Washington state Democrats just passed a $3.7 billion tax hike, which Democrats claim will go to “critical services” such as “education,” “child care,” “healthcare,” and “other services Washington families rely on.” But few details in the legislation have been provided on how this money will be spent or who it will go to.
If a blockbuster new report about King County spending from the Seattle Times is to be believed, very little of that money will go to proven programs that deliver good results for Washington residents, while much of it will be lost to fraud.
First passed in 2015 as a $392 million property tax hike, King County’s Best Starts for Kids program was sold to voters as using “the latest research” to “transform the way we invest in our next generation.” A second round of $872 million in tax hikes was passed in the wake of George Floyd’s death. Ballot measure proponents specifically cited the work of economist James Heckman, whom they claim “found that investing earlier in a person’s development — starting with prenatal services — delivers the greatest return.”
Heckman is famous for promoting two early education programs: the Perry Preschool Project out of Ypsilanti, Michigan, in the 1960s and the Carolina Abecedarian Project out of Durham, North Carolina, in the 1970s. Both were small, 123 and 111 children respectively, and both studied low-income black families. More importantly, both programs were detailed and intensive, including not only hours of daily instruction for children but also lengthy home visits for each family. But positive results from the studies have not been successfully replicated in larger populations.
King County’s Best Starts for Kids program, anyway, bears no resemblance to either the Perry Preschool Project or the Carolina Abecedarian Project. Where Perry and Abecedarian included specifically designed curricula and regular home visits for all participants, Best Starts for Kids is nothing more than an attempt to shovel money out the door as fast as possible to any nonprofit organization that can fill out an application.
According to the Seattle Times, one nonprofit organization called Your Pretty Perfect received a three-year, $470,000 grant to provide job training for young adults just weeks after incorporating. The licensed cosmetologist who owned the group collected $314,000 in payments before the county stopped paying her. After contacting the employers listed on the grant application, the Seattle Times found no evidence that Your Pretty Perfect ever trained anyone or even tried.
Another contractor unable to substantiate any services delivered turned out to be living in Cambodia. A separate King County audit of 36 Department of Community and Human Services nonprofit grants referred 21 for enforcement due to evidence of fraud or improper dealings.
Twenty-one of 36 contracts. That’s almost 60% of contracts that showed at least some evidence of outright fraud. That doesn’t even look at whether the non-fraudulent programs delivered services that improved outcomes for King County children or were simply wasting money on ineffective, though not necessarily fraudulent, programs.
In response to the King County Department of Community and Human Services audit, and the recent Seattle Times report detailing a whistleblower who was fired for raising concerns about widespread fraud in the program, some King County officials want even more money to create a new government office in charge of providing financial oversight of more than $1 billion the county funnels through nonprofit human service providers every year.
But more government really is not the answer. Everyone knows that, not least the fraudsters who enrich themselves and the government officials who knowingly shovel the money in their direction. The underlying problem is that King County is taking in so much tax money so quickly that it doesn’t know how to spend it. Why not just cut the tax levies that fund the Best Starts for Kids slush fund and let taxpayers spend the money in their own communities?
DEMOCRATS KEEP CHOOSING ILLEGAL IMMIGRANTS OVER AMERICANS
Democrats have an unshakable faith that when the government takes your money in taxes, it will spend it better than you would. No matter how much they pour into homeless, early education, job training, or community-violence nonprofit groups, even when results never materialize, their answer is always the same: Spend more.
At what point will Democrats admit that such governance is a racket and that the money is better left with the people who earned it?
