“Just Let Me Write the Definitions”

Posted on by Scott Tanner

In The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s legendary biography of Robert Moses, Caro describes how Moses was fully capable of getting his way by writing things in legislation that none of the legislators understood, even as they passed it. In one example early in Moses’s career (which I am going to do from memory and not look through the entire 1,200-page book for), Moses wanted to take over control of water rights off of Long Island. So, he drafted a rather innocuous bill that contained an opaque reference to legislation from the mid-1800s about water rights off of New York, but which otherwise was written in the same manner as all other water rights–related issues that the legislature was familiar with in the 1920s. None of the legislators or their aides bothered to find and read that mid-1800s law (which was probably much harder to do before computers), so they voted on and passed a new law that they thought did X, when it in fact it did Y. Moses, of course, wanted it to do Y, and by the time the legislature discovered the difference it was too late to do anything about it.

This brings us to the recent Missouri Supreme Court ruling on whether or not counties can collect the sales tax on marijuana in incorporated parts of a county. The court ruled that counties can only collect the tax in the unincorporated parts of a county. This is what the state constitutional amendment said, so in that respect the court’s decision makes sense. However, the way the constitutional amendment was written had a different definition of “local government” than was previously used and generally understood in Missouri. Do you think most (or any) voters read to page 19 of a 38-page ballot description to see that, in this case, the definition of a county only applied to unincorporated areas?

Longtime former Missouri State Senator Clifford Jones used to say (I’m paraphrasing here), “You can pass any bill you want. Just let me write the definitions.” That is what the ruling by the Supreme Court is rewarding, and perhaps it had no other choice in the matter. We let initiative petition writers create a major change regarding how local governments operate, which very few people will see or understand, and then that change becomes law.

To be clear, county taxes are almost always collected countywide, not just within unincorporated areas. Yes, there are a few other exceptions, such as utility taxes, but that doesn’t justify initiative petition writers using obscurity as their ally, as in this case. (I am not disputing that a majority of Missourians wanted legalized marijuana. My concern is with the use of legal minutiae in initiative petitions to get other changes made at the same time.)

Missouri needs to reform initiative petition rules to make amending the Constitution more difficult. (In a future post, I will go into more detail about the specific reforms we need.) Otherwise, we will be subject to more well-funded, out-of-state efforts to change Missouri laws using seemingly popular ideas as cover for making major legal changes via obscure and unread ballot language. Did you read the 38-page document that accompanied the marijuana vote and described all of the legal changes? I doubt it.

Robert Moses would be proud of efforts to get what you want by secrecy. We are a republic, not a direct democracy, and we should act like it. Missouri needs initiative petition reforms.

Missouri’s Squandered Opportunity

Posted on by Elias Tsapelas

The first step toward finding a solution is admitting there’s a problem. It’s been obvious to anyone who’s been paying attention over the past half-decade that Missouri has a spending problem. The good news is that Governor Kehoe admitted as much when he signed the state’s budget bills before the start of the new fiscal year.

Longtime readers of the Show-Me Institute blog won’t be surprised by this admission, but hearing the governor finally acknowledge our state’s spending problem hopefully signals a coming course correction. This stands in stark contrast to Missouri’s lawmakers in recent years, who have largely ignored how out of control state government spending has become, despite all the data to the contrary.

Prior to state Fiscal Year (FY) 2026, which began on July 1, Governor Kehoe signed a $50.8 billion spending plan, which was about $2 billion less than what the general assembly sent him. It should be noted, and lauded, that the governor applied some fiscal sanity by vetoing more than 200 spending items. But it’s also important to keep perspective on our state’s current financial mess and how much work fixing it will require.

It’s easy to forget that as recently as FY 2019, Missouri’s government only spent a little more than $27 billion in total compared to the $50 billion for 2025. What’s changed? Missouri’s spending has exploded on almost everything: welfare, education, transportation—you name it, and spending on it probably increased.

In 2019, Missouri’s budget included a little more than $9 billion in general revenue funds (primarily state sales and income tax collections) and nearly $9.6 billion from the federal government. Today, our state plans to spend more than $15.6 billion in general revenue and $24.5 billion in federal funds. If you compare this to the state’s estimates for general revenue collections in the coming year of $15.3 billion, you can see that even after the governor’s vetoes, Missouri’s government is still expecting to spend $300 million more than it projects to bring in. That doesn’t even account for the high likelihood of supplemental funding requests later in the year, and that the state’s supply of federal funding is projected to fall by the billions.

