Is Texas Gov. Rick Perry Guilty of “Stealing” Missouri Jobs?

Posted on by Andrew B. Wilson

As appearing in the Springfield News-Leader on October 23, 2013:

If “stealing jobs” were as bad as — and essentially no different than — stealing cars or stealing horses, Texas Gov. Rick Perry might expect to wind up at the end of a rope — the traditional fate in cowboy movies for horse thieves and cattle rustlers in the Lone Star State.

While that is not about to happen, the Texas governor has clearly been having a fun time infuriating some of his fellow governors in going to their states to pitch CEOs on the idea of relocating their businesses to Texas — one of only nine states (the others being Alaska, Florida, New Hampshire, South Dakota, Tennessee, Washington and Wyoming) with no state income tax on personal income. In venturing into California, Illinois, New York and several other high-spending, high-tax blue states, Perry has made a lot of speeches and spent some $2 million in TV ads singing the virtues of “limited government, low taxes and a fair legal system.”

Perry also made two visits to Missouri — in August and again in late September. In the earlier trip, he took Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon, a Democrat, to task for promising to veto the first tax cut in Missouri’s income tax in many years. As it turned out, even with heavy majorities in both houses of the Missouri legislature, Republicans were unable to override Nixon’s veto.

“Vetoing a tax cut is the same thing as raising your taxes,” Perry said in the commercials aired in several Missouri cities. “But there is a state where businesses flourish and jobs are created — Texas.”

That brought out the usual charges of “stealing jobs” in the two big-city, liberal dailies — the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and the Kansas City Star.

But if someone is guilty of “stealing” a job, someone else must own the job. But who?

How about no one? As Harry Stonecipher, the outspoken former CEO of Boeing, liked to say, “Only the customer can guarantee your job.”

In a competitive marketplace, no one really owns a job — not the jobholder, not the company providing the job and certainly not the governor of any state. Companies naturally gravitate to — and create employment within — the jurisdictions that provide the lowest costs of production, and taxes are an important part of the cost of production.

At the end of the day, there is no such thing as “stealing” a job. Like it or not, the states are in competition with one another in trying to attract and retain businesses focused on creating the greatest value for their customers, shareholders and employees. One of the keys to doing that is keeping the “tax price” in your location below that of competing jurisdictions.

Missouri should be focused on lowering the tax burden for all businesses. The best way to promote growth (and compete for jobs) is to get rid of all income taxes on business. Let the people who have earned the money put it back to work in their own businesses.

Andrew B. Wilson is a resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

 

Show-Me at the Lake, Thursday Mornings on KRMS

Posted on by David Stokes

David Stokes weekly appearance with Manny Haley of KRMS. In the November 21 show, Stokes and Haley discussed zoning for parking for Lazy Gators and Shady Gators before talking about a resolution to the private road dispute in Camdenton.

David Stokes’s previous appearances with Manny Haley:

 

 

 

 

Is Common Core A ‘Victory For Everyone’?

Posted on by James V. Shuls

On Tuesday, Chester Finn and Mike Petrilli, from the Thomas B. Fordham Institute, had an op-ed supporting the Common Core State Standards published in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. They have placed this same op-ed in a half dozen other newspapers over the past few months. To which, Neal McCluskey and Ann Marie Banfield wrote an excellent response back in July.

Let’s start with Finn and Petrilli’s argument that [Missourians] should embrace Common Core in part because the state “has already invested time and money to implement the new standards.” Basically, Washington successfully coerced [Missouri] into sinking money into Common Core, so we had better stick with it.

McCluskey and Banfield note that the Fordham piece mischaracterized the nature of Common Core’s development.

Common Core was created by the National Governors Association and Council of Chief State School Officers, associations that neither represent states nor the people of [Missouri]. Legislators represent you, and the NGA doesn’t speak for states just because governors are elected. NGA decisions have no binding ramifications for states, and it’s doubtful anyone has ever voted for a gubernatorial candidate based on what they thought he or she would do in the NGA. Governors simply have very little incentive to care what the NGA does.

