Smart Government

Keith Humphreys acknowledges that substance abuse treatment programs are often designed poorly.  Further, we shouldn't have outsized expectations.  Yet this isn't an argument against there being a treatment solution, nor is it an argument for less spending.  He outlines some very sensible solutions.

It's hard to sell people on government spending towards social problems when there is a lot of money out there being spent poorly.  This tends to get held up as evidence that *no government spending works*, or at least that the benefits aren't worth the cost.  But there are many things out there being tried, and many of them with success.  Instead of debating *whether* money should be spent at all, we need to be debating *how* the money gets spent, with the knowledge that there are answers and that we have a responsibility to find them.

The sooner we can come together as a society and decide to hold ourselves accountable for the problem, the sooner we will be able to have a truly "smart" government,.