Missouri taxpayers are stuck with a government spending far beyond its means. As recently as 2023, Missouri had nearly $8 billion in general revenue funds set aside that could have been saved for times of need, but instead the state has spent exorbitantly, whittling away at the surplus. Today, those excess funds have been almost entirely depleted. Governor Kehoe recently noted that without his actions to reduce spending, the state was expecting a billion-dollar shortfall going into the next fiscal year.

It’s hard to look at what’s happened with Missouri’s budget over the past five years and view it as anything but a squandered opportunity. Our elected officials managed to take historic tax revenue growth, unprecedented federal investment, and an $8 billion cash reserve and turn all that into a billion-dollar hole in the budget right as the state’s revenue forecasts are taking a turn for the worse. Going into next year, Missouri’s tax collections are projected to decline and there will be no more excess federal dollars to prop up the state’s unsustainable spending. It should go without saying that it is imperative that Missouri’s lawmakers finally get serious about getting the state’s finances back on track.

There’s no longer any dispute about whether Missouri’s finances are a problem. The better question is whether it’s too late to stop the bleeding. Perhaps the most important task for our state’s elected officials over the next year will be finding a solution that’s better than something akin to putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound.

Statistics Shows Crime Numbers Converging for Major Missouri Cities

Posted on by Scott Tanner

The violent crime statistics in the cities of St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield tell a much different story today than they did 20 years ago. In 2005, it would have been unreasonable to compare Springfield and St. Louis on a per-capita basis for violent crime, but recent statistics show they are much closer as of 2023. Kansas City was also far below St. Louis in violent crime per capita in 2005, but that has changed.

Figure 1: Violent Crime Per Capita (St. Louis, Kansas City, and Springfield)

The chart below shows the violent crime per 100,000 people from 2004 to 2023.

Source: FBI Crime Data Explorer (CDE)

The violent crime statistic includes aggravated assault, homicide, robbery, and rape. The chart above displays the convergence in crime numbers between the three largest cities in Missouri. The specific per capita rates in 2023 for the respective cities are: St. Louis (1,439.3), Kansas City (1,483.1), and Springfield (1,178.1).

This would seem like good news for St. Louis when looking at the chart above and seeing a steady decline in violent crime, and it is, but it doesn’t change the fact that the city still ranks within the top 10 most dangerous cities in the United States by many metrics, along with Kansas City.

Crime being down in St. Louis is good. In my opinion, the bigger takeaway from this data is the fact that violent crime in Kansas City has remained stagnant rather than decreasing, and Springfield’s rate has steadily risen over the last 20 years. None of our major cities is close to being considered safe compared to similar midwestern cities like Des Moines or Omaha.

Omaha claims transitioning from its officers using only enforcement (applying the law) to also including intervention (stopping the crime taking place) and prevention (taking preventative measures before crime begins) has reduced violence. Other cities have studied Omaha in hopes of replicating its success, including Kansas City. Unfortunately, based on the data, it hasn’t yet made a difference in Kansas City.

St. Louis should be commended for the drop in violent crime in the city, but major Missouri cities still have a significant problem with violent crime. If we want to become a state that people want to live and work in, our cities need to prioritize fixing this problem.

Sun Fresh’s Struggles Were Predictable—and Predicted

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

The Washington Post just published a story on the failure of the taxpayer-subsidized Sun Fresh grocery store on the corner of Linwood Blvd. and Prospect Ave. in Kansas City. It’s an excellent piece, and one in which I was given the opportunity to participate. The author, Annie Gowen, included this:

Patrick Tuohey, co-founder and policy director of the Better Cities Project, has been critical of the Sun Fresh project. He says the store looks “great on paper” but does not have demand to support it. Plus, he noted, the neighborhood has other options because of a nearby Aldi store and the independent Happy Foods Center.

Kansas City officials hoped that subsidizing the grocery store would revitalize a long-neglected corridor. Ten years later, with the store on the brink of closure, city leaders are asking what went wrong. But they needn’t look far: the answers were visible from the start—and many of them were detailed in the very Show-Me Institute blog posts I wrote at the time.

Since 2015, I’ve chronicled the Sun Fresh project and argued that its shortcomings were structural, not situational. Here are the key arguments made then, all of which remain relevant now.

