Promising Government Policies That Ended Up Causing More Harm Than Good

In every society, there are going to be issues and concerns that, when addressed, could make life better for everyone, from the standard citizen to the top one percent.

Sometimes, when new policies and programs are implemented, they sound wonderful, but once they are put into action, consequences arise that no one could have ever expected, making us wish that things could just go back to the way they were.

Redditor luxyron asked:

"What's a government policy that seemed like a great idea but ended up causing more harm than good?"

The Sparrow Effect

"Policy implemented by Mao during the hard times to kill the sparrows because 'they were eating the seeds in the fields.' Under the policy, people would be killing sparrows in large numbers."

"Turned out that the supreme leader was wrong. Sparrows were eating insects that were eating the crops. Following the disappearance of sparrows, a huge famine arrived with thousands/millions of dead."

- anothercopy

"He also demanded that as much metal as possible be gathered up for weapons manufacturing. His overzealous following gathered up everything, including farm implements and pots and pans, thus adding to the Sparrow Effect and causing mass starvation."

"Sadly, most of the pot metal was useless, so there was no benefit at all."

- crangeguy

"History is full of stories like this. Humans thinking they can manage wildlife, they cull a keystone species, and throw an entire ecosystem into chaos."

- VulfSki

An Unprepared Community

"The Care in the Community project..."

"The idea was that those with mental health issues would receive wrap-around care in the community they were from, enabling them to maintain better connections and have a better life than just being shoved into institutions, and then they could close most of the institutions down."

"They just did the closing down institutions part. The community was given nothing to prepare. This had, and still has, consequences."

- Russell_W_H

"This is a great example of, 'We don't want to pay for it, so we're going to cut funding for it and pressure the community into doing the heavy-lifting for us without giving them any resources to successfully do so.'"

- VulfSki

No Child Left Behind

"The 'No Child Left Behind' policy." My mother was a public school teacher for 35 years and vows that this policy was the undoing of decades of progress that actually helped all children succeed."

"Keeping a child back or retaining them at the same level for a year or two is painful for teachers and families and kids, but it makes a HUGE difference in the long-term."

"No teacher WANTS to keep a child back, but retention is sometimes necessary because everyone learns differently."

"It also helps kids who have outlier birthdays. My brother has an outlier birthday, was a full year younger than his class, and after NCLB, my mom wasn’t able to retain him, and he very obviously struggled because of it, even with a teacher as his mom. He was just in a different place developmentally than his peers, and a year would have made a huge difference."

"It was a policy meant to do good and it did the opposite."

- Mayor_Baby

Perverse Incentives

"When India was still a British colony, the British government was once concerned about the number of cobras and cobra bites in Delhi. So they decided to incentivize killing the snakes by attaching a bounty to every dead cobra. Pretty sensible on its face, and it seemed to work well for a while..."

"At least until people started breeding cobras."

- awildpoliticalnerd

"You didn't include the best part. When they inevitably stopped paying people, all the breeders released the cobras cause why would I keep 80 cobras in my house for no reason, resulting in the problem getting much worse."

- Purgatory115

"The history on this is a bit iffy. It may be a made up story to illustrate perverse incentives. That being said, perverse incentives do exist, and there are historical examples."

"In 2002, Brits offered money to Afghan farmers who burned down their poppy fields. This actually caused people to grow more poppy. They’d harvest and sell the sap before burning the fields."

- Alternative_Fill2048

Accountability Backfired

"Forcing companies to publish the list of their top paid executives and their salaries. It became a league table that they all used to negotiate higher salaries with."

"The head of the sector who pushed the rule said years after the implementation, they thought it would be a name and shame thing and companies would pull back on excessive executive compensation, but they did not. He said he regretted pushing the rule."

- pickle9977

"Seems like they should expand that to all positions... but we can't be giving the normal people the ability to know their true market value, now can we?!"

- mortemdeux

Gotta Keep Making Money Somehow

"(USA) Wanna know why it seems like 90% of the vehicles on the road are monstrous SUVs?"

"That's thanks to a fuel efficiency mandate! But it turns out it was easier to just make bigger vehicles that fell into a different classification than it was to make regular old passenger cars that were sufficiently fuel efficient. Doh!"

- Astramancer_

"Every law needs to go through a focus group of a**holes to detect all the ways they’ll circumvent the law."

- needlestack

Wage Control Troubles

"FDR's wage control acts in the late 1930s led to employers offering health insurance as a way to attract better talent, and, well, you see how that's going for lots of people these days."

- Exotic_Negotiation_4

"That was only part of it. The IRS wanted to tax those benefits, and Eisenhower convinced Congress to keep them tax-free because Democrats were fighting for universal health care and Ike thought that was SOCIALISM!!"

"Also, Unions opposed single payer because they'd lose a major bargaining chip with their employers."

