What’s in a Name?

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

A prefiled bill that is only 49 words long may go a long way to deter politicians from spending public funds on personal legacy projects.

House Bill 1235 simply adds the following language to Missouri statutes:

No state land or building shall be designated in honor of an individual unless such person has been deceased for more than two years. This section shall not apply if money is donated to a state entity in exchange for the right to name state land or buildings.

If former U.S. Senator Christopher “Kit” Bond wants to give his own money to Missouri to build a bridge, or former Governor Jay Nixon wants to reach into his own pocket to build a state park, that’s fine. But spending taxpayer dollars is different, and rewarding individual politicians for doing their official duties by naming public assets after them—at least  while they’re still alive—seems a questionable practice at best.

In fact, why not extend the same restriction on all political subdivisions. To me, Emanuel Cleaver II Boulevard is just . . . tacky. Shouldn’t  taxpayers  be confident that those who spend their money are not seeking fame and self-aggrandizement? House Bill 1235 helps get us there.

This is a revised version of the original post.

In Arkansas, 80,000 Ineligible Medicaid Recipients Removed from Rolls

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Since as far back as 2015, we have talked about the idea of performing regular audits of the state’s Medicaid rolls. The purpose of such audits is several-fold: not only to ensure that taxpayer money is going to qualified beneficiaries and to detect malfeasance, but above all else to ensure that the state’s limited resources are making it to the most vulnerable members of our society. 

Arkansas has an auditing program similar to the one we’ve talked about, and it appears the state just turned up a lot of ineligible beneficiaries.

Nearly one-third of those cases involved people who did not report changes of address as required by the state. More than 25,000 people were removed from the program because they were receiving public benefits from more than one state. [Emphasis mine]

DHS says more than 16,000 people were removed because of unreported employment. Others were removed from the program because they were eligible for Medicare, while another 4,100 cases involved inmates who still had Medicaid coverage.

In all, about 80,000 Arkansans ineligible for Medicaid were removed from the program’s rolls. 

As we’ve noted before, there are lots of non-nefarious reasons that someone may be on Medicaid but ineligible for it, including unfamiliarity with its rules and regular fluctuations in their own income. But whatever the reason for that ineligibility, the more efficiently the state can steward funds and direct them to needy beneficiaries who actually qualify for the program, the better the results will be for the program, its beneficiaries, and the taxpayers who fund those benefits.

Patrick Tuohey Discusses Airport-and Sidewalks-on KCPT’s Ruckus

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

On Thursday, December 21, the Show-Me Institute’s Patrick Tuohey appeared on KCPT’s Ruckus to discuss the latest twist in the Kansas City International Airport plan, the Kansas gubernatorial race and the controversial push to privatize sidewalks in Westport which has set up a debate over public safety and civil rights.

Brenda Talent Discusses Saint Louis County Budget on KETC’s Donnybrook

Posted on by Brenda Talent

On December 21, Show-Me Institute CEO Brenda Talent appeared on Saint Louis Public Television’s Donnybrook to discuss cuts to Saint Louis County’s budget, the selection process for a new Saint Louis City police chief, state government transparency, a complete smoking ban in Saint Louis County, and other state and local issues. 

More Research on Food Deserts

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

I’ve written here before, skeptically, of the plans to address the so-called food desert on Kansas City’s East Side. Specifically, the plan to spend millions of dollars to subsidize a SunFresh grocery store is unwarranted and a waste of taxpayer funds. I’ve documented research that shows that nutritional inequality is not a function of distance from a grocery store. New research is bearing this out.

A study released this month from the National Bureau of Economic Research examines food inequality with an eye toward quantifying the impact of grocery store location. The paper concludes:

We find that equalizing supply would close the gap in healthy eating between low- and high-income households by less than ten percent. After separating out supply variation, the descriptive correlations in our final section show that education and nutrition knowledge predict healthy grocery demand and explain non-negligible shares of the relationship between income and healthy grocery demand. For a policymaker who wants to help low-income families to eat more healthfully, the analyses in this paper suggest that improving health education—if possible through effective interventions—might be more effective than efforts to improve local supply.

There are several nonprofit organizations in Kansas City working to address the issues of nutrition in the urban core, including Rollin’ Grocer and Kanbe’s Markets. If there is a market for healthy food, these efficient, private efforts are much more likely to succeed than a single, multi-million-dollar box store.

City leaders may get to point to a new, revived grocery store and shopping center as a result of their political largesse. But a subsidized grocery store won’t create much new interest in eating healthy—it is more likely to merely draw traffic away from other businesses that contribute to the local tax base.  It will also consume public funds that would otherwise go to support infrastructure and, ironically, education. If food deserts are real, they are psychological, not geographical. A taxpayer-funded Sun Fresh won’t do much but get in the way.