Next, the Obama administration didn’t just “promote” the standards, it coerced their adoption with real ramifications. At the nadir of the “Great Recession,” it told states that to fully compete in the $4.35 billion Race to the Top program they had to promise to adopt Common Core. That is exactly what most did, before the final standards were even published. Adoption was cemented by making it one of only two ways states could meet requirements for waivers from the No Child Left Behind Act.

Finn and Petrilli claim that the Common Core doesn’t dictate curriculum and is good for school choice.

That’s like saying that government requiring you to ride a bike, but letting you pick the color and a banana seat, doesn’t constrain your transportation options. Similarly, they suggested that because lots of people are scrambling to produce Core-aligned materials, it’s fostering innovation. That’s basically proclaiming that with all car and airplane manufacturers suddenly making bikes, travel innovation will explode.

Readers shouldn’t be fooled by the folks at Fordham; the Common Core is definitely not a “victory for everyone,” as they would have you believe.

(Hat tip to John Combest for pointing out all the places the Fordham piece was published.)

Wow: Jackson County Voters Say No To Research Tax By Five-To-One Margin

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

We had our concerns about Question 1 in Jackson County, a proposal that would have imposed a half-cent sales tax for medical research in the county. Given the size and duration of the tax along with its beneficiaries, it was certainly plausible that residents might reject it, but I don’t think David Stokes or I expected that voters would reject the tax by a five-to-one margin.

In complete unofficial returns, 12,066 voters supported the tax, roughly 16 percent of those casting ballots, while 64,486, or 84 percent, opposed it.

The early returns were so decisive that supporters conceded defeat long before the final votes were announced.

“It was an effort very much worth fighting,” a somber Russ Welsh, past chairman of the Greater Kansas City Chamber of Commerce, told a crowd of about 50 supporters gathered at Union Station.

While voters did not agree with the funding mechanism, he and others said the campaign had been successful in educating the public about the promises of translational research.

Kansas City residents already live under an enormous sales tax burden — a burden so heavy that some local districts already feature a sales tax well in excess of 10 percent. The research tax would have exacerbated sales tax problems in Jackson County.

This was the right move for Jackson County residents. Let’s just hope that the Kansas City area has reached its peak sales tax and will start lightening the region’s tax burdens going forward, rather than piling on more.

On Transit, Kansas City Looks Backward

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

Subject to a possible contract rebid, Kansas City’s political leadership seems on the brink of accomplishing something that has eluded them for years: building a rail transit system in downtown. It only took a decade of study, multiple defeats at the ballot box, and overcoming a lawsuit or two to realize their dream of using 19th century technology to meet 21st century needs.

But elsewhere in the country, forward-looking urban areas are using new technology to meet transportation needs. The TechCrunch website recently published a piece about the purchase of 2,500 driverless cars by Uber, a vehicles-for-hire service with fleets around the country. The cars, built by Google and now in their third generation, are described this way:

Due to its low weight and the latest in fuel cell technology, the GX3200 can get up to 750 miles of travel on a single charge, or about 48 hours on standby mode. Like Google’s other autonomous vehicles, the GX3200 is designed to find and dock in the nearest Google PowerUP station whenever it’s not in use.

In contrast to light rail, the rapidly progressing leaps in driverless car and cycling technology are allowing people more freedom and choices in how they get from point A to B. Indeed, the future of transportation is in flexibility, not inflexibility. Google driverless cars allow for cheap and easy transit while respecting individual freedom. In several places, state legislatures have altered their traffic laws to allow for such cars.

Why can’t Kansas City be at the bleeding edge of this transportation revolution instead of celebrating the transportation equivalent of erecting telegraph lines? Kansas City is one of the earliest adopters of Google Fiber (which, by the way, was brought to us by small efficient government, not large bureaucratic government). We ought to be looking to the future for our transit needs and championing the things that people want: individually tailored service, ease of use and convenience — and provided by the market because the people demand it, not the government because politicians do.

The fixed rail they will be installing downtown offers none of that flexibility or popular appeal. Rails do not take passengers where they want to go; rail takes people where city planners want or need them to go (not to mention a car ride to the stations in most cases).

To add insult to injury, the rail system that is being built likely will be abandoned by the hip urbanite core that it is meant to attract as soon as something sexier comes along … like a Google car.