- _jump_yossarian

Define 'Unpatriotic'

"The Patriot Act. It didn't seem like a good idea to me at the time, but I was only 20 so what did I know? Apparently enough."

- sircrush27

"I just hate the name of the law. It let its supporters smear anyone who had legitimate privacy concerns as 'unpatriotic.'"

- Letter_Effective

"That was intentional. Lawmakers will create the stupidest imaginable name for a bill so that it can be abbreviated into a word that tests well with focus groups."

- idontagreewith2

Unnecessary Design Changes

"That stupid new gas can design."

- yeah87

"Spill more gas with that one than an old one for sure."

- smooze420

Housing Crisis

"Eviction moratorium. It led to an exodus of small landlords with private equity and large landlords able to gobble up properties. The people who got behind on rent got even more behind and were just evicted later. Rental assistance would have been the better choice."

- kesi

"Rental and mortgage assistance also would have been a better choice in 2008. The banks would still effectively be bailed out but people wouldn’t have lost their homes."

- Fickle_Finger2974

A Fire That Cannot Be Contained

"The forest Fire prevention and response."

"For many forests, natural fire cycles are just part of life. Routine controlled burns are the safest way to clear underbrush."

"Sadly when the Forest service was facing scrutiny they pivoted hard to fighting forest fires. The end result is the underbrush built up and resulted in even more disastrous fires."

- Ok-disaster2022

Payment Protection

"The Paycheck Protection Program and the CARES Act. Huge amounts of money were handed out with almost no oversight. The result was the largest amount of fraud in history."

- purple_lantern_lite

"Small business owner here (employ 12-15 people): we took a very small amount in the first draw (20k) and a bigger, yet relatively small amount in the second draw (120k). Being the id**t that I am, I spent every cent of this on making sure all my employees got paid every week, everyone had medical coverage, and that safety measures (plexiglass panels, extra cleaners, etc) were put into place for everyone when we could finally partially reopen."

"I kept fastidious track of all money and filed every receipt away to later submit. We crunched the numbers, and this wasn’t going to be enough to get us through, so from April 2020 to November 2021, my two co-owners and I didn’t take a cent home. We literally paid ourselves $0 for 21 months to make sure that we could continue to provide for our employees and patrons."

"When it came time, I promptly and comprehensively submitted my massive amounts of documentation on how we had spent every cent of our PPP loan. I was SO grateful for it because, without it, the business would sincerely not have survived the pandemic."

"Imagine how much of an id**t I felt like when I began seeing how much other businesses and business owners got away with. I should’ve bought a f**king yacht."

- Infamous_Yak8910

"Even for the businesses that technically used it to pay their employees, for a lot of them, it was basically money directly in their pocket because they were conducting business as usual, but they no longer had to pay wages. Not all businesses were forced to close or even limit service, but for some reason even "essential" businesses like grocery stores or construction companies were allowed to get 'loans.'"

"It was so disgusting to me how many people took advantage of a program that was meant to help. And inevitably they are the same exact people that are against student loan forgiveness programs."

"PPP was just more theft from taxpayers to give to the rich. The fact that some businesses (like yours) used it correctly for its stated purpose was a pure accident. It was always meant to be a gift."

- Amelaclya1

A Questionable Form Of Free Speech

"Citizens United. Everything around it. Corporations are not people. Unlimited money in govt is a terrible ideal. Money is not speech."

"Some billionaire wants to stand on a street corner with a placard? Go for it. Dumping +200 million into a campaign to buy your way into govt contracts, bulls**t, that's not free speech.""

- oxphocker

"For the record. Every Congress, there are a handful of democrat lawmakers who try to introduce a bill to end Citizens United. But they never get enough support."

"This is an issue where if people actually supported politicians trying to do the right thing, progress could get made."

"But usually in this country, we only complain about the bad politicians while not propping up good ones"

- Vulfski

Shopping Bag Dilemmas

"Plastic bag ban. Now we are inundated with discarded reusable shopping bags instead of the lightweight single use ones which actually had a high rate of re-use for dog poop scooping, lining wastebaskets, etc."

- TheRealMegMurry

"Eh, I’m actually okay with this one. On the one hand, it’s absolutely a scheme for grocery chains to upcharge you on a bag when you forget yours."

"On the other, for my entire life, up until the plastic bag ban, it was normal to go outside and just see plastic bags swirling in the breeze like tumbleweeds."

"I don’t know what the actual environmental impact is but it can’t be negative."

- dirtylizard

"While I appreciate the positive effect it's had on the environment, some cities near me went overboard with their policies."

"Not only banning plastic bags but charging a fee plus sales tax for flimsy paper ones. And what about stores that sold goods that would be damaged by rain in a paper bag?"

"I always favored a compromise where plastic was an additional charge, paper would always be free."

- theshoegazer

These issues are great reminders of just how many opportunities there still exist for us to improve our lives, society, and government.

Though they may seem impossible to tackle alone, talking about them is a great first step.