Too often, your local government will have advocates of money-spending that holds out the promise of jobs, or some tangible benefit that can be presented in dollars gained back for the community.

The authors of such fiction typically seek to justify their own positions of employment within that community, and possibly within the government entity itself. Axiomatically however, all of them have a stake in the outcome of the requested spending.  They will be asked for, and then will present metrics, or a presumed study of return on investment (ROI) and typically the elected leadership falls for it hook, line and sinker.

A perfect example was during a consideration of funding for the MSU extension office in Grand Traverse County when I was an elected commissioner.  County commissioners were given plenty of reading materials by the MSU advocates to show us that for every dollar spent we would see a result of $17 in benefit to the county.  The calculations as it turned out were premised on a ‘guess,’ that was then multiplied by a compounding analysis program that is used by MSU intellectuals, that relies on ‘guesses’ for the input variables.

Go. State.   ..  Yay.

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