Can we out-trump the conservatives on economics and demand a policy payback analysis to all federal or state investments? How would pet Republican programs do if their corporate welfare programs had to be benchmarked against, say, proven pre-kindergarten education investments for kids? Let's get the substantive cost-benefit analysis done to make that case on everything we are in favor of achieving in the next thirty years.
It's easy to rag on corporate welfare and certainly there's a bunch of it in the budget, much of it perpetrated by Republicans. It's this sort of anti-conservatism that has us in danger of being left as a 20% rump for a generation. Embracing this sort of rigorous analysis would lead us to a better understanding of what the proper role of government would be.
I also want to take up this:
Conservatives would be forced to take a public stance against doing the math on what government buys, and abandon their argument that government spending is useless.
Nobody in American government believes that government spending is useless. As this article so ably points out, history is replete with examples of government programs with lots of upside benefit that exceeded their cost. It's even more replete with programs that didn't work worth a damn or whose benefits were overwhelmed by unintended consequences. A really rigorous cost/benefit, that took into account all the costs and benefits of a program, monetary or not, would really help us to identify those expenditures that will be helpful, and those that won't. I don't think that sort of work would favor much of the current Democratic agenda, but if it did, let's do it. Republicans (especially the current crew) don't have a monopoly on good ideas, after all.
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