THEFT BY POLICY - OUR GOVERNMENT AT WORK O ur world has changed, but our government and the tools it uses have not changed with it. Our state and local governments can no longer meet their ex- isting obligations. Everywhere the budgets for essential government services like education, police protection, health department inspections, criminal courts, and road repair are being pillaged to pay for public housing, battered children’s shelters, efforts to collect child support, foster care, programs for latchkey children, residential treatment facilities for law-breaking juveniles, and, steepest of all, Medicaid. The states find themselves struggling to pay for programs mandated by Washington, for which their citizens did not even vote, and unable to pay for their own desired policy choices. The collapse of state and local government, however, is only one symptom of a broader economic, educational, and social decline that no government-funded social programs can remedy - foremost among which is the steady erosion in the living standard of the bottom half of our labor force. The deterioration in real wages for unskilled and semiskilled workers occurring since 1980 re- sults from a convergence of international competition for low-skill work and our own failure to teach basic literacy and number skills to our children. The breakdown in education is symptomatic of the overall disjunction between what we want and expect from government and what we get.
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