One of the things that has always pissed me off about politics and political coverage is the media's consistent failure to perform simple math. I hadn't been blogging much more than a week before I first picked at this particularly irritating nit, and I've repeatedly scratched that wound raw over the subsequent eight years.

Take for example Rob McKenna's repeated promise to cap spending at 6 percent a year on all state programs other than education, a rate he insists would be high enough to cover population plus inflation.

This looks like a job for simple math!

First of all, the state serves different populations, and they don't all grow at the same rate! This is a point driven home recently by SEIU Healthcare 775NW, which correctly points out that due to our aging population, caseloads for long-term care in-home services are projected to grow far faster than the state's population as a whole:

6percentcap.jpg
  • SEIU Healthcare 775NW

Second of all, as I've written on numerous occasions, population plus inflation is a bullshit metric. The cost of providing per capita government services at a constant level rises faster than the Consumer Price Index (CPI) for a number of reasons, not the least of which being that the high-skill and labor-intensive services government provides don't lend themselves to the sort of productivity increases the economy as a whole realizes from automation and off-shoring. For example, you can't off-shore a classroom or automate policing.

Thus McKenna's proposed six-percent annual cap on the growth in state spending on long-term in-home healthcare services can't help but result in a dramatic underfunding of these services over time, because calculating both "population" and "inflation" is simply a lot more complicated than McKenna's math makes it out to be. Indeed, McKenna's core claim—that population plus inflation is a funding level sufficient to maintain state services at current levels—is total bullshit. The math simply doesn't pencil out.

Some in the media have congratulated McKenna for putting specific numbers behind his proposals. The problem is, these numbers don't add up. And that's something McKenna should be called to account for.