Gregg is the Principal of Atlas Strategy Group and is widely regarded as one of the preeminent public affairs professionals in the country. A former Executive Director of the American Conservative Union, the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC), and the Faith & Freedom Coalition, Gregg has been an advocate for free-market public policy at local, state, and national levels for 15 years.

Gregg has worked—and continues to work—extensively with the Show-Me Institute to increase the organization’s membership and following among the next generation of free-market leaders. 

Show-Me Institute Chief Executive Officer Brenda Talent had this to say about our newest board member:

"We’re excited to have Gregg Keller join the Board at the Show-Me Institute. His youth and expertise in free-market public policy will bring a fresh and vital perspective to our Board."

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• Medicaid: Medicaid expansion sounds like free money, but after three years, Missouri taxpayers will have to pick up a $3 billion tab. Reform Medicaid, don’t expand it.
• Common Core: One size for kids doesn’t fit all, whether it’s shoes or schools. Why use centrally imposed standards that don’t meet the individual needs of local schools or students?
• Minimum Wage: We’d like to see everyone get a raise, but a government mandate is the wrong way to go. Raising the minimum wage will only hurt the very people it’s intended to help.
• Accounting: Missouri is behind in funding its public pensions because of flawed accounting assumptions.
• Tax Credits: Elected officials gamble your money on their favored corporations. Let’s end corporate welfare.

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• Accounting: Missouri is behind in funding its public pensions because of flawed accounting assumptions.
• Alphabet Soup: Lawmakers offer favored corporations tax subsidies like TIFs, EEZs, TDDs, and many others. Let’s end corporate welfare.
• School Choice: We have liberty in America, but our kids are assigned to a public school based on where they live. Let’s change that and give school choice a try.
• Tax Credits: Elected officials gamble your money on their favored corporations. Let’s end corporate welfare.
• Privatization: Privatization—public services provided by private companies—can deliver needed services at lower costs to taxpayers.

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When the St. Louis Cardinals played the Detroit Tigers in the 1968 World Series, the whole nation was watching (it captured an astounding 57 percent of television viewers) and both cities — as well as both teams — were looking good. Detroit was still the unchallenged auto capital of the world, and St. Louis was home to a dozen of the nation’s biggest and best-known companies.

Since then, the two baseball teams have fared better than their cities. When they met again in the 2006 World Series, the rest of the nation yawned — 83 percent of viewers tuned out. Who cared about a baseball rivalry in two dying cities in flyover country?

From 1950 to 2010, Detroit’s population dropped from about 1.8 million to 714,000 — a 61.4 percent decline. Over the same period, St. Louis City dropped from 857,000 residents to 319,000 – a 62.7 percent decline.

Think of Detroit as a larger St. Louis — more than twice the size in area as well as population. Drive through north St. Louis and you see block after block of abandoned and boarded-up buildings; drive through Detroit and it is mile after mile of the same. It is the Empty Quarter of cityscapes — which partly explains why it takes an hour for Detroit’s police to respond to a 911 call.

Detroit leads the nation’s cities in violent crime, followed by Oakland and St. Louis. According to FBI statistics, your chances of being the victim of a violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) are not a whole lot less in St. Louis City than they are in Detroit. The incidence of such crimes is only 13 percent lower in St. Louis than Detroit. I worked in Detroit from 1976 to 1982 as a reporter and anchor at WXYZ-TV. Coleman Young was the city’s first black mayor, notorious for playing the race card (though most white politicians were no better). I once asked him about his girlfriend’s exorbitant salary as the administration’s PR person. That night, the station ran his response — an expletive-filled rant accusing me of racism for even raising the question. Later, many city employees — both black and white — thanked me for spotlighting the mayor’s favoritism.

Lee Iacocca took over a struggling Chrysler in 1978 and refused to meet union demands to match GM and Ford wage rates at $18 an hour. He told the union: “At $13 an hour, you can have 20,000 workers . . . at $18, you’ve got zero.” He understood the Big Three were on thin ice.

After 13 years anchoring and reporting at KSDK in St. Louis, I returned to Detroit for a year in 1999 at WDIV TV. I was astonished at how much worse the city looked. Gone were the well-kept, middle-class neighborhoods. The drugs and violence were so bad that city cops often would ride four to a squad car.

Therein, I think, is a principal difference between Detroit and St. Louis. Things in St. Louis never reached the same pitch of hopelessness.

St. Louis experienced its biggest out-migration of people in the 1980s, when the population fell 27.2 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the city’s population was down just 8 percent.

By contrast, Detroit’s population over the last decade fell a stunning 24.9 percent.

So, no, I do not think that St. Louis City is following Detroit down the road to ruin — or to bankruptcy, either. In a recent column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dave Nicklaus pointed out that with slightly more than twice the population of St. Louis, Detroit has six times as much debt.

What’s more, St. Louis has not experienced a massive breakdown in vital services. Far from taking an hour to respond to a call , St. Louis police, on average, are at a crime scene in 10.32 minutes. And where Detroit police cleared only 11.3 percent of murders and 12.7 percent of reported rapes through arrests in 2011, St. Louis police cleared 66.4 percent and 71.8 percent of such crimes, respectively.

