What’s Coming Is a Tragedy that Historians Will Only Wonder About

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National Review Institute’s Douglas Murray joined The Tim Jones and Chris Arps Show on NewsTalkSTL to discuss the recent shift in American culture, his November 10 event in St. Louis, and more.

Event Information

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

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What Should Washington University Do with All of That Money?

Posted on by David Stokes

Should non-profits pay taxes? Well, as someone who works at a small non-profit and believes in low taxes, I am going to start off with a “No.” But I can admit the question is actually more complicated than that.

A student at Washington University recently opined in his school newspaper that the university should be paying payments-in-lieu-of-taxes (PILOTs) to the cities around the school where it owns property: University City, Clayton, and the City of St. Louis. A complicated question is what to do when Wash U buys homes or apartment buildings within those cities to house students or visiting faculty, and then those properties are removed from the tax rolls because Wash U is a non-profit. From an article in the Post-Dispatch:

To house some of those people, it has purchased many off-campus single-family homes, duplexes and apartment buildings – 11 in Clayton, 53 in the city and 121 in University City.

It also owns several commercial properties – with one of the largest being its 1991 purchase of the old Clayton Famous-Barr for $17.5 million. All those purchases have an impact: The university’s not-for-profit status removes them from the property tax rolls.

The residents in these buildings need police and fire protection, roads, and other public services. When a property is purchased by a university and comes off the tax rolls but still has residents, the cities continue providing services but no longer receive the property taxes. That puts cities in a bind, especially University City and Clayton, which depend more heavily on property taxes than the City of St. Louis. The Wash U writer documents how many other universities pay PILOTS for local services to their cities, including the second-best university in Southwest Connecticut: Yale.

You know who else has written about this issue? Me. I think larger non-profit organizations, such as Wash U, SLU, many senior citizen homes owned by non-profits, and others could be asked to make partial payments of property taxes to cities. As for the City of St. Louis, I definitely think that should be part of a trade-off for eliminating the earnings tax.

Without ending the earnings tax, I don’t think non-profits should be asked to pay PILOTs to the city. (Non-profits are also exempt from the half-percent payroll tax that for-profit companies pay to the city.) Wash U and SLU doctors, administrators, nurses, etc. pay plenty to the City of St. Louis via the earnings tax. University City and Clayton have no such alternative (nor should they). I think partial PILOTs by larger non-profits are a reasonable way to help fund local services so that the tax burden is not unfairly falling on local residents for services used by the non-profits as well.

A Policy Scare Story: TIF

Posted on by Corianna Baier

Ghosts and chainsaws can be scary, but is there anything scarier than the misuse of tax dollars? Okay, maybe that’s over the top. But there is something scary about governments giving away millions of public tax dollars to private developers—tax dollars that are supposed to fund schools, police, roads, and critical public services. So yes, tax-increment financing (TIF) should scare taxpayers.

TIF is an economic development incentive tool used to try and spur development. When a TIF project is approved, governments return a portion of a developer’s tax payment back to the developer to help fund the development. It’s a classic case of the government picking winners and losers by choosing which developers receive handouts. This practice is almost always a misuse and waste of taxpayer dollars. Independence, MO, had a particularly frightening experience with TIF.

TIF is often financed through debt bonds. Normally, the increment (the extra taxes generated by a development) is returned to the developer. When TIF is financed via debt bonds, that money is returned to the developer, but the developer then uses those funds to make bond payments. A TIF district in Independence anchored by a Bass Pro Shop was funded with bonds issued by the city. However, when the project failed to meet sales tax revenues projections, the developers couldn’t make the bond payments. Independence lawmakers decided to use $3.5 million from the general fund to cover the shortfall in the bond payment. The city wasn’t required to do this because the bonds weren’t guaranteed, but it did so to “ensure the city’s strong financial credit rating.”

Independence’s bad bet cost taxpayers. Paying the $3.5 million to cover the shortfall and protect the city’s credit rating may or may not have been the right move, but the point is that the decision could have been avoided altogether. Taking money from the general fund to bail out a development that already received tax dollars means even less funding for other critical city services. TIF cases such as these, and other taxing district failures, are policy scare stories. Cities such as Webster Groves that are currently considering large TIF projects need to consider the considerable risks with tax subsidies. Maybe it’s time for lawmakers to end this nightmare for good and stop using TIF to fund private developments.

Here’s a Scary Halloween Idea: Restarting the Trolley

Posted on by Jakob Puckett

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

Posted on by Claire Andrews

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

Posted on by Susan Pendergrass

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.

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Missouri Is in Poor Fiscal Health

Posted on by Corianna Baier

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.

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