Patrick Tuohey is the western Missouri field manager at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

Public Schools Do Not Serve All Students

Posted on by James V. Shuls

As first appearing in Education News on October 22, 2013:

One of the great myths in education today is that all public schools serve all students. Nothing could be further from the truth. Nevertheless, opponents of school choice make frequent use of this falsehood in arguing against any expenditure of public money to help disadvantaged students attend private schools. They argue: “If private schools do not serve every student, they should not get tax dollars.” It is time to set the record straight: individual schools — whether public or private — do not serve all students. Nor should they.

One prime example of a public school that does not serve all students is Metro Academic and Classical High School, a magnet school in the Saint Louis Public School District. U.S. News & World Report ranks Metro as the No. 1 public school in the state, for good reason. Metro grads regularly go on to top-tier universities and perform exceptionally well on achievement tests.

There may be great things going on at Metro, but it cannot be denied that part of the school’s success is derived from its admissions process. To be admitted, a student must score proficient or advanced on the state MAP test. In 2013, nearly 14 percent of black eighth graders in Saint Louis scored proficient or advanced. That means more than 86 percent of black students in the Saint Louis Public School District do not meet the admissions criteria for Metro.

The Saint Louis Public School District has more than 25 magnet schools. Though most do not have admission standards as rigorous as those at Metro, they typically do have some requirements. By design, these admission standards keep students out.

Though they may not have magnet schools or a selective admissions process, other area districts do have special schools designed to serve their most disabled, disturbed, and/or disruptive students.

In 1992, the Parkway School District opened Fern Ridge High School. The school is designed to help “tenth through twelfth grade students, including those with disabilities, succeed when conventional methods have failed.” Students who cannot make it in the general population can be transferred to Fern Ridge. In other words, individual Parkway high schools do not serve all students.

Parkway is not alone in having a special school for students with unique challenges. In 1957, the Special School District (SSD) of Saint Louis County was established. It “was the net result of years of hard work and advocacy by parents of children whose educational needs were not being met by the existing public school system.” Today, the SSD serves approximately 23,000 students through services provided at district-run schools, independent sites, and two technical high schools.

Other students with disabilities attend the Missouri School for the Blind, the School for the Deaf, or use the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program (MoVIP) at home.

The bottom line is that individual schools do not serve all students. That is a good thing. There are great benefits that come from having highly specialized schools that are skilled at educating special students. Bright, gifted students are challenged and receive a tremendous education at Metro High. Students with special needs are encouraged and given the tools to succeed at Fern Ridge. By specializing, these schools are able to provide students with a better education than they might have received in a traditional school.

It is ridiculous to expect individual private schools to serve all students when individual public schools do not fulfill this task. Rather than place unrealistic expectations on private schools, or public schools for that matter, we should work to give every child access to the school that is going to best meet their needs. That may be a traditional district-run school, a magnet school, a special school, a charter school, and yes, even a private school.

Through school choice, every student can be served. As Milton Friedman once wrote, “The injection of competition would do much to promote a healthy variety of schools.” Isn’t that what we really need — a healthy variety of schools that can meet the unique needs of each of our students?

James V. Shuls, Ph.D., is the education policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

 

How The Kansas City Star Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Streetcar

Posted on by Joseph Miller

A recent Kansas City Star editorial trumpets the success of the downtown streetcar and supports planning new routes, even though it hasn’t been completed. The article accuses the opposition to new streetcar planning of wasting time. However, why should Kansas City spend more money planning to expand the streetcar when 1) streetcars do not improve transit; 2) there is no evidence that streetcars drive development; and 3) the original line has yet to open, much less prove its usefulness?

Streetcars will not improve mobility for public transit users in Kansas City. They travel at about the same speed as current city buses, 7-12 mph. Although a streetcar’s capacity is higher than buses, each space on a streetcar costs three times a space in the new green energy buses that Kansas City is planning to purchase. That number doesn’t include the costs of streetcar infrastructure, which will exceed $1 million per mile. In addition, streetcar lines are inflexible, meaning they cannot respond to changing customer demands or shifting demographic patterns.

