That was probably meant to sound like a lot.

Exactly. Well-functioning agencies can point to statistics over long periods of time… But politicians don’t like boring “funding education caused crime to drop by {x}% ten years later” statistics because they aren’t sympathetic nor inflammatory. They’re also hard to attribute directly to the agency in question, because there could always be confounding factors that have skewed the numbers.

It’s like the difference between fire code/building regulations, and a fire department. Builders and real estate developers hate fire code regulations, because it’s expensive to comply with. Fire code prevents a lot of fires from starting, (and ensures buildings can be quickly and safely evacuated if a fire does occur), but it is seen as an expense. It’s something the real estate developer is required to pay for, and they resent it. But everyone loves their local fire department. Fire department funding is seen as an investment. They’re big, flashy, loud, and everyone knows when they work. And notably, the fire department only has to respond when something isn’t prevented by the local fire codes.

If your electrical system quietly works for 50 years without causing any fires, (because of your local building codes requiring the wiring to be done in a way that avoids fires) your fire department never needs to respond to a fire in your building. So the building owners tend to go “why do we even need all these expensive fire regulations, if there hasn’t been a fire here in 50 years?” There isn’t any way to point at the fire code and go “look at all the fires that these regulations prevented in your building,” because the fires never existed in the first place.

In reality, the two (building codes and the fire department) are working in tandem to keep people safe. But one is much more visible, so it’s the one that people tend to focus on.

And importantly, the conservative mindset is entirely focused on direct cause and effect. They’ll never look at larger systems. Criminal does crime, police catch criminal. Cause, effect. Sex causes unwanted pregnancy, unwanted pregnancy leads to abortions. Cause, effect. My building is on fire, fire department responds. Cause, effect.

They’ll never go more than one step away from a given system, because that would remove the direct cause and effect that they’re focused on. They won’t look at why the building caught on fire, or we could prevent it from happening again in the future. Which is why we would see them push to deregulate building codes, while simultaneously pushing to fund the fire department. Because they’re focused on the direct cause and effect. And as far as they’re concerned, anything slipping past the existing regulations is enough to prove that the entire system is ineffective. Because again, they see the cause (whatever slipped through the regulation) so they know what the effect will be. Never mind the fact that the regulation prevented a whole lot of other things from happening. They see a building on fire, and go “well I guess the fire codes are a waste of money. Might as well fund the fire department instead.”