Let’s go ahead and sort this out: Nothing will never be “adequately funded.” In almost every circumstance, someone, somewhere, will have at least some idea of what else they could do with an extra dollar or two. The fact that they have to give up something because they have limited resources means, to them, that the problem is simply that the world is not “adequately funding” the initiative we consider important.
There is a subtle social danger here: it is easy to think that social problems are not due to inevitable compromises, but to the fact that bad people have bad values and thwart the march toward justice, prosperity and equality for probably venal reasons.
You’ve heard that a task tends to expand to fill the time allotted. The same is true for budgets and expenses: a project expands to fill the resources allotted to it, and it’s easy to say, “If only we had more resources.”
We see it all the time in public policy. Bad roads? More funding needed. Bad schools? More funding needed. Disease? More funding needed. There are some problems though. Roads and schools could always be better. People could always Be healthier. Blaming problems on inadequate funding is a stubborn refusal to acknowledge that trade-offs exist and are inevitable. When someone says they are “underfunded,” what they really mean is, “I could do a little more of what I find important if I had a little more money.”
There are three problems. First, people can always do something with a little extra money, even if it is just to protect themselves against future calamity by adding it to a reserve fund. Second, funds earmarked for one thing cannot be used for another, and since we do not have infinite resources, we must make difficult choices about when to say “yes” and when to say “yes.”NoThird, even when a cause is adequately funded – or at least funded enough to win a particular crusade – it usually does not dissolve but moves on to another crusade because we look more carefully to find the straw among the ever-growing piles of wheat.
A former colleague often said, “The older I get, the better I am.” It’s easy and tempting to think that there was a golden age when we did things right. There are a few errors in this way of thinking. First, it’s simply wrong to think that we neglected things like education. Spending on primary and secondary education, adjusted for inflation, increased by 280% in 2020 compared to 1960.The idea that education is “defunded” is simply false. Second, golden ages can be misleading because of the incentives of politicians. When you’re spending the money of future generations and you know you’ll be advanced by the time the bill comes, it’s easy to spend lavishly on public services and put off unimportant things like maintenance. By the time the bill comes, you’ve advanced in your career and some other idiot has been left with the bill.
We should not blame the problems on “inadequate funding”. Nothing We will never be “adequately” funded if we can think of something else to do with the next dollar – and people will always be able to think of something else to do with the next dollar.
Art Carden is a professor of economics and a member of the Medical Properties Trust at Samford University.