  • In May 2015, I wrote that “Kansas City government is going into the grocery business,” a move I called “a stunning development.” I noted that the city would lease the property to Sun Fresh for just $1 per year and that the entire project was heavily subsidized—a sign that market demand alone wasn’t enough to support it.
  • In the same 2015 post, I argued that grocery demand was already being met in nearby areas: “people who make a living running grocery stores by investing their own money do not think this [Sun Fresh investment] is a good idea.”
  • The next week, I conducted some shoe-leather reporting by driving around the supposed food desert. I found several grocery stores with well-stocked produce aisles, and marveled about how, due to the city’s use of various taxing jurisdictions, food in some of the city’s poorer neighborhoods was more expensive than in wealthier areas.
  • In May 2016, I updated the story of the subsidized grocery store, noting costs were ballooning, ending with: “In short, it appears that city leaders are planning to lose money investing in an already-failed venture in order to pursue a policy that has no evidence backing its effectiveness.”
  • The next month, I wrote that the USDA was becoming skeptical of the “food desert” idea itself. I also noted research showing that the mere availability of healthy food was not sufficient to solve the problem of unhealthy diets.
  • In March 2017, I pointed out that project costs continued to rise.
  • In December 2017, I summarized new research showing that the “food desert” premise was deeply flawed.
  • In October 2018, I highlighted a Kansas City Star piece indicating grocers are in the business of giving people what they want, not what someone else thinks they ought to have. The Sun Fresh store director told the paper, “You can pick apart any store that you want to on what they have or don’t have, but it’s about if people request these things or not . . .  We’re going to give our customers what they want. Not just what looks good.”
  • In July 2019, I wrote that there were signs the project was already failing. “Despite city-funded construction and dramatically subsidized rent, the store cannot pay its bills. The question now seems to be whether taxpayers should further fund this failing enterprise.”

The city’s logic was clear enough: offer fresh food options in a historically underserved area, and hope it drives neighborhood investment. The Star quoted then-Mayor Sly James as saying the Sun Fresh Market would be the “beginning of the revitalization of this entire corridor.” He was wrong. The policy approach ignored fundamental questions of market feasibility and safety. Even when intentions are noble, taxpayer subsidies cannot manufacture demand where it doesn’t exist.

Supporters may argue that this was an experiment worth trying. But experiments should come with contingency planning and humility—not endless subsidies. The city’s willingness to absorb risk that private firms declined should have been a warning, not a point of pride.

The real tragedy is that Kansas City could have directed those resources toward improving public safety, supporting neighborhood-scale entrepreneurship, or partnering with existing grocery providers willing to operate without public subsidy. All of those approaches would have been more fiscally responsible and, most likely, more sustainable than what the city did.

As policymakers consider next steps, they would do well to revisit the early warnings and lessons from Sun Fresh. The problem was never just about food access. It was about how we define, diagnose, and address the challenges facing our neighborhoods.

This was a foreseeable failure. Hopefully, our policymakers learn from it.

Medicaid Reform Incoming

Posted on by Scott Tanner

Ready or not, big changes are coming to Missouri’s Medicaid program. Earlier this month, President Trump signed the “One Big Beautiful Bill” (OBBB) into law, and it includes some of the most significant changes to the Medicaid program in decades.

Back in May, when the concepts for the bill were still being discussed, I wrote about several of the proposals that I thought might be included. As a jumping-off point for a more in-depth discussion of the many reforms included in the OBBB, I thought it would be helpful to first compare what made it across the finish line to the ideas I discussed in my earlier post.

  • Rein in financing gimmicks: As I’ve discussed at length, states have recently been drastically increasing their reliance on Medicaid provider taxes in response to rising healthcare costs. The OBBB freezes state provider tax rates where they are today, prohibits states from adopting new ones, and begins lowering the maximum allowable rate from 6% to 3.5% over a period of years (excluding those for nursing homes and intermediate care facilities). Missouri’s current rate for its hospital provider tax is 4.2%, so this change could have an effect on the state’s budget in several years once the OBBB is fully implemented.
  • Work requirements: Instead of offering states the opportunity to try work requirements for their respective Medicaid programs, as has been proposed in the past, the OBBB goes one step further by requiring states that have adopted expansion to establish “community engagement requirements” for their able-bodied enrollees. These requirements largely exempt populations that aren’t considered working-age able-bodied adults, such as pregnant women and parents with dependents under the age of 14.
  • Reduce “enhanced” federal match: Decreasing the federal government’s skewed payment structure for the Medicaid expansion population was one of my only expected reforms that didn’t make it across the finish line. While this change was excluded, the OBBB does eliminate the temporary increase in federal payment share that has existed for several years, which was an effort to entice states to adopt expansion. It also reduces the federal payment rate for states that cover illegal immigrants under their Medicaid programs.

