I'm not a huge fan of David Sirota, but his first column for the Creator's Syndicate, on the real lessons of the DMV, is quite good. Nice to have this sort of lefty-ism hitting the papers.
By the time I posed for my license photo, I had spent three total hours in a DMV office, as had at least 200 other people.
While I smiled for the camera, I considered this mundane encounter with state government in economic terms. Between all the people I waited with, about 600 combined hours of economic output was extracted from the state and thrown away. Multiply that over an entire year throughout any given state, and you see how poorly run public services take a severe — and hidden — toll on a state's economy.
Services, of course, do not fail in a vacuum. They fail because budget cuts leave them lacking adequate resources to succeed. While Republican economics teaches that less government spending means a stronger, more efficient economy, my experience at the DMV suggests otherwise, as does this state's overall experience as a test tube for conservatives' budget and tax doctrine.
Conservatives have a good thing going on: They spend their campaigns convincing the country that government can't work, win on the argument, cut the government's budget so it doesn't work, then spend the next campaign arguing that you should put them in charge of the government, because, don'cha know, government doesn't work.
Also, the main DC DMV is a pit of despair. The one in Georgetown, however, that's funded well enough to rent space in a nice mall and mainly caters to upper class white people, is a dream to go to.
