McCain: Rudy Giuliani on Spending
McCain regularly talks about ear-marks, and how he wants to stop them. Barack keeps saying that the waste that they represent is worth ignoring. Now, what does this have to do with Rudy Giuliani? Reducing ear-marks is precisely the way to drastically reduce government spending. How is this possible? Very simply: when you show you care about the little things, the larger things will take care of themselves.
This is a peculiar lesson that I learned from reading the fine book Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell. The sub-title of this book is “How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference”, and one of its key examples is Rudy Giuliani in how he dealt with and drastically reduced crime in New York. The way he did this was through tackling two smaller areas of crime: graffiti and turnstile jumping.
Covering over graffiti, and arresting the perpetrators in an area can have a large effect on crime, simply because it shows that people in that area care about their neighborhood. This is sometimes called the “broken windows” effect from a famous book by George L. Kelling and Catherine M. Coles., and it has also been applied to running businesses. When buildings look dilapidated and un-cared-for because they have broken windows and graffiti on them, good people avoid the area: it reeks of crime. In addition, bad people flock to the area: it looks like an easy score.
“Turnstile Jumping” is what happens in the subways of New York, where people jump over the turnstile instead of paying the 50 cents to get on the subway. These are minor offenses, but because no one was willing to enforce the payments, they occurred more regularly and encouraged higher crime within the subway, including graffiti.
So Rudy Giuliani started to crack down on graffiti, particularly on the subways. First, they started to just paint over what people did (frequently called “tagging”), while trying to catch them in the act so that the perpetrators would be the ones paying for their crimes. The day after a tagging occurs it would be painted over so that all the public places kept a clean, cared-for appearance, because they were cared for. Number one, this discouraged the perpetrators simply because no one could really see and “appreciate” their work, so they were less inclined to tag. Second, these people were being caught and kept from engaging in these acts again. And third, but most important, it discouraged crimes in those areas because public officials were regularly near-by, and because these places looked like people with means and effort cared about them.
In addition, Giuliani cracked down on turnstile jumpers and saw a huge decrease in crime, and a huge increase in citizen satisfaction. The police did not have the time and effort to arrest someone for jumping a turnstile: this meant trotting them to the main office to fill out paperwork and ultimately incarcerate them for a 50 cent crime. However, Giuliani created mobile offices which were busses fitted out to provide an easy way to prosecute the jumpers. Officers would arrest the jumpers, hand cuff them, and line them up along the subway wall to wait for the mobile office to arrive. This had the triple effect of being more efficient, and hugely humiliating to the jumpers, and very reassuring to New York’s citizenry. In addition, these jumpers frequently already had warrants out for their arrest: when people are committing larger crimes, they are also likely to be committing smaller crimes. This ultimately made the police system much more efficient. To this day, when I watch a movie centered in New York, I regularly notice the police officer standing guard in the subway. (I’m pretty-sure that 16 Blocks is a recent example of this).
John McCain’s plan to curb “pork barrel” projects or “ear-marks” is precisely this same philosophy: by showing that we care about the small spending in government, we encourage the people working in government to care about the larger spending in government. We also discourage congressmen from trying to be dishonest with tax-payer money. But if we take the Barack Obama plan, and just ignore the little pieces of waste, the people working within government get the idea that “it does not matter if [they] cheat a little, or lie a little about what [they] do with [our] money, because [they] are just small potatoes anyway: it’s the bigger programs that are the real problem”.
Thinking like that is not right. I do not steal from work, even just a ream of paper or a pen once in a while simply because it is not worth it in the long-run with how I treat my employer. Frankly, I think businesses should be willing to pay as much for resources for an employee each year as the employee is being paid. However, that is not a decision I will make for myself, I have to persuade my boss that it is in their interest to upgrade my computer every few years: $5000 in machines and software every few years is an extremely tiny portion of what they are paying me. Any business that is stealing software is not thinking very carefully about where they are really spending money, and is involved in much shadier business practices. RUN if you know your boss is doing that.