LOGIN NOT A MEMBER? REGISTER

FOR PRESS CONTACT US  SUPPORT

The Maryland Public Policy Institute

• RESEARCH
• Criminal Justice
• Economic & Fiscal Policy
• Education
• Environment
• Gas Tax
• Government Transparency
• Health Care
• Transportation
• Welfare
• EXPERTS
• EVENTS
• MPPI PRESS
• ABOUT US
• POLICY BLOG

'Genuine' progress?

Originally published in the Frederick News-Post

Economic & Fiscal Policy

by Marta Hummel Mossburg

OP-EDS

With the European welfare state crumbling and the Dow down 7.9 percent in May as a result, Maryland:

A) Cuts spending and its government workforce to avoid shutdown.

B) Renegotiates pension contracts with state workers to prevent massive tax hikes and cuts to state services.

C) Tries to be more like Greece, Spain and the rest of the P.I.I.G.S (Portugal, Italy, Ireland, Greece and Spain) decimating your 401(k).

If you picked C, you win. State legislators purposely avoided tackling the $30 billion unfunded pension and health care problem for state workers in the 2010 session. They also passed a budget that allowed the state to steal money from bridge and road repair and spend it on other things, hiking taxpayers' debt burden.

But Gov. Martin O'Malley launched the Genuine Progress Indicator earlier this year to measure the happiness and satisfaction level of state residents and to guide policy.

(http://www.green.maryland.gov/mdgpi/index.asp)

The GPI uses 26 indicators to compute Marylanders true well-being, including quantity of leisure time, volunteerism, education, income inequality, commute time and pollution.

Previously, the state relied on purely economic measures such as employment and wages in the Gross State Product to measure the state-of-the-state.

"The traditional measure failed to capture many aspects of life we value -- from environmental quality to livable communities. It also lumped many negatives, such as cost to undo the damages from economic growth, together with the positives," said Matthias Ruth, director of the University of Maryland's Center for Integrative Environmental Research, which calculated the GPI.

Not surprisingly, the old measurement found that in 2000 Maryland was more than 50 percent wealthier than it actually was when the new factors were added to the data mix.

GPI is similar to an international Gross National Happiness standard that ranks the tiny, isolated and poor country of Bhutan as a model achiever. And it mirrors the efforts of French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who in February 2008 asked a commission to find an alternative to Gross Domestic Product to measure economic and social progress, as apparently GDP did not take into account the joys of adultery and Bordeaux.

The idea that government should measure happiness is ludicrous, as it is a subjective ideal with religious overtones.

More importantly, what proponents of these new measurements fail to grasp is that the items they weigh as equally if not more important than generating money have a high price. And as the recent events show, society cannot pay the bill for a state that mandates months of vacation, "free" health care and early retirement with lavish benefits. Eventually, those models will collapse as demographics dictate that one worker cannot pay for one retiree, the ratio soon to be across Europe.

Second, the government has no authority to maximize happiness. It exists to enforce the laws of the land and to guarantee, "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" for each of its citizens.

Before Maryland starts using a tool to grow government's size and scope, it should first address real problems like massive unfunded pension and health care benefits that will severely limit the state's economic growth if left unchanged -- an outcome guaranteed to leave many people very unhappy. That would be real progress.

Marta Mossburg is a senior fellow at the Maryland Public Policy Institute. mmossburg@mdpolicy.org