Not that they were especially relevant in the first place. Their factually-challenged and ideologically-driven attempts to join the *debate* has largely been a flop, yet we find John Stapleford has been able to get more space at the NJ editorial page to try to sow their confusion to Delawareans.
Today’s missive wants us to know that we should be wary of Public-Private Partnerships. You should make a point to go read the whole thing, because this is a new level of mess from Stapleford. While I have no idea whether Stapleford is responsible for the title of the piece, there isn’t anything that Stapleford is attempting to critique here that counts as a real public-private partnership. Those are specific arrangements between a public entity and a private one to manage capital and risk to get something done. This is mostly done for infrastructure but there are other applications.
In any event, Stapleford starts with abit of nostalgia for a past Chamber of Commerce President who was skeptical of the creation of a Small Business Technical Support Center (but it happened anyway). And somehow this is meant to have something to do with the Chamber acquiescing to an increase in the gross-receipts tax a few years back. His point here is something of a real mess, but he glides right by two key things — one was that the state was facing a financial cliff and there were tax increases, program cuts and salary roll backs for state employees everywhere. There weren’t many Delawareans who weren’t hit by the effort to balance the budget. Credit to Jack Markell AND the Chamber for recognizing that everyone needed to share the pain.
The rest of his piece is too hard to really tease out any real coherent thread. He throws around more numbers that you shouldn’t expect to have any data quality. But if I squint and look at this sideways,it looks as though the academic Stapleford is trying to make us believe that the government as a consumer of goods and services in the economy is somehow not especially legit. Which is completely nuts — no matter what you think the government ought to be doing, it will be buying or leasing Xerox machines (and toner!), buying office supplies, buying gear for police, firefighters, soldiers and so on. A private sector company who has a contract to produce the uniforms of soldiers or police officers is hiring people, buying equipment and sending money into the economy. And the government as a consumer of goods doesn’t count as a public-private partnership. The government paving the road in front of your house or repairing the water main hires a contractor to do that and that contractor (his employees and suppliers) are delighted for the business. And most of them competed for that business.
This piece is worth reading for its sheer incoherence, really. There isn’t much of a point outside of a recitation of various ideologies not backed up by any data or even a real narrative. Shame that the News Journal keeps thinking that this is worthy of their editorial page. But apparently if you are in a *think tank* you are expected to produce *think pieces*. One day Stapleford just might do that — but not today.