Most proponents of the streetcar are aware that they make no improvements in terms of actually providing mobility, and never present a strong argument to the contrary. While most transportation systems are designed to move people to different parts of a city, a streetcar’s purpose is to move money to a single, preferred section of the city. The great weaknesses of the system — high fixed costs and minimal flexibility — become supposed strengths as investment moves to streetcar corridors.

While it may be true that giving special tax breaks and pouring investment into specific sections of a city can increase local development (albeit at the expense of other sections of the city and other taxpayers), there is no evidence that streetcars increase development, aside from anecdote. In fact, the streetcar’s own grant application openly states that downtown development has already exceeded $5 billion since 2002 without a streetcar. If Kansas City can achieve development without an expensive streetcar system, why build it in the first place?

It is entertaining to see a charge of waste from those who would spend hundreds of millions of dollars on a transit system that will lose money and not increase mobility. Perhaps if streetcar proponents adequately considered the wastefulness of their own activities, they would have no opponents to denigrate.

Collective Bargaining + Tenure = More Teacher Layoffs In Normandy

Posted on by James V. Shuls

The Normandy School District is in a tough place financially. The inter-district transfer program is taking its toll and the district may spend as much as 30 percent of its budget on student transfers. To make up for the loss of revenue, the district is looking to make cuts to reduce expenditures. Normandy will lay off 103 employees: 71 teachers, 27 support staff, and five building administrators. These cuts, along with the closing of Bel-Nor Elementary and other changes, are projected to save the district more than $3 million.

There is no doubt that the Normandy School District needed to cut some teachers. However, the number of teachers laid off in Normandy will be higher because of state tenure laws and the district’s collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the Normandy National Education Association. Both state statutes (RSMo 168.124) and the CBA dictate that new teachers must be laid off before tenured teachers.

When districts engage in these seniority-based layoff policies, instead of a policy based on the effectiveness of the teacher, they ultimately lay off more teachers. A new teacher makes less money than an experienced teacher, although they may or may not be more effective.

The average teacher salary in Normandy last year was just more than $60,000, but a non-tenured teacher with four years of experience earns little more than $40,000. That means the district would have to lay off 1.5 non-tenured teachers to equal the salary of one of the district’s average teachers.

Let’s put this into perspective. The district is laying off 71 teachers. If the laid off teachers represented the average teacher, the district would save nearly $4.3 million in annual salaries. If they laid off all novice teachers with four years of experience, they would cut less than $2.9 million in annual salaries — a difference of more than $1.4 million.

The “last in, first out” policies enshrined in state law and in the district’s CBA will undoubtedly lead to larger class sizes than having a policy based on merit.

Salary Schedule for Normandy 2012-13

Uh Oh: Are The Exchanges Goosing State Medicaid Rolls?

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

With the failings of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) as a backdrop, the Missouri House Interim Committee on Medicaid Transformation met over the last two days to discuss whether the state should expand Medicaid under that very law. Much of the media’s focus so far has been on the abject failure of the ACA’s website, but for those who have logged onto an insurance exchange successfully, often it’s not private insurance they’re coming away with — it’s Medicaid. [Emphasis mine.]

The disastrous rollout of HealthCare.gov may have another serious problem: A CBS News analysis shows that in many of the 15 state-based health insurance exchanges more people are enrolling in Medicaid rather than buying private health insurance. And if that trend continues, there’s concern there won’t be enough healthy people buying health insurance for the system to work….

CBS News has confirmed that in Washington, of the more than 35,000 people newly enrolled, 87 percent signed up for Medicaid. In Kentucky, out of 26,000 new enrollments, 82 percent are in Medicaid. And in New York, of 37,000 enrollments, Medicaid accounts for 64 percent. And there are similar stories across the country in nearly half of the states that run their own exchanges.

So the exchanges, billed as a private market solution to America’s health care problems, appear to be putting more people into a long-broken government program than into private insurance. That’s a huge contradiction in policy and puffery that undercuts the entire law. What assurances do taxpayers have that individuals aren’t being improperly added to the Medicaid program? And why would any legislature expand Medicaid just as Obamacare is boosting the program’s cost to the states?

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