Tuesday, Sep. 02, 2008

You can pay a little bit now, or a whole lot later

THE POPULAR MANTRA in South Carolina is that our government is too big and spends too much money. So it’s important to take note when a small-government, pro-privatization group says we aren’t spending enough money on public services. Specifically, that we aren’t making the kinds of investments that could pay off down the road.

That’s the conclusion of the Heartland Group, which issued a report recently examining how states are doing 10 years after the Congress acted to “end welfare as we know it.” (To get an idea of where the group falls on the political scale, consider: It suggested that reducing the number of people on welfare is a more important measure of success than reducing the poverty rate.)

Even though our state got a perfect score for requiring welfare recipients to get training or get a job, has one of the highest work-participation rates and has some fairly tough restrictions on eligibility, the report ranked us just 34th nationally — largely because we don’t provide the interim financial assistance that can make the difference between staying in the working world and falling back onto public support.

The Heartland Group is no fan of giving tax dollars to individuals, yet it argues that states should provide cash to help poor people through a rough spot (the car breaks down, for example) because that “empowers caseworkers to fix problems without adding people to welfare rolls, reducing the amount of time they must devote to people who do not need long-term support as well as staving off dependence.”

This conclusion points to a familiar problem in our state: We let a philosophical disdain for government in general and taxes in particular get in the way of actions that in the long run will save us more than we spend.

We don’t provide 4K and other early childhood education programs to all poor kids, even though we could recoup most of the money in lower retention rates in first and second grades, and all of it many times over by the time those kids become adults who have steady jobs rather than ... qualifying for welfare.

We don’t provide routine treatment for the poor before physical or mental illnesses become crises, and so we all pay higher insurance rates to cover the costs of hospitals, which under federal law can’t turn away those patients who show up to get treated in the most expensive setting possible — the emergency room.

We don’t work to keep people from starting to smoke or help them stop (which we could actually do without spending a penny — but of course that would mean raising a tax: the cigarette tax), even though that would protect us in a few years from having to spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year through Medicaid and higher insurance rates to treat the ravages of smoking addiction.

We don’t provide drug treatment, mental health services, education or training for petty criminals, even though that can keep them from graduating to more serious crimes. (Worse, we actually lock up a lot of them, which costs far more than turning them around — but that’s about other misplaced priorities.)

The Heartland Institute didn’t talk about any of those other issues, but it doesn’t take much of a leap to get from what it said specifically about the investments we don’t make in welfare to the general point — a point so obvious that it’s a cliche — that our leaders just don’t seem to get: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And it costs way less.