Need historical data for comparison and percentages would make it nicer.
K-12 spending: the same dilemma afflicting everywhere. Despite spending more dollars not getting an equivalent return. Yet teachers are not raking it in. The money is disappearing somewhere. Is it similar to university level: top-heavy administration? Excessive spending on facilities?
I don't know where these estimates are coming from. They seem high. Sometimes an investment in services pays off long-term. CA's cuts to early childhood services only ends up with a bigger bill down the road as more kids fall off and end up either needing help later or getting into trouble.
But I agree with you: in all these areas how much are we spending, in adjusted dollars, per beneficiary and what are the outcomes? If possible how much "overhead" exists in each program? I suspect there is a lot of fat to be trimmed in these areas as admin/management gobbles up bigger slices of the pie while delivering nothing of value. You can see this writ small in San Francisco housing programs. Quite a number of non-profits that claim to be about housing, sucking up funding, then a) opposing all new housing where they don't get to wet their beak b) not actually putting a single person in a home.
