Let’s go ahead and get this out of the way: Nothing will ever be ‘adequately financed’. In almost every circumstance, someone somewhere will have at least an idea of what else they could do with a few extra dollars. The fact that they have to give up something because they have limited resources means that the problem in their eyes is simply that the world is not “adequately funding” whatever initiative we think is important.
There is a subtle social danger here: it is therefore easy to think that social problems arise not from inevitable compromises, but because bad people out there have the wrong values and thwart the march of justice, prosperity and equality. for likely venal reasons.
You’ve heard that a task tends to expand to fill the allotted time. The same goes for budgets and expenses: a project expands to fill the allocated resources, and from that point on it’s easy to say, “if only we had more resources.”
We see this all the time in government policy. Bad roads? They need more funding. Bad schools? More financing. Disease? Financing again. However, there are a few problems. Roads and schools could always to be better. People could do that always be healthier. Blaming problems on inadequate funding stubbornly refuses to acknowledge that trade-offs exist and are inevitable. When someone says they have “insufficient funding,” what they really mean is, “I could do a little more of what I care about if I had a little more money.”
There are three problems. First, people can always do something with a little more money, even if all they’re doing is insuring themselves against a future disaster by adding it to a rainy day fund. Second, funds for one cannot be used for another, and because we do not have infinite resources, we must make difficult choices about when to say yes and when to say yes.No.” Third, even if a cause is funded enough – or at least funded well enough to win a certain crusade, it usually doesn’t go away, but embarks on another crusade because we search even harder to find the chaff among the steadily growing piles of wheat.
A former colleague always said: ‘the older I get, the better I was.’ It’s easy and tempting to think that there was once a golden age of doing things the right way. There are a few things wrong with this way of thinking. First, it is simply wrong to think that we have failed in things like education. Inflation-adjusted primary and secondary education expenditures were 280% higher in 2020 than in 1960. The idea that education is being “defunded” is simply wrong. Second, golden times can be misleading because of politicians’ incentives. When you’re spending the money of future generations and you know you’ll be further along by the time the bill comes due, it’s easy to spend lavishly on public services and put off inconspicuous things like maintenance. By the time the bill comes due, you’ve already moved on in your career, and some other loser is stuck with the bill.
We should not blame problems on ‘inadequate funding’. Nothing will ever be “adequately” funded if we can think of something else to do with the next dollar – and people will always be able to think of something else to do with the next dollar.
Art Carden is a Professor of Economics and Medical Properties Trust Fellow at Samford University.