Though far from perfect, St. Louis City still works for most people. Many old neighborhoods are flourishing again. Let’s hope that we are on the cusp of a real turnaround in the city’s fortunes.

Rick Edlund is the communications director at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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The public-sector union included Show-Me Institute board members as part of a national blacklist of fund managers that public pension trustees are encouraged to avoid.

According to a Wall Street Journal article, the union’s goal is to “strong-arm pension trustees not to invest in hedge funds or private-equity funds that support education reform.” (Full Article)

“The Show-Me Institute will not be bullied by the American Federation of Teachers into abandoning ideas that are in the interests of the people of Missouri,” Show-Me Institute Executive Director Brenda Talent said. “It is ironic, and sad, that a union which claims to represent kids and teachers is using pressure tactics to defeat proposals that would benefit both groups. We will continue our principled fight for Missouri’s students, taxpayers, and pensioners — whether the AFT likes it or not.”

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The topic of the paper was the looming financial crisis of underfunded public pensions.

Listen online here:

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So it is now with the Missouri Legislature. Lawmakers have struggled in vain since Sept. 6 to accomplish much in their special session. But the House can’t agree with the Senate on hardly anything, especially sunset provisions for key tax credits. As the finger-pointing of blame escalates, it’s time for legislators to admit that, just like Duran, they’re out of hope. They need to officially call a halt to the special session.

The bad news is that they haven’t fixed the state’s sizeable tax credits problem. The good news is that it appears they won’t pass Aerotropolis, the so-called China Hub proposal that was a bad deal for taxpayers from the get-go. Good because it means Missouri taxpayers apparently won’t be stuck with hundreds of millions of dollars in new tax credits. And to those lawmakers (and public officials) who continue to say “We’ve got to do something” to prime the economic pump in Missouri: There is a better way. Stop handing out tax credits and start lowering the tax burden for all companies and individuals. 

Something to think about for the next legislative session.

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You’ll want to hear what he has to say. Reservations are required, so be sure to RSVP for the St. Louis event here.

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I hope all is well in “common sense radio” land. I heard you had John Beck, your senior vice-president, on with you this morning, and that you or he gave us a mention. I appreciate that, but I continue to be mystified that you and/or Mr. Beck won’t allow one of our policy analysts on your program to discuss the Aerotropolis proposal.

We here at the Show-Me Institute have studied and written about this bill for months. To simply claim, as I’m told Mr. Beck did, that we are against all tax credits is shallow, at best, and in this case, completely misses the point. The fact, as we have pointed out in numerous op-eds, papers, blog posts, videos and radio and TV interviews, is that Aerotropolis remains a massive tax credit giveaway program that may well leave Missouri taxpayers picking up the tab.

Mr. Beck, who is also a board member of the RCGA, clearly doesn’t see it the way we do. That’s fine, but isn’t this topic important enough that your listeners deserve to hear both sides of the debate? I repeat what has become a long-standing offer to have one of our policy analysts come on your program to talk about Aerotropolis.

I await your call.

Best,

Rick Edlund
Communications Director
Show-Me Institute
314-454-0647

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Click below for live video of the Show-Me Institute’s Speaker Series on Economic Policy, which will begin at about 7:00 p.m. CDT. Tonight’s speaker at this Saint Louis University event is Brian Riedl, the lead budget analyst for the Heritage Foundation. Riedl’s speech, “What Washington Won’t Tell You About the Next Economic Crisis,” focuses on the looming budget and deficit crisis in America.

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Riedl will appear in Saint Louis on May 3 as part of the Show-Me Institute’s Speaker Series on Economic Policy, cosponsored by Saint Louis University and the Sinquefield Charitable Foundation. His speech is titled “What Washington Won’t Tell You About the Next Economic Crisis.” If you’d like to attend, be sure to visit the registration page and click on the “Register” button at the top of the page. Meanwhile, listen to what Brian Riedl had to say on KWMU about America’s financial crisis.

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Now the bureau’s official count is out … and the numbers are daunting. The city of Saint Louis has lost 8 percent of its population since 2000. As recently as 2008, the city had claimed to have a little more than 356,000 residents. That appears to have been wishful thinking. The true figure is lower — much lower: 319,000, according to the Census.

The city’s mayor, Francis Slay, didn’t try to sugarcoat what he called “absolutely bad news.” It will, he said, “require an urgent and thorough rethinking of how we do almost everything.”

The Show-Me Institute has been doing just that. From our first policy study on the Saint Louis earnings tax, to a look at tax credits, to the most recent examination of the city’s land use policy, we have focused on ways in which the city can grow instead of shrink.

One can assume that the city’s unaccredited school system has also played a factor in the ongoing exodus from Saint Louis. Parents want to live in communities with good school systems. The Show-Me Institute has published several studies and papers outlining the benefits of educational choice — i.e., letting parents decide where their children will go to school.

In short, wishing and hoping for better numbers is no longer enough. For years, the city has effectively chased people and businesses out of town with policies like the earnings tax and the issuance of tax credits that only favor certain businesses. This downward trend won’t be stopped until city leaders adopt free-market policies that encourage growth instead of discouraging it.

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Full Study, Policy Brief, and Supporting Research

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