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Perhaps you've seen the billboards, heard the radio advertisements or seen the full-page newspaper ads declaring that Oklahoma's CareerTech system is "elevating our economy.” The budget for this statewide marketing campaign was $190,000 in taxpayer money last year, and a full $380,000 in 2008. The Oklahoman has reported that "CareerTech officials want the budget increased to $1 million in coming years to adequately market the system across the state.”

But is CareerTech really elevating our economy?

Clear economic thinking requires us to consider not only that which is seen, but that which is unseen. And CareerTech's expensive PR campaign fails to make mention of a crucially important fact, a fact acknowledged by the very author of the study on which the PR campaign is built: CareerTech's educational activities come with a significant price tag.

According to CareerTech's 2007 annual report, federal, state and local taxpayers paid $467 million in support of CareerTech. In addition, the much larger (and less obvious) burden is the permanent lost economic activity due to the tax burden.

Economists use the term "deadweight loss” to denote the burden imposed on taxpayers to pay for government programs like CareerTech. "Deadweight loss” describes the economic inefficiencies created by taxation, such as when taxpayers reduce work and/or consumption or shift income to avoid taxation. In other words, the very process of transferring resources from the private to the public sector results in a permanent loss of potential economic output.

In a study in the current issue of Perspective, published by the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, we performed a cost-benefit analysis of CareerTech. In terms of benefits, we'll take CareerTech's word for it that full-time training is estimated to add approximately $4.3 billion ($1.8 billion in current dollars) to the future income stream of CareerTech graduates.

But we found that this $1.8 billion compares with the tax burden and deadweight loss of up to $1,859,400,076 (in current dollars). In other words, Oklahoma taxpayers received a net negative return on the CareerTech system of at least $77 million — and this estimate does not include the administrative or compliance costs associated with taxation.

Instead of elevating our economy, it appears that CareerTech is enervating our economy.

"If anything, most public services do not appear to justify the taxes needed to finance them,” economists Stephen Brown, Kathy Hayes and Lori Taylor found in a recent study. They say that any tax savings financed by slower growth in government spending is positively associated with growth in private capital and private employment. "This finding would seem to imply that other state and local public capital has been increased to the point of negative returns, perhaps because a growing stock of other public capital is indicative of an increasingly intrusive government.”

Oklahoma taxpayers would be better served with a reduction of subsidies to the CareerTech system, forcing CareerTech to compete with the private sector on a level playing field.

Economists Moody and Warcholik are research fellows at the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs, a conservative think tank ( www.ocpathink.org).