PolicyGuy

Wednesday, November 24, 2004


States Should Use Hard Times to Shape Up.
Like most states, South Dakota is looking at weaker-than-expected tax revenues. The Great Plains Public Policy Institute reminds policy makers that this difficulty is an occasion for reviewing public functions. Too often, higher taxes pay for more of the same apparatus, and not better results.

Borrowing from public sector management consultant Peter Hutchinson, the Institute offers several prescriptions for sound policy. The first one in the list is foundational: "Clear the decks of all programs and activities not central to government's core purpose."

Mission creep is bad in the private sector (think of conglomerates that try to do everything and fail, and then of the Jack Welch mantra that a company should be #1 or #2 in a market, or leave it). It is perhaps inevitable in the public sector, but without the disciplining hand of competition, its effects are more serious.

"Justice Louis D. Brandeis'?s metaphor of the states as "laboratories" for policy experiments ... had almost nothing to do with federalism and everything to do with his commitment to scientific socialism. .... To this day, it continues to inhibit a truly experimental, federalist politics." -- Michael S. Greve

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