Tampa Bay Times from St. Petersburg, Florida • 4

TIMES SUNDAY, MARCH 22, 1992 7 A Govern from 1A ernment (in the 1960s) tried to do more than it had ever done before," he said, "and we've found we were not good at some of it." Alan Ehrenhalt agrees with Wilson and Marshall but thinks the public is also to blame because it expects too much. Ehrenhalt is executive editor of Governing, a magazine about state and local government (and an affiliate of the St. Petersburg Times), and author of The United States of Ambition, a book about the people who run for political office. The Great Society's flaw, he says, was its belief that deep-rooted social problems could be solved in much the same way as the interstate highway system was built with money, leadership and engineering. "It was a foolish overcon-fidence of the Great Society," he said.

"It seems to me to have shown abysmally little respect for the problems." But since then, the public has become too demanding, Ehrenhalt said. "We were satisfied in the 1950s when it took three days to mail a letter," he said. "Now we expect it the next day. Is it government's fault that it can't keep up?" Whatever the reason, the rapid decline of faith in government is having some dangerous side effects, observers say. One is that those who can afford to do so are, in surprising ways, withdrawing from the public sector and taking their political and financial support with them.

Harvard University political economist Robert B. Reich calls it "the secession of the successful." Affluent famines, Reich has written, are increasingly placing their children in private schools, hiring private security guards, joining private recreation clubs, even passing private laws in the form of neighborhood covenants and condomini First, he points out, schools don't have to fight for their customers; they are provided with a constituency, children who are required by law to attend school. Second, there is little competition for this constituency, because most school systems assign students on the basis of where they live. Third, schools receive their appropriations regardless of how well they do their jobs. And finally, he says, there are few clearly defined goals for schools and little way of measuring their effectiveness.

"It is just an awful arrangement that makes no sense whatsoever," Kolderie said, "and its results are perfectly predictable." The way out, Kolderie, Osborne and others contend, is to place the money for public services in the hands of the people who use them through vouchers, for example, for parents of school children, allowing them to choose among public schools. At the same time, they add, governments must relax their rules and regulations enough to let entrepreneurial public officials offer a multitude of choices. But will it work? The records of such efforts are mixed, at best. Minnesota has the nation's most extensive voucher system for public schools, allowing children to move even across school district lines. More recently, it has begun allowing teachers to strike out on their own with institutions called "charter schools." Under special charters, teachers can band together and create their own schools, offering experimental education, for example, or schools that teach only traditional subjects.

Kolderie says it is too early to tell how the voucher system and charter schools will work, but it safe to say Minnesota schools have not been remade as thoroughly as advocates had hoped or critics had feared. um regulations because they have little faith in government's ability to provide these services. And as this top 20 percent of wage-earners withdraws from the world of public institutions, he says, they also take away their support for the institutions others depend on. "The fortunate fifth," he wrote, "is quietly seceding from the rest of the nation." There are other signs that people are refusing to do business with government agencies. One is the growth of storefront operations that mail packages and sell stamps.

For a fee, these businesses wrap parcels, affix stamps and stand in line to mail them to save consumers the trouble of dealing with the Postal Service. As ominous as the decline of faith in government is, there is another, perhaps greater problem, observers say: the spiraling cost of government. In 1940, Osborne says, federal, state and local governments took the equivalent of 20 percent of American's total income; by the late 1970s, it had risen to 35 percent before it declined a bit during the Reagan years. Now it is rising again. Much of the increase in government budgets can be traced to inflation, of course, but businesses contend with inflation, too.

And yet some businesses actually manage to lower prices computer companies, for instance, and makers of video recorders. One way they do so is through greater productivity. That is, companies can change the way they make, distribute or sell their products in order to make them cheaper. Government, some observers say, is falling dangerously behind businesses in finding ways to deliver services more cheaply. This "productivity gap" between government and private industry became apparent 10 years Meanwhile, politicians who have embraced the "reinventing government" cause have been met mostly by yawns from the public.

Take Gov. Chiles. He was one of the first to put Osborne's theories to work, calling for the "right-sizing" of Florida government. He offered a few specific programs: loosening civil service regulations and budget procedures to permit more innovation, decentralizing some authority for education and human resource decisions. "Chiles has adopted the idea of reinventing government whole cloth," Osborne said.

But it hasn't struck a chord with the public, which views such things as little more than exercises in redrawing the state's organizational chart. FSU professor Dye says there is "general confusion" about what the Chiles administration is up to. "They haven't been able to sell (the administration's programs) to Floridians or even define it properly so it could be understood." Lt. Gov. Buddy MacKay concedes he and Chiles haven't sold the voters on "right-sizing." "We have not yet been able to show how all this ties together," he said.

