Unintended Consequence
An unintended consequence that the Government did not expect from the Reinvestment and Recovery Act being enacted was the short term federal aid expiring before state revenues were recovered. The federal funds helped state budget cuts only to a point and were not long-term fixes. In 2009, states seen a big increase in school funding and the amount of retained teaching jobs up until 2011. The Act funded 266,000 education jobs until in 2011, when education funding expired (WILLIAMS, JOHNSON & OLIFF, 2011). After 2011, it was a difficult year for budgeting and resulted in budget shortfalls thus resulting in education job losses. The government did not anticipate these difficulties that they experienced, therefore …show more content…
For example, in the state of Colorado, they recently had to get rid of $260 million for the schooling budgets. Another example was in Florida where they had to raise tuition at colleges by up to 15%. Another large sum of money that was cut from school related funding was in Michigan. There they cutback $135 million for financial aid and scholarships. (WILLIAMS, JOHNSON & OLIFF, 2011). In the fiscal year 2012, the consequences were severe when it came to school budgeting. States eliminated more money than most people where used to or ever anticipated. Obviously in phase one, the government did not intend for states to have to cut budgets and spending. Millions of dollars was cut in school funding across the United …show more content…
The Act should have made schools spend a portion of their funds on each portion and not allowing school districts to only focus on short-term things the school needed to fix at the time. The government and President Obama had good intentions with this act, but ultimately they failed to have strict regulations on what schools could spend their money on. They should have made it so that the school had to put money towards things that would benefit the school in the future. If schools would have put a portion of funds to long-term goals, it would have helped the economy grow more steadily and kept the same amount of education jobs as the economy had when the Act was first enacted. Figure 1 shows the decrease in jobs since 2009 when the act was implemented and it continued to decrease every year since the spike. If the solution is implemented the curve would a steady line beginning in April 2009 because the amount of education jobs would have stayed the same or very close to it if schools used the funds for long-term