Saturday, February 12, 2011

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,.

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