Ryan Streeter
George Will’s column on Teach for America raises an interesting question for the GOP. He rightfully praises Wendy Kopp and her organization, Teach for America (TFA), which has done more to dispel myths about what’s holding poor children back in school than anyone.
Will concludes:
[S]omeone in Congress should invest some on TFA's behalf. Government funding - federal, state, local - is just 30 percent of TFA's budget. Last year's federal allocation, $21 million, would be a rounding error in the General Motors bailout. And Kopp says that every federal dollar leverages six non-federal dollars.
As I read this, I was reminded of David Brooks’ smart column a couple weeks ago in which he cited TFA along with Bill Gates and other solid leaders who are flocking to Washington to protect their piece of the federal pie.
They assume that if they can only persuade enough people that their programs are producing tremendous results then they will be spared from the budget ax.They are wrong about that. The coming budget cuts have nothing to do with merit. They have to do with the inexorable logic of mathematics.
When we use math, Brooks notes, we see that entitlements are the big driver of unsustainable government spending, a point we have been making over and again here at ConservativeHome.
For this reason, using the “rounding error” argument that Will employs just won’t cut it any more. The problem we have is that our federal budget simply contains too many “rounding errors," and when you add them up, they become one big scary number.
Still, Will’s point has some merit. He and Brooks are actually in agreement on one thing: the question is not whether the government should spend money on worthwhile objectives, but whether it's possible given our fiscal challenges. A few observations:
The explosion in entitlement spending is on a path to “crowd out” other government spending. As brooks notes, it’s set to reach 70% of federal spending in 20 years. The “math” of entitlement spending shows that we are, effectively, at war against all other government priorities. We’re shrinking our ability to address them with each passing year that we let entitlements grow. That the spending cuts the GOP is currently debating will do much of anything Brooks calls a “mirage.”
As Will intimates without saying it, TFA is a worthwhile use of taxpayer money because it helps low-income children succeed, which in turn lowers costs later. You don’t hear too many conservatives making this argument these days.
This brings up a question that Yuval Levin raised here at ConservativeHome when he said that, if he could change one thing about the GOP, he would “make it so that every time we are tempted to talk about the size of government we talk also (and more so) about the purpose of government.” The Will-Brooks columns implicitly raises questions about how Republicans will approach the purpose of government the remainder of this year:
So, the question these columns raise is: what is the positive role government is supposed to be playing on the social welfare landscape?
Is the purpose of government to provide universal entitlements, which benefit many middle and upper middle class families, at the expense of spending that benefits primarily poorer people? If the answer is no, then reform is urgent, because conservatives have for decades been complicit in turning these programs into the primary purpose of the U.S. federal government. I made this argument last week here at ConservativeHome.
And, let’s say we started getting our fiscal house in order and freeing up a greater share of the discretionary budget. Would there be a role for federal spending anymore, as Will intimates there is, in confronting some severe national challenges? This, it seems to me, is a very open question.
Comments