I’m not reflexively against spending taxpayer money on social welfare. Hell, I benefit from many social welfare programs, including Medicare and Social Security. I’m not one of these Republicans who says the government should only spend money on the military and screw everyone else. But I do say that taxpayer money should be spent wisely.
So I thought that Adam Johnson’s March 1 op-ed in the San Francisco Chronicle was illogical. The headline says it all: “Spending on social welfare works.” Well, I’m not so sure. These days, when people talk about spending on social welfare, I can’t help but think of social justice warriors who want to defund the police and spend the money on disputable stuff. So I have to admit my instinct, when I read the headline, was negative.
But I don’t like making unwarranted generalizations about someone’s thought-out policy, so I read Johnson’s op-ed. Carefully. And when I was done, I realized I’d been right. It’s doesn’t add up to anything sensible, and the reason why gets to the heart of progressives’ problem.
Johnson cites Mayor London Breed, who’s done a good job of standing up to her radical Board of Supervisors (and the equally radical school board). Breed has made the point that despite all the money San Francisco and California spend on social services for the poor, it hasn’t had any impact on crime and homelessness, both of which have gotten much worse. Surely, no one can dispute this. The logical inference is that spending money on social problems does very little to reduce crime; as Breed herself said, “We’ve added all these resources—the street crisis response team, the ambassadors, the hotels we purchase, the services. All these things. And yet people are still being physically harmed and killed.”
A reasonable person would conclude that spending hundreds of millions of dollars on the things Breed cited is not working. That same reasonable person might ask if the money could not be spent more wisely elsewhere—on infrastructure, say, or teacher salaries or hiring more cops or (God forbid!) reducing taxes. But Johnson concludes otherwise. He writes, “Even if one accepts the premise that California has high crime rates…there is no indication it does so in spite of a robust safety net, but rather because it doesn’t have a strong enough one.”
What’s that old definition of insanity? “Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result.” Johnson seems to think that if something isn’t working, we should do more of it! He realizes that there’s a reason why Mayors and Governors “dismiss a [massively expensive] social welfare approach to crime prevention—with tight budgets unable to run up deficit, it’s largely beyond their control.” That should end the discussion right there: No elected official is going to follow Johnson’s advice, even if they wanted to, because there’s simply not enough money to pay for everything.
Instead, Johnson argues that this lack of money “doesn’t mean that [elected officials] should disparage the idea [of more spending] or that robust social welfare and greater equality cannot improve social outcomes…”. Well, actually, it does disparage the idea. Americans have watched our government spend hundreds of billions, maybe trillions of dollars for the last 60 years on the War on Poverty and subsequent programs, both on the State and Federal levels. They’re now watching cities invest even more money in (to quote Breed), “street crisis response teams, ambassadors, hotels, services,” and things like MACRO, violence prevention programs, drug intervention, and even, potentially, reparations, which would be really expensive. Are these schemes worth spending more and more money on, even though crime and homelessness are rising? Johnson says yes. I have my doubts.
Steve Heimoff