Parents’ Bill of Rights Law Passes the House

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

This week, the Missouri House of Representatives gave initial approval to a Parents’ Bill of Rights bill, the culmination of months of hard work by members across the chamber. The bill is a bit of a mash-up of reforms relating to school transparency and instruction—eight amendments were added to the bill after the title was expanded, each from a different House member—but the final legislative product is one that parents and reformers can get behind. The Missouri Independent has more details on the bill:

The bill . . . aims to “to empower parents to enforce” rights laid out in the bill, like knowing what curriculum is being taught and allowing parents to visit schools to check on their children. . . .

An amendment added to the bill [] would prohibit teachers or students from being forced to adopt ideas in violation of sections of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, such as concepts that individuals are inherently superior or inferior based on their race, ethnicity, color or national origin or “bear collective guilt” for the actions their ancestors may have committed in the past. . . .

Other provisions included in the bill require that public school employees’ salaries be included in the state’s accountability portal, allow for lawsuits if school boards fail to follow requirements that allow for public comment and directs the state education department to develop a database for schools to post their curriculum and professional development materials every six months.

The bill also requires that districts post their curricula on their websites, one of many ideas that overlaps with the Show-Me Institute’s Parents’ Bill of Rights published last year. If this bill is passed, it will go straight into law. This is in contrast to House Joint Resolution (HJR) 110, which would first go to voters, but would also have the benefit of entering the Missouri Constitution.

It’s been a slow process, but it is good to see some of the legislative logjam in Jefferson City that’s bedeviled lawmaking for over three months finally making its way down the river. I look forward to testifying on this legislation in the Senate and hope these reforms complete the legislative process and become law. Onward.

Medicaid’s Volatile Upcoming Year

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

As Missouri’s legislators begin crafting next year’s budget, one of the biggest questions they’re facing is how much the state’s Medicaid program is going to cost. Because Missouri’s budget is constitutionally required to be balanced, the size of Medicaid will directly impact our state’s ability to pay for other funding priorities.

It should be no shock that the past two years have been tumultuous and expensive for Missouri’s largest government program. Medicaid fulfilled its role as the state’s health coverage provider during a global pandemic, and on top of that, Missouri also adopted Medicaid expansion. These two factors have the potential to swing state Medicaid spending by billions of dollars.

Today, Missouri’s Medicaid program enrollment sits at the highest point in state history, which as I’ve written before, is in large part because of COVID-19. Fortunately, there’s hope that the federal state of emergency for the pandemic will end in the next few months. Such a move would represent a green light for states to begin once again checking whether program enrollees still qualify for the services they’re receiving (one of the conditions of receiving stimulus funds for Medicaid was not removing anyone from the rolls for the time being).

This is important because enrollment is the single biggest driver of Medicaid spending, and there are many reasons to believe that there are large numbers of ineligible enrollees right now. According to the Urban Institute, more than 350,000 current enrollees could lose coverage if the state starts checking eligibility again. To put that number in context, even if you assume the monthly cost of coverage for these enrollees is $400 (it’s likely higher), this is saying the state may be spending $140 million per month on people who don’t qualify to receive services!

It should not be controversial to insist that state tax dollars only pay the cost of health coverage for those who meet the qualifications to receive it. In normal times, federal law requires states to check eligibility regularly to ensure funds aren’t being wasted. Federal law also requires those who are qualified to receive benefits regardless of any administrative difficulties. This is a problem for many Missourians right now, as the wait time for application processing far exceeds what’s allowed by federal law. (It should be noted that those who are eligible for coverage when they apply will have their qualified costs covered retroactively once enrolled regardless of processing time.)

To summarize: There’s an enormous backlog of current enrollees whose eligibility needs to be checked, and once an eligibility check is completed we will likely see a major decline in total enrollment. But there’s also a sizable backlog of applicants who are waiting to be enrolled—and once that process is complete, total enrollment will increase.

The good news is that the governor and legislature appear to recognize the enormity of the task ahead; both have included increased funding to help reduce the administrative backlogs in their budgets. It’s anybody’s best guess how much Medicaid enrollment will fluctuate over the next year, but there are potentially billions of reasons that state taxpayers should care about enrollment numbers.

Podcast: Raises for Teachers, Billions for Meta, and a New Stadium for the Chiefs

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Patrick Ishmael, Susan Pendergrass and Elias Tsapelas join Zach Lawhorn to discuss the Missouri budget, a massive tax incentive deal in KC, the possibility of the Chiefs moving to Kansas, and more.

Listen on Apple Podcasts 

Listen on Sticher 

Listen on SoundCloud

In Another Grinding Legislative Session, Missourians’ Priorities Getting Ignored Again

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

After countless hours of debate and filibuster, the Missouri Senate finally passed a version of a redistricted Congressional map—a regular and expected exercise required of legislatures after each Census. That redistricting debate is still not over, but the slow and plodding pace on this relatively simple piece of legislation is indicative of both the House and Senate’s failure to get much done this year. Coming into 2022, a lot of leading Missouri politicians talked a good game about getting freedom-enhancing priorities passed for the public, but so far that talk has amounted to just spending billions of dollars of federal money. Not much extra freedom there.

What’s the cost of this legislative inaction been so far? From failing to establish a parents’ bill of rights to making no progress on reforming taxes, priorities of all sorts are increasingly in peril as the end of the session draws ever nearer with each passing fruitless legislative day.

Congressional maps are only part of the problem, of course. The main problem is that the Senate supermajority, bizarrely, cannot agree among themselves on what major legislative priorities to pass and when to test the commitment of the minority to a filibuster of the majority’s plans. Bills are filibustered. Resolutions are filibustered. The journal (!) is filibustered. And economic freedom and school choice and transparency and tax reform go by the wayside.

