What if lawmakers fixed a problem and no one noticed? We don’t have to speculate. The political debate is filled with problems that were solved decades ago but that people don’t seem to have noticed. It leads to pandering and a lot of bad policy.
Consider this progressive call “to ensure corporate polluters are held accountable for the damage they do.” The United States fixed this in the 1970s when federal laws made companies liable for environmental harms. Fear of lawsuits has drastically changed industrial practice, and environmental measures have drastically improved over the past fifty years.
Yet calls to make sure corporate polluters are punished continue. This is because politicians want to address people’s concerns. And if people don’t know that the issue has already been dealt with, elected officials can gain support by dealing with it again.
Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer wanted to ensure that no child went hungry at school. The National School Lunch Program already pays for the school meals of families with limited means. The governor’s policy change was to have taxpayers cover the costs of meals for children in wealthy families. Whitmer didn’t try to identify issues where the school lunch program was failing to provide meals to kids who need it. She just extended it where it doesn’t belong.
Paying for meals of kids who are in no danger of missing a meal won’t do anything about hunger. Yet because the problem sounds plausible, and because enough people think it sounds like a good idea, lawmakers feel like solving a problem that has already been solved.
Education policy is filled with problems that were already solved. Poor urban school districts tend to get more money than others — not less, as is often claimed. Schools are not overcrowded; there are just 14 students per teacher in the state.
Perhaps the biggest, most believed, problem that has already been solved is school funding. When including all federal, state and local sources, the average school gets $23,700 per student. Even if we write off all the programs the state and federal governments fund and payments made, looking only at the state’s minimum per-pupil payments to schools, taxpayers spend around $200,000 for a 20-student classroom.
Federal, state and local governments spent $833 billion on primary and secondary education nationwide in 2022. The only services that get more money are federal entitlements. In comparison, the federal government spent just $766 billion on the military that year.
There is no magic number for education funding, so determining whether schools are underfunded, appropriately funded, or overfunded is a matter of opinion. Still, people ought to care more about whether spending is effective rather than whether funding is adequate. They ought to notice that private and charter schools tend to spend less while delivering more. Lawmakers ought to debate how to improve education outcomes, not whether to increase the already generous amounts of funding they provide.
Interest groups can exploit the false perception that solved problems are unsolved. The people working and managing schools would like everyone to think that schools are underfunded. It’s easier to get more money from lawmakers that way.
Lawmakers also gain popularity when they pretend to fix a problem that has already been addressed. Just look at the myriad job training initiatives launched by lawmakers. There are dozens of programs that try to get people valuable workplace skills. Lawmakers keep adding more when they ought to review the effectiveness of the existing programs.
The fact that so many people are worried about problems lawmakers have already addressed is the reason why lawmakers pay attention to it. Elected officials care about doing what their voters want. And if voters are worried about underfunded schools, then the people’s elected representatives are going to give them more of what they want.
Lawmakers would do better by digging in to improve existing policy — if there are remaining problems — than fixing problems that are already fixed. But it would be better if everyone had a better grasp of the policies already in place. Don’t fall for things that just sound plausible and politicians will deliver fewer fake solutions.