All told, the OBBB includes at least a dozen additional healthcare changes that will impact Missouri in one way or another that I haven’t mentioned above. It’s also important to keep in mind that much of the OBBB will not go into effect immediately and will be implemented in phases over the next decade. For many of the changes included in the bill, it’s far too early to confidently predict the effect they may have on Missourians or the state’s budget.

Over the coming weeks and months, I’ll dive deeper into some of these provisions as more information related to Missouri comes to light. Time will tell whether Missouri’s government is ready or capable of successfully implementing the reforms on the horizon.

A Freeze in July?

Posted on by Scott Tanner

As a former tutor at a Tennessee Boys & Girls Club, a recent headline caught my eye: the Boys & Girls Club, along with other after-school programs, is facing a funding freeze after the Department of Education decided to hold back around $6 billion across the country for review.

Missouri anticipated around $80 million from these frozen programs. The Department of Education’s budget summary suggests the funding for many of these frozen programs will be consolidated and given as a lump sum under the K-12 Simplified Funding Program.

This fund seems to be designed like a block grant, as it would allow states to spend money on previously allowable activities (such as after-school programs) but with fewer administrative regulations. This model is not unprecedented, as Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF) is currently funded using a block grant, and there have been discussions about switching Medicaid to a block grant structure as well.

The department’s actions could signal that federal funding to states may continue to decrease, and there may be fewer strings attached to federal funding. That would mean that states, including Missouri, will have to decide which programs that rely on federal funding will be sustained, and to what extent.

Evaluating Deeper Budget Decisions

Missouri likely will need to make some hard budget decisions in the coming years. Prior to COVID, federal dollars comprised about 14 percent of Missouri’s total revenue for K-12 education. In 2021–22, an additional $1 billion in federal dollars ballooned that percentage to 28. In 2022–23, the federal share fell slightly to 25 percent. In my colleague Elias Tsapelas’ paper “Saving Federalism,” he notes that the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education’s (DESE) inflation-adjusted federal spending was roughly 45% higher in fiscal year 2022 than fiscal year 2011.

This extra money is fizzling out as the pandemic spending evaporates and the Trump Administration continues to evaluate longstanding programs and rules. The changes at the federal level should incentivize Missouri to rightsize the budget by eliminating unnecessary or unhelpful spending. Establishing a Missouri Office of Government Efficiency would be a good initial step.

Beyond that, Missouri will need to take a more proactive approach to funding specific education programs. Should we increase funding for after-school programs at the expense of a program to improve teacher effectiveness? Before the recent federal policy shift, Missouri was largely guided in these decisions by what we could get federal money for. Now, DESE and school districts will need to set their priorities.

Here’s to hoping Missouri can rise to the challenge and prioritize programs with the greatest potential to benefit students.

St. Louis’s Improving Crime Data

Posted on by Braxton Steele

If you were to guess that St. Louis was the most dangerous city in Missouri, you would be correct. You would also be correct if you assumed it would rank within the top ten most dangerous cities in the United States. The rankings can vary slightly depending on the website and the metrics used, but St. Louis ranked near the top of nearly every one of them. The Kansas City Star article linked above uses a report from U.S. News and World Report for 2024–2025. The rankings were determined by FBI crime reports of each city’s murders and property crime per capita. The same list had Kansas City at eight.

St. Louis has a reputation for being a violent city. Crime issues have helped push people out in droves and deterred newcomers from settling in the area. St. Louis City’s population has decreased by over 30% since the 1980s, and the number of vacant downtown buildings has increased substantially. The Wall Street Journal went as far as to call downtown a “real estate nightmare.”

Although St. Louis continues to rank among the most dangerous cities in the country, efforts have been made to solve the ongoing crime problem, beginning with the replacement of former St. Louis Circuit Attorney Kim Gardner in 2023. Gardner exacerbated the crime issue in several ways, including having an exclusion list of police officers who were not allowed to bring cases to her office and creating a massive backlog of more than 6,700 cases that awaited charging decisions. The current St. Louis Circuit Attorney, Gabe Gore, has since cleared all cases in the backlog.

