Susan Pendergrass speaks with Chester “Checker” E. Finn Jr. from The Thomas B. Fordham Institute.
Here’s a Scary Halloween Idea: Restarting the Trolley
Later this month, St. Louis taxpayers will face a spooky scenario just in time for Halloween. Should the Loop Trolley get another $1.3 million of their money?
The East-West Gateway Council of Government’s preliminary plan is to award a $1.3 million federal grant on October 27 to help restart the trolley (the East-West Gateway already has the federal grant money but is still making final decisions on how to spend it). The trolley has already received $51 million in taxpayer funding but didn’t even last two years because ridership and revenue were less than one-tenth of what was projected.
Members of the East-West Gateway board must remember that this is the same trolley organization that comes back to taxpayers in different costumes every year asking for more candy—er . . . money. Some years the disguise is construction delays; some years it’s money to get more cars on the tracks.
The costumes this year are congestion mitigation and air quality, but these new costumes aren’t any more convincing.
For the trolley to relieve traffic, Delmar Loop shoppers traveling from miles away must stop their cars just short of their destination and take the Loop Trolley for the final two miles of their trip rather than driving the last two miles and parking closer. Shoppers simply haven’t been willing to do this, as poor ridership numbers attest. More to the point, anyone who drove on Delmar Boulevard when the trolley was still running knows that a gigantic train car sharing the road with cars driving and parking only creates more confusion and congestion, not less.
Since the trolley runs on electricity it may in theory improve local air quality, and supposedly the trolley scored well on an East-West Gateway greenhouse gas emissions reductions test. But claiming that the trolley is going to significantly reduce emissions seems questionable. An electric trolley only reduces transportation emissions if it gets people out of their cars. Moreover, don’t forget how that electricity is generated—coal. Given that coal emits much more greenhouse gases than gasoline per unit of energy, the trolley would have to get a lot of people out of their cars to make even a slight difference.
If backers of the trolley really want to start the party again, securing funding from private investors would be much better than handing out tax dollars this Halloween.
Until this happens, however, maybe the most appropriate costume for the trolley is a zombie.
Douglas Murray in St. Louis
You are invited to join the Show-Me Institute, Show-Me Opportunity, National Review Institute, and NewsTalkSTL on Wednesday, November 10 for a complimentary event with Douglas Murray. Murray will give an outsider’s perspective on the recent shifts in American culture, the culture wars, and the attack on free speech and education. Please RSVP to secure your seat.
Murray is a best-selling author, an award-winning political commentator, and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute. He has written books on neoconservatism, terrorism and national security, freedom of speech, and the rise of woke culture and identity politics. His upcoming book, The War on the West: How to Prevail in the Age of Unreason, explores why in recent history it has become acceptable to discuss the flaws and crimes of Western culture, but celebrating the West’s contributions is condemned as hate speech.
The reception begins at 5:30 p.m. with hors d’oeuvres and a cash bar. The presentation begins at 6 p.m.
Register Here
We Ranked Every Public School in Missouri
Find your school: moschoolrankings.org
Dr. Susan Pendergrass joined The Tim Jones and Chris Arps Show on NewsTalkSTL to discuss MoSchoolRankings.org. The website makes student performance data more transparent than ever by providing parents, policymakers, educators, and taxpayers with access to easy-to-understand information about every Missouri public school and school district.
Missouri Is in Poor Fiscal Health
Many people struggled with their financial circumstances and fiscal health in 2020. Based on a new report, it seems that state governments experienced similar trouble. Every year, Truth in Accounting, a nonprofit committed to transparent government financing, releases its Financial State of the States report. The report examines the intricacies of government finances and ranks the fiscal health of the 50 states. In this fiscal year 2020 report, COVID-19 and federal assistance play a major part in government financing, but it’s noted that “despite receiving federal assistance from the CARES Act and other COVID-19 related grants, the majority of states’ finances worsened.”
Missouri is in that majority.