The result is that instead of fending off just one faction of filibusterers, the Senate now has two sizable filibustering factions: the liberal minority and, now, the conservative caucus.

It’s easy to dust off the old saw that this is just how the Missouri Legislature operates, but years of rewarding filibusters in the Senate has invited more of them and made filibusters the norm rather than the exception to managing legislative business. You’d be forgiven if you thought the legislative priorities of Missouri’s conservative supermajority were a bit unclear, especially in contrast to states like Arizona and Florida that committed to transparency in curricula and acted at the first opportunity. If not getting things done in 2022 is the intent of representatives and senators, well, mission accomplished. But I don’t think that was the deal taxpayers thought they were making with their elected officials when they put them in office.

Whatever the majority’s objectives might be for 2022, the clock is winding down on them. Missourians deserve far more than has been delivered by the legislature, and so far, the session has been a giant disappointment.

“Sunrise” Study Questions Legitimacy of Occupational Licenses

Posted on by Corianna Baier

If occupational licenses are meant to protect consumers, should licenses be created at the behest of lobbyists instead of consumers? And should these licenses get created despite initial reviews that recommend against the creation of a new license?

A new study from the Institute for Justice finds that even though these things shouldn’t be the case, they are. Institute for Justice researchers studied 397 sunshine reviews (reports used by legislators that evaluate the need for new occupational regulations) from 15 states conducted from 1985 to 2017. They found that occupational licensing lobbies have driven the push for 84 percent of sunrise reviews and about 80 percent of these reviews declined to recommend licensing. What’s problematic is that legislators enacted licensing more often than recommended—twice as often as recommended in the reviews. These stats don’t instill confidence that occupational licenses were enacted to protect consumers, as is often claimed.

Missouri doesn’t require sunrise reviews and therefore wasn’t included in this study, but it does make one question whether Missouri’s occupational licenses were created under similar circumstances. Were Missouri’s various occupational licenses truly created to protect consumers? And are they still serving that purpose? We should have the answers to these questions.

A five-year sunset for all occupational licenses would give lawmakers new opportunities to assess the validity and necessity of occupational licenses. These licenses make it harder to get a job, which reduces supply and raises prices for consumers. Through a sunset process, unnecessary regulations (or even unnecessary licenses) that do not serve the purpose of protecting consumers can be identified and eliminated. A sunset provision would go a long way in supporting workers and consumers.

Only Days Left to Replenish Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund

Posted on by Corianna Baier

The April 1st deadline is fast approaching.

As a reminder, states have the option of using stimulus funds to replenish their Unemployment Insurance Trust Fund. However, if the funds are replenished after April 1st, 2022, states will be subject to a maintenance of effort requirement for unemployment benefits through 2024. On its face, such language could limit the ability of states to take any action to reduce weekly unemployment benefits or reduce the number of weeks of benefits available until after 2024.

This is quite the string to attach. Who knows what the next two years will hold and whether states will want to adjust their unemployment benefits? There’s still time for lawmakers to act and avoid having their hands tied by this rule.

Read more about this issue here.

Missouri Use Taxes Should Expand the Tax Base, Not the Size of Government

Posted on by David Stokes

Use taxes in Missouri are simply sales taxes on goods delivered to your home from out-of-state sellers. Local governments have been authorized to collect use taxes for a long time—predating the internet, even—but they have not been widely adopted. Collecting sales taxes on Sears catalog purchases was a lot of work for little revenue. The internet has changed that. The recent Supreme Court decision in the “Wayfair” case, changes to state legislation, and, most obviously, the tremendous increase in e-commerce during the pandemic have all combined to greatly increase the need or desire for governments to tax online sales.

For purposes of comparison, e-commerce now makes up over 12% of total sales in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. For cities and counties in Missouri, 12% is a lot of sales not to tax. To address that, at least four counties and dozens of cities have placed use taxes on the April 5, 2022, ballot. Expanding the tax base with a use tax, if done in conjunction with a reduction of other, more harmful taxes, could be a beneficial change. But let’s be clear: if there is no corresponding reduction in other taxes, this is a tax increase on residents.

It is a central tenet of tax policy that a tax base should be as broad as possible. The more expansive the tax base, the lower the rate that must be imposed to fund the functions of government. Exact use tax revenue amounts are hard to predict, but the revenues for each city will not be insignificant. Local governments have received federal COVID-relief and stimulus funds, home values have risen substantially, and tax collections during the pandemic were not down as much as initially feared. As a result, many of these cities and counties do not need this new tax revenue to meet vital needs. The use tax could be approved by voters to responsibly expand the tax base and equalize the competition between online and physical stores, but it should not be approved simply to grow government revenues. Imposing a use tax in a revenue-neutral manner is not a new idea. It is exactly how the Missouri Legislature addressed this issue with the state’s new use tax law in 2021. St. Francois County officials have publicly stated they will lower their county property tax if the use tax is approved.

For cities and counties in Missouri proposing to impose their own use taxes, the simplest way for them to offset the revenue increases from the use tax would be to lower their property taxes in a revenue-neutral manner. Other options for various local governments if the use taxes are approved include eliminating more harmful taxes, such as the paradoxical local sales tax for economic development. Reducing the local utility tax rates would be another good exchange for cities that do not levy property taxes.

The imposition of a use tax for these Missouri cities and counties could be a positive policy change. It could also be an easy way for politicians to just raise taxes one more time. By having various city officials pledge to enact offsetting revenue reductions, local officials can amplify the public benefits while curtailing the tax impact on residents and businesses. That is a plan I think most taxpayers and voters could support. Without such a commitment, though, the use tax is just another tax increase.

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