what did it do? What about employment? Again, it was a challenge finding a comparable period, but I did come up with information for the period 1999 to 2007. From the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the class Education, Training and Library occupations grew 50.8%. The mantra that we have been hearing, “for the children” mostly trumpeted by the teacher’s unions has been for smaller class sizes. That sounds good but what does it really mean? If you have smaller class sizes, you have to have more teachers. If you have more teachers you have more teacher’s union members. If you have more teacher’s union members you have more contributions to the Democratic party, more votes for Democrats and in turn more education spending to continue the cycle. The students are marginally better educated, the taxpayers get hosed, and on the local level property taxes go through the roof.
How about “Buck-A-Day” Biden? I call him that because that is the average amount that this devout Catholic has given to charity over the past ten years. But pay more in taxes? He says that’s your patriotic duty! The government needs more money. Times are tough.
The problem I have with many government programs is that once passed into laws, rules have to be written on how to execute them and the rules have to be followed explicitly or the lawsuits follow. That means that there will be cases of deserving people, who for one of the rules does not qualify. That also means that there will be cases of undeserving people, who because of the rules qualify for benefits even though they don’t need them.
If liberals followed Mr. Kristof’s lead, in his attempt to shame them into giving more, maybe we could have government take less. That would allow us all to give more, and do it a lot more effectively. Or how about this for a novel approach. Before we implement any government social program, the first 10% of funding has to be raised privately, through charitable donations. If the liberals, who largely favor these kinds of programs can raise the cash, perhaps the program is worthy. If not, perhaps we could be spared another Department of Education bleeding $1 trillion from the economy when most school decisions are made locally anyway.