Some observers doubt it does tie together. Tad Beyle, a University of North Carolina political scientist, says that although he finds some of Osborne's ideas useful, "I'm wary of theories that say, 'If you do these six things or these three things, our problems will go That's not true. It doesn't happen that way." Still, there are few other ideas around for making government work better and restoring public confidence in government. No wonder Buddy MacKay occasionally sounds wistful. "Ten years from now," he said, "people will look back, and they'll see we were the first to do it right." ago, Florida State University political scientist Thomas Dye said.

It also dawned on many observers, Dye said, that "if (government productivity) continued to lag behind the private sector, it would require an ever larger share of GNP to keep up." In other words, unless it finds ways to innovate, government is forced to consume greater and greater portions of the national income, damaging the economy. That's why there is such interest in David Osborne's theories about reinventing government. Osborne is the first political theorist in years to offer a way out of the productivity gap, by making government agencies work more like private companies. He doesn't push "privatization," the pet theory of conservatives a decade ago, which urged governments to simply turn over vast areas of public service to private companies. Privatization gave rise to corporations running prisons and picking up garbage; some companies even built and ran toll roads.

Rather, Osborne urges public agencies to mimic the way private companies reward innovation, efficiency and customer satisfaction. That is easier said than done. Most government agencies, unlike corporations, do not get their revenues from the people they serve. That is also true of public schools, said Ted Kolderie, senior associate at the Center for Public Studies, a research institute in St. Paul, Minn.

Public education is set up to serve children and their parents, Kolderie says, yet parents don't pay for the schools. Taxpayers do. That is one reason, Kolderie argues, that public schools, like other government agencies, do not reward efficiency or measure their own effectiveness. There's no reason to do so, he says. of its offerings.

"We're not in a mass market anymore," he said in an interview. "We're in a niche -market. People are used to choices, so this one-size-fits-all approach by government you live in this neighborhood, so you must go to this school doesn't sit well with people." Osborne has written a book, Reinventing Government, in which he argues that government agencies should take lessons from what is going on today in corporate America, as businesses decentralize, dismiss entire layers of middle management, speed up decision making and offer an array of choices. Other observers aren't sold on Osborne's prescription that government should be more like business, but they do agree with his diagnosis that Americans are deeply disenchanted with the way government operates today. The concern cuts across party lines.

One group that is openly worried about the decline of confidence in government is the Progressive Policy Institute, a Washington think tank for moderate Democrats. The institute has held seminars and issued reports on the subject with the Heritage Foundation, a conservative organization. When it comes to thinking about what's wrong with government, says Will Marshall, president of the Progressive Policy Institute, "the old ideologies are obsolete." Osborne agrees. "This is not a liberal or a conservative issue," he said. There hasn't always been such widespread cynicism about government.

There was a time, in fact, when most Americans had confidence in government's ability to solve their problems. During the economic collapse of the 1930s, public agencies were about the only places offering reliable services and steady jobs. And support of government soared in the 1940s and '50s, when Washington suc etite Week is March 22-29. special collections cessfully waged war on two fronts, schooled millions of returning GIs and built a gleaming network of interstate highways. Even into the 1960s, govern' ment seemed the right place to turn for answers to the nation's I I I Jr biggest and knottiest problems, including Liz Claiborne.

Guest appearances, gifts and bonuses, too. All just for you, our Very Important Petite from launching spacecraft to reduc ing inner-city poverty. Critics might have argued the cost was too high for President Johnson's Great Society programs, from Medicare to Model Cities, but few doubted they would work. Johnson didn't either. In his address to Congress on Jan.

4, 1965, outlining his programs, Johnson vVv Jr 'ss 1 11 ii 11 if 1 dismissed his critics oy saying, i II iiiiii.itl)ilif'-;T':Sy. I I I I I 1 I I "The Great Society asks not how You 11 find style in just your fashion that fits you perfectly. All the best collections. All the best looks at Burdines. much, but how good.

But within a few years, confidence in government began plummeting. By the end of the 1960s, the percentage of voters saying they trusted government to do the right thing most of the time had declined from 62 percent to 48 percent. And the decline has continued apace since then. By the late 1980s, three out of four Americans said they thought Washington delivered less value for each dollar of taxes than it had a decade earlier. And Time magazine asked on its cover, "Is Government Dead?" What caused the enormous erosion of confidence in government? Scholars and other observers of the public sector are divided.

Some believe, as Osborne does, that people lost faith in government because it failed to adapt to the economic and social changes going on in their Hves. Others say the fault runs the opposite way: People expect too much from government. And another group believes that government lost public support when it overreached, starting in the 1960s. One who believes government wounded itself by trying to do too much is James Q. Wilson, a political scientist at University of California-Los Angeles.

"People give up on government when government announces that it will solve an important problem and then fails," Wilson wrote last summer in the New Republic. "Before the 1960s, the federal government played almost no role in abortion, education, crime control, race relations or health care. The few things the government did, it did very well. It ended (by accident of World War II) the Depression, it won a popular war, it built the interstate highway system and it provided retirement benefits for the elderly. Small wonder that Americans took pride in their government in the 1940s and 1950s." Will Marshall of the Progressive Policy Institute agrees.

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