Missouri’s debt burden was $8.2 billion in fiscal year 2020. That’s $4,400 per taxpayer needed to fully pay the state’s bills, up from $4,300 the year before. Much of this debt burden comes from unfunded retirement obligations, for which “the state had only set aside 60 cents for every dollar of promised pension benefits and 6 cents for every dollar of promised retiree health care benefits.” This debt burden earned Missouri a “C” grade and a ranking of 24 out of the 50 states for fiscal health.
This report provides further evidence that Missouri was not in a financial position to successfully weather the economic downturn that followed the COVID-19 pandemic, something my colleague Elias Tsapelas and I have written about. Re-evaluating our tax structure and tackling pension problems (by shifting employees to defined contribution accounts, for example) would likely improve Missouri’s grade and ranking in this report. Fixing the state’s fiscal health is a big task, but it’s something that lawmakers should start to prioritize.
Podcast: America’s Big Tech Panic with Robby Soave
In this episode, Susan Pendergrass speaks with Robby Soave, a senior editor at Reason.
Join Robby for a virtual event on Thursday, October 21 for a discussion about big tech, cancel culture and more. Details and registration information here.
Robby’s latest book is Tech Panic: Why We Shouldn’t Fear Facebook and the Future
911 System Cost Savings Are No Joke
Emergency 911 call centers represent one of the clearest opportunities in Missouri to combine regional services. It is a vital public service ripe for cost savings and technological improvements via system sharing or consolidation. The Post-Dispatch has an update on the proposal to combine the City of St. Louis’s three different 911 centers into one centralized system. I think this is a great plan for the city to upgrade the current system and save money. We don’t need a bunch of small, independent 911 call centers. Larger, well-staffed centers with top technology are what we need in this area. This is not like other government services where there are trade-offs between the tax savings due to economies of scale with larger service providers and the preferred service benefits of smaller operations closer to residents and taxpayers.
The Post-Dispatch story notes that some politicians and employee unions are upset that they have not been included in these plans so far. Fine, include them in the planning going forward. Problem solved. But don’t let them—especially the employee unions— stymie this plan. I don’t see why they would—there are so many vacancies in the current 911 systems that I would be surprised if any jobs would get cut. If employee unions have constructive ways to improve the 911 system changes, then we should listen to them. If the Board of Aldermen does its job and asks tough questions about the plan, then those questions should be answered.
But keep the new plan moving forward. This is the low-hanging fruit of changes that could improve public safety for the people of St. Louis and save tax dollars at the same time.
Update on Webster Groves Development
On October 5, David Stokes joined The McGraw Show on The Big 550 KTRS to provide an update on the Douglas Hill Development in Webster Groves.
Colorado Governor vs. Income Taxes
Colorado Governor Jared Polis recently took a (perhaps surprising) stance against income taxes. At the Steamboat Institute’s Freedom Conference, Polis said that Colorado’s state income tax should be zero. Governor Parson (and governors across the country) should take note.
Colorado’s governor defended his call for an income tax rate of zero with basic economic theory. When you tax something, you make it more expensive and discourage buying or doing it. With sin taxes such as cigarette taxes, the tax is added to do just that—make the price of cigarettes higher and discourage cigarette smoking.
But is that really what we want to do with income taxes? Do we want to discourage people from earning income? Show-Me Institute researchers have asked these questions for years as they’ve written about Missouri’s income tax and the earnings taxes in St. Louis City and Kansas City. The individual income tax accounted for more than 26 percent of Missouri’s total revenues in 2020 (Colorado’s 4.63 percent individual income tax contributed almost 20 percent of the state’s revenues in 2020). Given the adverse incentives created by income taxes, it would be in Missouri’s best interest to rely less on this harmful tax.
Missouri legislators have taken steps to lower the state income tax, perhaps indicating a general acknowledgment of the negative effects of income taxes. For example, the online sales tax bill from earlier this year includes mechanisms to incrementally lower the top state income tax rate to 4.8 percent. This is a great step in the right direction, but we are still far from zero. As Polis said: “We can find another way to generate the revenue that doesn’t discourage productivity and growth . . . and we should.” I agree, and I hope that Missouri lawmakers share this sentiment and continue to lower income taxes in our state.
