Financing foolishness

There are several new programs in the news regarding rewards for people who stop doing something illegal or sinful. Was working on a column about that when I found this commentary I did in 1987. It seems this rewrite covers the topic quite well:

Remember swallowing my gum when I read it, some schools in the state of Maryland, around Baltimore, were paying teenage girls $200 or $300 a year not to get pregnant. That was some time back. No more reports followed from the Associated Press however, so we were all left to wonder, "Did it work?"

This week it was revealed to the world that hundreds of Illinois kids in what are called "troubled neighborhoods" are now earning wage to do better in school, stay honest, and not get pregnant. The "Peer Power Project" is being offered to girls in eleven of Chicago's public schools. Boys in four schools can get the "ADAM" program, which is similar to the girls, except for the pregnancy part. One of the elementary school principals, Sue Fowlkes, said, "It is too soon to tell if this will be successful." I could tell Sue right now where it's all going to lead because we've seen this program before.

One of my old columns written way back in the 1960s tells of how in desperation I paid my 7-year-old daughter, Heidi, to stop chewing her fingernails. Within hours our youngest daughter Wendy and baby son Clark who had never bitten any nails began chewing the ends of their fingers every time I looked at them, "ta get some monies." The kicker was when Heidi asked what the going price was for "not chewing toenails."

Besides those valuable home type lessons in human psychology we have bigger examples at the national level. Decades back in times of low prices and big surpluses, somebody in Washington, D.C., came up with a plan for paying farmers not to raise grain, and pigs, etc. The rest is history. After gaining experience, American farmers learned how to keep half the wheat land fallow (idle) and yet raise twice as much grain as they did before, even to the point where no one knows how many billion bushels began running out the top of government and private storage elevators, lying around in millions of Butler buildings, or rotting on the ground. Thousands of folks who had never even thought about farming got into the business of "not raising wheat, rye, and domestic oats."

I would guess that within 10 years it will cost $50 million annually just to pay off the teenagers in downtown Chicago for not sowing wild oats. The Chicago Board of Education would be well advised to start building spare homes for unwed mothers and set up the necessary bureaucratic machinery for giving away surplus babies.

And, let's hope the plans for paying teenagers to cut back on their robbings and killings works out better than paying dairymen to cut back on their milk and cheese. Since the Federal dairy plan went into effect the costs have become nightmares and right now thousands of U.S. dairy farmers are being paid an average of $88,000 each to sell off all milk animals to slaughter houses because the millions of tons of surplus cheese, butter, and dried milk is costing too much to store and the government can't give it away as fast as it accumulates.

Are you starting to see the picture? . . . the Chicago school board buying off the kid's surplus switchblades, shivs, and blackjacks?

The best pay in life is getting money or other rewards for doing something positive, either producing a product or a valued service. It goes against what most of us consider common sense, bribing people to be good or pay them to not do something bad or stupid.

Adding to the problem, I'm worried a lot of those kids in Chicago are going to grow up looking for jobs with the B.I.A. or some similar Federal Bureaucracy.

G. George Ostrom is the news director of KOFI radio and a Flathead Publishing Group columnist.