More recent efforts include House Bill (HB) 495, signed by Governor Mike Kehoe into law in March. This legislation transfers control of the St. Louis Police Department to a state-appointed board. The governor has already made five interim appointments to the six-person board (the mayor is the sixth member of the board). In addition, a $45 million 911 dispatch center broke ground last year in St. Louis with the goal of improving response times. In St. Louis, only half of the 911 calls in 2022 were answered within the national standard of 10 seconds.

It is unclear whether these efforts will have positive impacts on public safety in St. Louis, but what is clear is that violent crime in the city is down. It was down 7.8% in 2024 compared to 2023. The St. Louis Metropolitan Police Department (SLMPD) reported homicides were down 6.3 % in 2024. It is worth noting that crime is down across the country, so this may be part of a larger trend.

The fact that St. Louis has lower violent crime and homicide rates is a positive sign, but time will tell if the city can sustain this success and lose the moniker of being one of the nation’s most dangerous cities.

Missouri Families Need the “Unsafe School Choice Option”

Posted on by Mike Ederer

A version of the following commentary appeared in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

When asked why they want school choice, families often cite safety as their number one reason, which makes sense. How is a child supposed to learn if they’re afraid to be at school? Under the federal Every Student Succeeds Act (ESSA), students trapped in persistently dangerous schools are supposed to have a way out. It’s called the Unsafe School Choice Option (USCO). Unfortunately, Missouri has all but ignored this protection—and that needs to change.

ESSA requires every state to identify persistently dangerous schools and offer students the right to transfer to a safer public school. This is not a suggestion; it is federal law. Yet in Missouri, no school has ever been labeled as “persistently dangerous,” and no families have ever been notified of this option. Either Missouri schools are perfectly safe—which is unlikely—or the state’s criteria are so vague and restrictive that no school could ever qualify.

But let’s look at that more closely. Consider Poplar Bluff High School. According to data from the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), there were 12 violent incidents at the school in 2022, 19 in 2023, and 10 in 2024. In that same three-year period, there were 266 out-of-school suspensions. A “violent incident” in a Missouri school is one in which “a student uses physical force with the intent to cause serious bodily harm to another person.” It seems hard to believe that a school with these levels of violence would feel safe to students.

And then there’s University City Senior High School. From 2022 to 2024, according to DESE, there were 51 violent incidents and 21 weapons violations at the school. That is a lot of weapons being brought to school, and it certainly doesn’t sound like a safe environment to me. Last year in St. Louis Public Schools, teachers at Vashon High School sent a petition to the district claiming that they were teaching in a dangerous situation. In fact, one teacher had to use pepper spray on a crowd of students to get them under control.

There is no substitute for giving families an immediate exit from a dangerous situation. Additional funding, new programs, or behavior contracts might help improve school safety in the long run—but they do nothing for the student being bullied today, or for the child afraid to walk the halls because of fights, weapons, or harassment. For these families and students facing these problems, the only meaningful solution is the freedom to exercise their current legal right to transfer to a safer school.

In Missouri, for a school to be considered persistently dangerous it must have experienced at least one violent incident or one weapons violation in two out of the past three years. At least 30 schools in the state meet that criterion. However, the school must also have expelled at least five students (ten if the school enrolls more than 250 students) in each of the past three years. No school has met that criterion since the law was enacted. What if the Missouri definition were changed from violence/weapons and expulsions to violence/weapons or expulsions? Thousands of Missouri students could move to a safe learning environment—which should be the minimum standard.

Parents deserve honesty. It’s absurd to suggest that there are no unsafe schools in the state. If a school is unsafe, the state must acknowledge it and provide families with options—not pretend the problem doesn’t exist. If the state refuses to define what “persistently dangerous” means—or sets the bar so high that no school ever qualifies—then the federal requirement becomes meaningless in practice.

It’s time for Missouri to adopt clear, reasonable criteria that reflect real risks to students and activate the USCO in schools that meet those criteria. Every Missouri child deserves to attend a safe school, no matter where they live. Families in struggling districts should not be forced to wait years for conditions to improve—or worse, accept that their child’s school is unsafe with no way out.

The Unsafe School Choice Option was designed to give families an emergency exit from these situations. Missouri leaders must stop ignoring this law and start empowering parents to protect their children.

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