Posted on 02/07/2015 8:39:36 AM PST by Kaslin
For both moral reasons and economic reasons, we should have small government.
But even a curmudgeonly libertarian like me also thinks its important to have effective and efficient government.
Fortunately, theres no contradiction between these views. Indeed, academic researchers have found that nations with smaller government also have more efficient government. With Singapore being a very powerful example.
This is why I periodically share data looking at how much governments spend compared to how much they deliver.
Though this can be a depressing exercise because to cite one example no government in the world spends more on education than the United States, yet we get very sub-par results.
But what if we compare cities inside the United States on this basis? Are there big differences in how much some local governments spend and the results they get?
The answer is yes, emphatically so.
Here are some excerpts from an article in The Atlantic on which local governments do reasonably well and very poorly in terms of education outcomes on a per-dollar-spent basis.
…education spending isnt inherently bad—what matters is the result. Some school districts get lots in return for the amount of money they spend. …the online financial resource WalletHub has crunched the numbers on school spending at 90 of the most-populated cities across the country, revealing which ones are getting the most—and least—bang for their buck. To arrive at the findings, WalletHub divided each citys aggregate test scores in fourth- and eighth-grade reading and math by its total per-capita education spending. The researchers then adjusted those figures for various socioeconomic factors, such as the poverty rate and percentage of households that dont speak English as their first language.
Here are the 10 cities that purportedly do the best job on a per-dollar-spent basis.
And here are the cities that do the worst job.
I guess Im not overly surprised that cities in California and New York generally rank at the bottom.
Though I wonder whether the results would look significantly different if education spending was measured on a per-pupil basis. That would seem a relevant distinction.
But heres the key takeaway. Some cities spend two to three times as much per capita on education, yet they actually deliver worse outcomes!
Something all of us should remember next time some politician, whether Obama or some local hack, whines about the need for more money for schools.
Now lets look at how wisely or ineptly local governments spend money on crime prevention.
Heres some of WalletHubs analysis.
With tax season approaching, WalletHub assessed how efficiently the 110 most populated U.S. cities spend taxpayer dollars on police protection. We did so by calculating each citys ROI on police spending based on crime rates and per-capita expenditures on police forces after normalizing the data by poverty rate, unemployment rate and median household income. …note that Adjusted ROI Rank reflects the results of our analysis after controlling for the three economic factors, whereas Unadjusted ROI Rank reflects the results before normalizing the data by the same factors.
So which cities get decent bang for the buck?
And here are the 10 cities that get the least value compared to resources devoted to crime prevention.
Gee, what a surprise to see New York City (once again) at the bottom of the list. And I can only imagine how the city will rank after a few years of Bill de Blasio.
And whats the story with Long Beach, CA?!? Why are they among the worst on both lists?
Anyhow, kudos to WalletHub for producing both these comparisons. This is good factual data that enables people to see whether their city is being competent or wasteful.
Specifically, why are taxpayers in places such as St. Louis and Orlando spending three or four times as much, on a per-capita basis, as taxpayers in cities such as Lincoln and Louisville?
P.S. Returning to the big picture, were more likely to have competent and effective government if it is limited in size and scope. Or, as Mark Steyn humorously observed, our government is more expensive than any government in history and we have nothing to show for it.
Spending has nothing to do with quality education.
Cut the administrative staff in half.
Fire the Teacher’s Unions.
Cut the curricula to eliminate social engineering, marginal languages, and anti-American courses.
And many of the parents of those rotten students had/have opportunities to put their rotten kids in good charter or private schools. Most of them turned down the chance. This should throw cold water on the false notion of many conservatives that all you have to do to improve the education of poor/bad students is to put them in good schools. What most likely happens is the bad students drag down the good schools and make life miserable for many non-rotten students forced to share space with them.
It would be interesting to see a scatterplot of this data vs. %voting D, %voting R or, the D/R voting ratio. I suspect the correlation would be nonzero, to the benefit of Rs. Because Ds base the goodness of a place on the intentions more than the outcomes, e.g. Maryland being a “high-scoring place” in the gun department, because it has very strict laws and heavy enforcement, rather than low crime rates.
Something all of us should remember next time some politician, whether Obama or some local hack, whines about the need for more money for schools.
...
They see that money buying votes, not educating children.
The data have been “debunking” any correlation between spending and educational outcomes for fifty years.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.