Democrat programs always sound good but, once in operation, they’re consistently disastrous, whether because of inefficiency, graft, or being easy marks for grifters. San Francisco just added another program to that list, with taxpayers having coughed up over $700,000 to get black men as teachers in local elementary schools—and ending up with almost nothing to show for that money.

Democrats believe that they, not the taxpayers who do the work and create actual wealth, know how to spend money virtuously and wisely. There is no indication that this is the case. The more money that Democrats get, the more they waste.

Thanks to the giant federal boondoggles of alleged “inflation reduction” and “job creation” through government spending—which means printing money and stripping wealth from the private sector— Congress allocated $7.5 billion in taxpayer monies to build EV charging stations. In three years, eight EV charges have been built.

Image by AI.

Biden’s broadband program has been equally stuck in government inefficiency. The 2021 infrastructure bill authorized over $42 billion in grants to make sure that every American was connected to high-speed internet. Three years later, the program hasn’t connected a single American to high-speed internet.

One doesn’t have to look only at the federal level to find these failures. In Tim Walz’s Minnesota, his government’s lax oversight allowed 70 people (23 of whom are now convicted) to engage in a massive fraud that siphoned $250 million off a federally taxpayer-funded child nutrition program. (It’s a federal program, but the states manage it.)

Now, San Francisco joins the list of Democrat-run governments using taxpayer money for poorly conceived, poorly managed programs that have virtue-signaling goals that they consistently fail to achieve. Following George Floyd’s decision to ingest enough illegal drugs to stop his heart, leftists excitedly saw heading their way a flood of cash from governments and corporations, all desperate to signal their support for black lives.

In San Francisco, an organization called the Urban Ed Academy (“UEA”) decided it was time to ask San Francisco to give it money to train black men as teachers. The goal was that, within a short time, every San Francisco public school would have at least one black male teacher.

I should say as an aside here that one of the huge problems with the black community is that it lacks positive male role models. The best way to integrate black men into children’s lives, of course, is to encourage marriage and committed fatherhood, but that suggestion is anathema to Democrats. They want the government as the daddy, so every black man who commits to a wife and his children via that wife is a threat to the government. The UEA seems to have grasped that black men matter to children’s mental health, so that awareness, at least, was a good thing.

Back to the point...

The UEA had created a program called “Man the Bay,” which had as its goal getting black men from across America to become teachers in San Francisco’s elementary schools. It offered to help these men with housing and to pay them some money as they worked to obtain their credentials.

The City was charmed by the idea and awarded UEA a $1.2 million contract under something called the “Dream Keeper” initiative. This program defunded the police by $60 million and, instead, earmarked that money to programs intended to benefit blacks in San Francisco. (Note: Leftist San Francisco has effectively driven out its black residents. The City’s black population is shrinking fast and will continue to shrink because, thanks to leftist policies that make the City unaffordable and dangerous for them, blacks are desperate to leave.)

That was three years ago. The results are trickling in now, and they’re not good. So far, in exchange for the $1.2 million allocation ($709,000 of which the City has already paid out), UEA managed to place four black male teachers and one substitute teacher in San Francisco’s elementary schools. Nor is this simply a matter of looking at the data before the program’s really had a chance to get going. No one is in the pipeline.

Instead, the problem is one of mismanagement. Most of the men who got their teaching credentials through the program ended up teaching in Oakland or they worked for nonprofits. According to the San Francisco Chronicle,

A Chronicle analysis of city records found that Urban Ed and its city sponsor, the Office of Economic and Workforce Development, made a series of decisions that increasingly pushed the program away from its original purpose and the overarching goal of Dream Keeper. Among the problems: a vague contract that doesn’t include the word “teacher”; San Francisco taxpayers being billed for services provided in another city; and a lack of buy-in from the partner Urban Ed needed most — SFUSD.

The same article states, “[t]here were red flags from the beginning.” Thus, the city’s woke bureaucracy pushed the initiative through even though a review showed it was a bad deal. You can read the details here. Suffice it to say that San Francisco took money from San Francisco’s working people and handed it to Oakland and other cities.

If what happened in San Francisco had occurred in the private sector, people would get fired and, if there was fraud, they’d be arrested. However, this is the government. Nobody, whether in San Francisco’s bureaucracy or at UEA, will pay a price for wasting taxpayer money on a foolishly conceived and managed initiative.

The bigger the government, the more it gets to take other people’s money using the police power that lurks behind every tax collected and then spend that money without consequences, no matter how bad the results.

If San Franciscans want to be stupid within their 49 square miles, so be it. What should worry all of us is that the media propaganda machine is working overtime to convince Americans that Kamala is “da bomb” and that her leftist initiatives using taxpayer money should be the norm for the nation.