NoMORedTape Respondents Seek Hundreds of Regulatory Reforms

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

In contrast to this Columbia Missourian story about the NoMORedTape regulatory reform project, I take a much rosier view of how the state’s regulatory outreach project is doing. So far, hundreds of sections of regulation are explicitly cited in the NoMORedTape data as needing reform, and while it would be accurate to say that a lot of people want no change on one issue — puppy mills — it is also true, and enormously important to note, that a lot of people want a lot of change on a lot of other regulatory issues.

I was a little disappointed that the Missourian also went out of its way to portray many NoMORedTape respondents as somehow not grasping the purpose of the site, incharitably citing some of the least informed comments in its article while omitting serious responses. Indeed, I’ve found the vast majority of the comments to be enlightening.

Comments like:

I did not renew my minority women status because they made it so difficult. Faxes are no longer acceptable and the instructions were in a format that I could not open. When I used the password given me it was not acceptable. I gave up because I had no more time to spend on it.

And:

“Certificate of Need” process makes developing critically needed Senior Living buildings a political instead of market-based process. It is costing Missouri many millions of dollars of development. Our $35,000,000 development was just denied Monday in Jefferson City by anti-competition, anti-market political forces. Eliminate the “Certificate of Need” process entirely like almost ALL other states in our Union.

And:

Currently the Missouri Dept. of Elementary & Secondary Education has too strict of rules for teacher and administrator certification, specifically for CTE professionals. In a time when we need more qualified candidates, they are often discouraged by the process.

And:

The University requires vendors to have Liability insurance that covers the University Curators. We print t-shirts, when has anybody sued over a t-shirt? 4 million dollars of liability insurance! This increases our costs and limits the smaller players or unnecessarily burdens the smaller players.

And so on.

Point being, regulatory reform is a serious issue that many serious people take seriously. I hope that public colloquy projects, like NoMORedTape, become more common, not less so, and I appreciate the public policy dividends NoMORedTape has already realized by engaging the public as it has.

Tax Cuts And Jobs Act Passes

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

As its details became clearer, we talked a lot over the least few weeks about the policy ideas that underpin the federal Tax Cuts And Jobs Act. The bill reduces taxes on individuals and corporations, nearly doubles the standard deduction, and reins in some of the itemized deductions that historically have tended to favor a cavalcade of special—and oftentimes wealthy—interests. I would have liked to see steeper cuts to the state and local tax (SALT) and mortgage deductions, but with the passage of the tax reform bill yesterday, we will have to save those fights for another time.

Congress approved a sweeping $1.5 trillion tax bill on Wednesday that slashes rates for corporations, provides new breaks for private businesses and reorganizes the individual tax code.

The Senate passed the GOP bill early Wednesday morning and the House then voted on it for a second time to fix technical problems with the legislation, the final step before it’s sent to President Donald Trump for his signature.

According to the Tax Policy Center, 8 out of 10 Americans will see their taxes reduced under the finalized bill, including the vast majority of middle income earners. It also sounds like entitlement reform could be coming soon to pair any long-term revenue reductions from this tax relief with long-term spending reductions, as well. Entitlement reform should have happened with or without tax reform, obviously, but that the two issues are being talked about in the same breath now is a positive development for supporters of good, sustainable governance.

But let’s not forget one other big development in the tax reform bill: starting in 2019, the end of Obamacare’s mandate penalty/tax.

The individual mandate was included in ObamaCare in part to draw young and healthy people to sign up for insurance in the marketplaces as a way to offset the costs of older and sicker enrollees.

Still, not everyone agrees that the measure has worked as intended, with some saying the mandate hasn’t been as effective as originally thought to entice people to buy health insurance.

“Today, we’re turning Obamacare from a mandatory program into a voluntary program and providing additional tax relief for the millions and millions of Americans who have chosen and will choose not to buy a government-mandated product that for them provides not the value that they want,” Sen. John Barrasso (Wyo.), the No. 4 Senate Republican, told reporters on Tuesday.

To me as a Millennial, the functioning of Obamacare’s mandate was a particularly objectionable piece of that bill that used younger, generally poorer Americans to subsidize everyone else in the individual market. It’s why so many young people instead risked not getting the insurance at all, especially as the premiums on the plans available to them exploded year after year. 

In the end, while I’d like to have seen more from the bill—and frankly, more from this year, including a full repeal of Obamacare—the passage of the TCJA is a welcome win in what could otherwise have been a dicey year for supporters of free market reform. 

 

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