During yesterday’s NRA press conference, Wayne LaPierre squeezed in plenty of ridiculous proposals (most notably, the highly inefficient & costly idea that American kids can best be kept safe w/an armed cop outside every school, an idea so ludicrous, in fact, that even long time gun enthusiast John Lott Jr. disapproved) including the preposterous suggestion that public funds allocated towards foreign aid might be better spent on the NRA’s new security proposal.
LaPierre suggested:
“With all the foreign aid, with all the money in the federal budget, we can’t afford to put a police officer in every school?”
I’m all for reconsidering the size of the aid budget. But the notion that money from the aid budget should be reallocated towards new security measures? That’s laughable.
Aid is a tiny portion of the budget. Foreign aid accounts for a little over 1% of the federal budget. The Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development estimated that in 2010, the U.S. gave $30 billion in the form of aid.
A quick Google search tells me that the National Center for Education Statistics estimated 98,817 public schools in the United States between 2009-2010. Let’s round that to 100, 000 for easy math. Now, following the NRA’s advice, let’s assume only one armed officer for each school. The Bureau of Labor Statistics that the avg. salary for a policeman is $55,000 per year, so let’s run with that figure. Assuming the public’s demand for police force stays the same, brand new cops would need to be hired, i.e. 100,000 cops at salary of $55k per year = $5.5 billion.
That’s just in salaries. On top of that, we’d need to add the cost of searching and hiring these new guards, arming them, training them, transporting them to the schools, side benefits, new uniforms, etc., a figure too difficult for me to calculate. Then there’s the added cost of the administration, planning and general bureaucracy of ensuring the planning and execution. Once we throw in the opportunity costs of this grand scheme, it’s difficult to estimate how far the final figure is from $30 billion.
And all for what? Armed cops didn’t stop the Columbine shooting. Neither did campus police at Virginia Tech ( I later read here that VA Tech had it’s own SWAT team). There’s no proof that the benefits will outweigh the costs.
Numbers aside, how come politicians or special interest groups are quick to promote their ideas at the expense of aid? The answer can be found in public choice theory. The average voter thinks the aid budget is a lot larger than it actually is. Because voters are rational (let’s assume) they prefer that public money be spent on services they can benefit from, rather than aid for developing countries. Moreover, politicians who vote to cut aid are less unlikely to become as unpopular amongst voters as the ones who argue for less public spending on domestic policies e.g. social security, healthcare, etc.
Like politicians and voters, the NRA is interested in maximizing it’s benefits. The NRA is a special interests group, a lobbying group with a hefty budget. By asking the government to introduce this new security measure, its asking for public funds to pay the cost of its idea, which essentially means citizens pay with their tax dollars. Some were appalled that the NRA didn’t admit the problem is too many guns in circulation. Some were shocked the NRA didn’t keep its mouth shut altogether. Of course not! The NRA’s mission is for more citizens to be armed. The group will most certainly only propose a solution that accomplishes its own objectives.
The point here is that it’s absurd to suggest the latest policy proposal should be funded at the expense of foreign aid. Although I’m skeptical of the amount of money allocated towards aid, I’m in no position to comment on how much, or how little, of the budget should be directed towards aiding the developing world. Regardless, the focus should be on better aid, which may not necessarily mean less aid.
Putting the aid debate aside, it’s simply wrong that taxpayers foot the bill for a special interest group’s idea. Instead of forcing us to pay, the NRA should generously donate some of it’s own $300 million budget towards its grand idea. That would make much more sense than pulling cash from the foreign aid budget.
**thanks to Ajay Menon & Daniel Lin for steering this topic in my direction.
Nice post Maria. Though I would add that he called for a police officer in every school using foreign aid money. Using the average American salary (~$43,000) for every single public school brings the total proposed program to $4.24 billion in staffing. You are right to point out that it would then require other financing for training, regulatory needs that always follow and staffing time at schools spent on the program. That likely brings the proposal by the NRA to above $4.5 billion, as a conservative estimate.
Though you are probably right to say that if, which is unlikely to happen, that the armed officers do end up in schools that it will number 10,000 or so, the important part here is to point out the absurdity of the proposal on every level. Cutting 15% from the foreign aid budget is nothing to sneeze at when it accounts for so little of the total budget, as you point out.
Maybe the better option is to frame it in areas where it belongs. Add it to education costs since it is in schools. What about homeland security since it is an issue of domestic security? Or, go after the bloated DoD budget. Finally, consider it a police staffing issues and force towns to come up with the budgets to pay for the officers.
Moving the money from foreign aid is politically expedient because it makes an absurd policy proposal seem palatable. When the trade-off has a more direct impact I would be that more Americans would clamor for proposals that are cost-effective.
Hey Tom, thanks for the thorough reply :) Your last paragraph really drives the point home. It’s silly how people are often quick to propose we use aid $ on issues that have nothing to do w/development, esp. when the aid budget is so small.
I suck at math (that’s why I’ll never become an economist haha) and just spotted my miscalculation. Thanks for the heads up!
I agree that it would make more sense to pull the money from DoD budget or have states figure out their own means of financing this project, rather than extracting funds from the aid budget, which has nothing to do with security. But between those two options, I’d lean more towards the latter. If it’s a federal policy, a school’s say on this matter is disregarded. If funding is done at the state level, schools get a bit more say. The DoD budget would only expand to include this new security feature, it wouldn’t stay the same size and money was simply reallocated. If demand for national security remains the same, the only way to pay the bill for this new school measure is from more tax money. The U.S. doesn’t need a larger defense budget. It doesn’t need more public spending, period. I should add that in a [my?] perfect world, all schools would be private, they’d be able to make their own security decisions, and this would not even be a national issue.
Frankly, I dont think any part of the budget should be spent on this type of security. Yes, this idea is very costly, but even more so, it’s an incredibly inefficient solution. Columbine, Fort Hood, VTech…none of those tragedies were stopped by the armed officers. I forget where I heard it, but I heard one guy argue “well if there’s one armed cop outside the door, surely he will be the first one to be shot by the bad guy”. Precisely.
It’s an interesting issue. I admit that the most efficient solution would be to encourage teachers to be armed. However, (and here I’m an awful libertarian), I’m not comfortable with the idea of a heavily armed society. Personally, I think the problem is the culture and the lax gun rules. The sad reality is, we can make the process of obtaining a gun more burdensome, we can ban plenty of weapons, but ultimately, the bad guys will always get ahold of what they need through the black market. It’s tough, I honestly don’t know what the best solution would be.