Robot Heart: Sex, Religion, and Politics

The Other Side of the Scale

With all due respect, just how are you supposed to perform your cost benefit analysis when you have no idea who will pay the cost?

While I’m not an expert in this field, there are plenty of companies out there devoted to gauging cost and value, as well as figuring out how to work those things out when developing a budget. (I have a friend who does this for a living even.) While I might not be able to answer this question personally, I know that it can be done. So the answer shouldn’t be, “Well let’s just stop spending altogether!” The answer should be, “We should find a way to optimize the spending we do.”

I acknowledge that this is a flaw in our current process: there is no one doing this math. Moreover, when spending is approved of through a series of independent votes, you don’t really get to compare and prioritize. I think this is something that needs to be corrected. I may not know personally how to correct it, but I know there are people who do. Why don’t we talk to them?

Regardless, animal control is a basic service, one that predates a lot of the more optional services we have now. (I know New York’s city shelter was drowning puppies in 1877, so…) It’s primary function is to control animal populations, which in turn controls (primarily) the spread of disease. While we have grown accustomed to the notion that you don’t have to worry about rabid animals running around cities, there was a time when this was a very real problem—and with large populations of unvaccinated animals in cities, you will see these problems increase. While I don’t think everyone will agree on whether or not Viagra should be covered by Medicare, I think most people would agree that keeping sick animals off the streets has some very profound benefits (profound enough that we don’t even consider them in arguments anymore, because we are so used to what life is like with them.)

With your pet example, you clearly weigh the fate of pet-owners (or, at least, their pets) heavily. What precisely are you putting on the other side of the scale?

Everyone benefits from this service. As I said before (repeatedly), cutting a break for pet owners creates the immediate benefit of pet owners being more able to keep their pets and care for them, which keeps animals off the street. It also helps city shelters from further driving up their costs. But these are by no means the only beneficiaries.

This should be a short-term or emergency addition to this year’s tax code, in order to help alleviate problems created by the recession, but then expire that in a year or two, when the issue of pet abandonment and shelter overflow is less of a problem, so that it doesn’t become a permanent tax hike on everyone. But in the short-term, I do think it’s a good short-term fix for a short-term problem.

This is the problem (or, rather, one of the many problems) that arises when you design programs without figuring out how to pay for them. You assume the people who will eventually pay the costs are less deserving than the people receiving the benefit.

Again, everyone benefits.

And with respect to the pet tax deduction—is there one other person reading this who thinks this is a good idea? Or that pet owners are inherently more deserving of this break than the people who will ultimately pay for it.

Again, everyone benefits. Keeping stray dogs off the street isn’t just about making pet owners happy. The fact that you seem completely incapable of acknowledging that failing to provide adequate animal control services will have more negative effects than a few sad pet owners either shows that you know that this is a flaw in your argument and are avoiding confronting it, or you are so accustomed to this service being provided, you seem to think it will take care of itself in the absence of the government doing it.

The flaw in the libertarian argument is that while, yes, it might make more sense in terms of balancing a budget to cut almost all public services, it doesn’t make any sense at all when you start talking about actually removing services that, though we take those services for granted because they’ve been around for as long as any of us can remember, actually do necessary and useful things for us as a society. This isn’t an issue of pet owners being more deserving than non-pet owners. This is an issue of a public service to all people being delivered or not.