• Richard Gelles, The Third Lie: Why Government Programs Don’t Work — and a Blueprint for Change, Left Coast Press, 2011, 151 pages, $22.95.
RALEIGH — “I’m from the government and I’m here to help you.”
That’s the “third lie” that concerns Richard Gelles, dean of the School of Social Policy and Practice at University of Pennsylvania. (The first two: I will respect you in the morning; and the check is in the mail.) While Gelles cites numerous examples of government programs that don’t work, he’s no advocate of limited government: His main beef with programs that don’t work appears to be that they block the enactment of new ones he prefers.
Gelles observes that once an individual problem receives the imprimatur of a government remedy, the definition of the problem will expand so that the remedy never goes away. For example, the Felix consent decree emerged from a class action suit charging that Hawaii had not complied with federal disability law. A case starting with one child soon affected more than 12,000, offering local mental health agencies “a new and seemingly limitless revenue stream.”
Psychologists were the gatekeepers and it took little time for them to determine that each child in the Felix class must receive services from the psychologist or his agency. The gate was in effect welded open, and before long the case spawned an open-ended entitlement. By 2001, the consent decree consumed one-eighth of Hawaii’s general fund, more than the state spent on higher education, with compliance costs of more than $1 billion.
Gelles’ own investigation concluded that all the effort and money did little to improve the education and lives of the 6,000 children who benefited from it. The incentives were for the clients “not to improve,” and the self-serving and self-protecting bureaucracy conspired to make “something of a joke out of so many government efforts.”
True to form, the head of Hawaii’s department of adolescent mental health hired her husband to run the program. A project coordinator with a salary of $170,000 had been a hula dancer and involved in an affair with the school superintendent. Beyond Felix, Gelles does a decent job of explaining why government programs perform poorly.
Aid to Families With Dependent Children (now known as Temporary Aid to Needy Families), he says, discourages work and fails to lift recipients from poverty. Any gains under Head Start, a program with an appropriation of $8 billion and deploying 250,000 government employees, disappear by the fourth grade.
The “inviolable rule” of government is to spend your agency’s allocation, which is “never enough.” The response to crisis or criticisms is “more money is believed to be the cure for all ills,” and of course more staff are always needed, along with more training. When those approaches fail to solve the problem, form a blue ribbon panel, explain that some clients “fell through the cracks,” and that things are better now. And, by all means, “kill the messenger” by attacking critics as “anti-child,” and so on.
“The social service emperor has no clothes,” says Gelles, and “once government programs are established, it is extremely difficult to change them, irrespective of whether they help or harm.”
Even so, the author, who is not an economist, thinks some government programs work very well. Gelles quotes Daniel Mitchell, formerly of the Heritage Foundation, saying the Social Security Trust Fund is a “hoax.” Gelles thought he had a Social Security account and that the taxes he had paid belonged to him. That said, Gelles proclaims that “Social Security works as a government policy and has worked for more than 70 years. The tax structure appears fair, the benefits, while not huge, are sufficient to keep 90 percent of the elderly out of poverty, and the bureaucracy that supports Social Security never has to invest people and time to determine who should or should not receive the benefit.”
The author acknowledges rising costs and perverse incentives in Medicare, but the huge program “works” for him because it provides single-payer health insurance for 22 million Americans over 65. Gelles also is fond of the GI Bill, and some readers will be surprised to learn of opposition to the plan from ivory tower academics. Harvard president James Conant predicted it would be a disaster and Robert Hutchins of the University of Chicago said it would turn colleges into “hobo jungles.” He acknowledges the voucher approach of the GI Bill as part of a “market approach” to social policy.
In his new “blueprint,” programs must be consistent with the values and principles of a market economy. They must encourage asset building, incentivize, reward delayed gratification, not support harmful behaviors, and promote a better-prepared work force.
He wants a “futures account,” like Hillary Clinton’s “Baby Bond,” for every child born in the United States, with no disqualifying factors. Unlike Social Security, the government would deposit $3,000 a year for 18 years into a real account under the individual’s sole control.
That grandiose scheme gives new meaning to in loco parentis and certainly would bulk up an already bloated Leviathan. A plan based on market principles and incentives would — unlike the futures account — empower parents, not government, to save for children’s future. Where, exactly, the money would come from Gelles does not say, but he knows what the deal is.
“The traditional battle between a market-based economy and socialism still lurks beneath the surface of any social legislation,” he explains.
Despite his book’s title, his criticism of bad programs, and his nod toward market principles, it’s clear which side Richard Gelles is on.