Is it really foolish to ask if money is being well spent? Only if you ask the question as poorly as you did. Taking two arbitrary values out of a complex mult

Is it really foolish to ask if money is being well spent? Only if you ask the question as poorly as you did. Taking two arbitrary values out of a complex multi-variate equation, and dividing them generates nothing but noise. If you're legitimately interested in quantitative public policy analysis, there are excellent graduate and doctoral programs that deal both in general policy analysis, as well as more specialized studies dealing specifically with labor and unemployment. If that sounds ridiculous to you, perhaps it'd be wise to recognize that the analysis is highly skilled technical work, and if you haven't devoted considerable energy towards gaining those abilities, you're just a noisemaker. You might as well be a donut-baker who holds strong opinions about graph theory despite having never programmed nor studied CS. * My claim is still that if comparable amounts of money were put in my own pocket,* Even if your claim is true, governmental solutions need not only to be good, they need to be replicable and scalable. If step one is "identify a million individual families who are able to use money more efficiently than established market-proven businesses", then it's going to take a very, very long time to reach step two.