It’s Independence Day weekend (as I write this) — a perfect time to talk about … Hmmm. Like maybe …
How awful most sequels are? Business tie-in: Special effects without plot are like IT without business purpose.
Nah.
The need for cap gun control, and how to make it constitutional?
Oh, don’t be that way. Click on the link. I’m not trying to take your guns away. I could probably stretch for a connection to information security. But probably not.
Hey, I know. Ridiculing New Jersey used to be a popular pastime. In this anti-political-correctness age, maybe it’s time to resurrect it.
Here we go.
New Jersey has won the national Worst Roads in the U.S.A. sweepstakes. How bad are they? New Jersey Governor Chris Christie has declared a state of emergency, because, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers as reported in The Washington Post, “… 42 percent of New Jersey’s roadway system is ‘deficient.’ Traffic jams cost the state $5.2 billion annually, or $861 per driver. And potholes, bumps, and otherwise poorly-maintained roads cost each New Jersey driver nearly $2,000 a year in increased vehicle maintenance fees.” And New Jersey’s transportation trust fund is empty.
New Jersey’s gas tax is second-lowest in the U.S.A (after Alaska). And yet, Chris Christie and the New Jersey legislature are in full agreement that a gas tax increase isn’t going to happen.
The fun part, and the tie-in: More New Jersey citizens are against a gas tax increase than favor one too, even though $200 per year in additional gas taxes would save an average New Jersey driver … let’s see, carry the one … make it $2,600 or so annually.
The problem: Not one New Jersey driver would be able to tell you when and in what form he or she saved it.
That’s right: In KJR-land, Independence Day is the perfect time to talk about metrics.
Because this is, deep at its core, a metrics story. Everything else is detail. Here’s why and why it matters.
Regular KJR readers might, if they stayed awake long enough, recall the four metrics fallacies:
- Measuring the right things wrong.
- Measuring the wrong things, right or wrong.
- Failing to measure things that are important.
- Extending business metrics to individual employees.
As is so often the case, Fallacy #3 is New Jersey’s root cause (in my not particularly humble opinion, supported by not one single piece of objective evidence, so sue me).
See, everyone’s tax burden is right there, in your face. A gas tax increase would be immediately apparent to every driver every time he or she fills the tank (insert teenager joke here).
Your tax burden is measured, in your face, and, all other things being equal, nearly everyone agrees which direction they’d like it to go (down, in case you weren’t sure). Nobody wants to pay higher taxes just because they like the experience.
What you get for paying your taxes, or, in the case of New Jersey’s roads, don’t get in exchange for not paying enough of them? That’s arguably more important, and yet it’s fair to say the value received from government in exchange for our taxes is completely and thoroughly unmeasured.
Anything you don’t measure you don’t get.
In business we have a metric called GS&A — general, sales, and administrative expense. It’s a fee business units pay to the mother ship in exchange for being owned by the mother ship. Most business unit heads call it a tax and resent paying it, because it detracts from their bottom-line financial performance.
Think any of them have access to the metric Financial Value Received In Exchange for GS&A? Maybe, but I’ve never seen it.
Way back when, in the early days of business consulting when Total Quality Management was all the rage, TQM’s gurus explained that while quality’s costs were obvious and apparent, it’s value was much higher than its costs, even though its value was nearly impossible to measure.
In the realm of Information Technology we all know the importance of good technical architecture — it’s the difference between a given change in functionality turning into a modest-sized one-person enhancement versus it requiring a project team and a few months to take care of.
All of these cases, and more besides have this one thing in common: Their costs are easy to measure, and to see. Their benefits are neither.
And anything you don’t measure you don’t get.
B
Most people don’t measure unintended consequences, yet they get them .
L
I’m one of those New Jerseyans who oppose a gas tax increase. I experience our crummy roads first-hand every day, and yet I still oppose it. Why? Because of the way things work in New Jersey politics. They say, “We’re going to raise the gas tax to make the roads better.” Then after a few years (or months!) it becomes, “We have to use the gas tax money for the general fund so we don’t have to raise other taxes.” And the gas tax remains high and the roads don’t get fixed.
The problem isn’t failing to measure things that are important, the problem is too many years of politicians lying to voters, a problem that is rampant in but not confined to New Jersey.
Except that the last time New Jersey raised its gas tax was 1988, so I don’t understand what you mean by re-use of past gas tax increases and “the gas tax remains high” when it’s second-lowest in the country. Could you clarify?
I don’t know how it fits in with measurement, but my NJ annoyance is the requirement to have a gas station attendant pump gas – no self-service allowed! [maybe like an IT dept that locks down devices such that users can’t do any updates on their own]
The other problem with the gas tax increase it is that would hurt poorer people more than rich, and along with not seeing the savings is the belief that the rich should pay.
As an actual resident of NJ, I would like an accounting of how we used the previous transportation trust fund monies, and how we will make sure to get the proposed taxes spent on roads. Roads are only part of the reason for traffic jams. Others include: not using native-son’s Thomas Edison’s incandescent light to work overnights, over-development of residential areas with insufficient roads, etc.
Hi Bob, Maybe it’s because the rubes have noticed that they don’t get what they paid for? Like New York, where the bonds for the Thruway were finally paid off, and the tolls were raised, not eliminated? New York’s high gas taxes and tolls didn’t prevent the collapse of that NY Thruway bridge. But this time it’ll be different, right?
Bob,
Just curious if the gasoline tax is the only source of revenue to pay for New Jersey’s road?
It looks like there may be multiple (http://www.state.nj.us/ttfa/).
I would hate for you to have another fallacy of assuming that you selected the correct remedy for the correct crisis.
Thansk!
Dan J
There are others. But both the governor and legislature have vowed that any gas tax increase must be offset by tax decreases somewhere else. Sure, a complete picture would talk about every possible source of additional funds but it seems pretty sure that no matter what the additional source of funds might be, the governor and legislature would insist on it being offset by a tax decrease somewhere else. I don’t know that this discussion would add any clarity to the picture, which is why I provided the simplified view.
Bravo to you for attempting a rational analysis of things. It makes to me, but then I’m not accountable to anyone else and we are from fairly related backgrounds, career-wise.
However, I believe there is some element of dysfunction in government that is resulting in our representatives behaving in ways that cause too many of us to not trust them. And without a sufficient level of trust, no organization or institution can succeed over the long term. The alpha male thing is not designed for benefit of all affected by it.
It seems popular to call that element of dysfunction “an unwillingness to compromise”, but I don’t that’s it.
The closest I can get to it is that it is the inability of too many people to know how to act in a timely way on measures they don’t really understand, and to know which people to trust, who do things differently than they do.