Is St. Louis the next Detroit? (Not in my view)

Posted on by Rick Edlund

As first appearing in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch on August 16, 2013:

When the St. Louis Cardinals played the Detroit Tigers in the 1968 World Series, the whole nation was watching (it captured an astounding 57 percent of television viewers) and both cities — as well as both teams — were looking good. Detroit was still the unchallenged auto capital of the world, and St. Louis was home to a dozen of the nation’s biggest and best-known companies.

Since then, the two baseball teams have fared better than their cities. When they met again in the 2006 World Series, the rest of the nation yawned — 83 percent of viewers tuned out. Who cared about a baseball rivalry in two dying cities in flyover country?

From 1950 to 2010, Detroit’s population dropped from about 1.8 million to 714,000 — a 61.4 percent decline. Over the same period, St. Louis City dropped from 857,000 residents to 319,000 – a 62.7 percent decline.

Think of Detroit as a larger St. Louis — more than twice the size in area as well as population. Drive through north St. Louis and you see block after block of abandoned and boarded-up buildings; drive through Detroit and it is mile after mile of the same. It is the Empty Quarter of cityscapes — which partly explains why it takes an hour for Detroit’s police to respond to a 911 call.

Detroit leads the nation’s cities in violent crime, followed by Oakland and St. Louis. According to FBI statistics, your chances of being the victim of a violent crime (murder, rape, robbery, and assault) are not a whole lot less in St. Louis City than they are in Detroit. The incidence of such crimes is only 13 percent lower in St. Louis than Detroit. I worked in Detroit from 1976 to 1982 as a reporter and anchor at WXYZ-TV. Coleman Young was the city’s first black mayor, notorious for playing the race card (though most white politicians were no better). I once asked him about his girlfriend’s exorbitant salary as the administration’s PR person. That night, the station ran his response — an expletive-filled rant accusing me of racism for even raising the question. Later, many city employees — both black and white — thanked me for spotlighting the mayor’s favoritism.

Lee Iacocca took over a struggling Chrysler in 1978 and refused to meet union demands to match GM and Ford wage rates at $18 an hour. He told the union: “At $13 an hour, you can have 20,000 workers . . . at $18, you’ve got zero.” He understood the Big Three were on thin ice.

After 13 years anchoring and reporting at KSDK in St. Louis, I returned to Detroit for a year in 1999 at WDIV TV. I was astonished at how much worse the city looked. Gone were the well-kept, middle-class neighborhoods. The drugs and violence were so bad that city cops often would ride four to a squad car.

Therein, I think, is a principal difference between Detroit and St. Louis. Things in St. Louis never reached the same pitch of hopelessness.

St. Louis experienced its biggest out-migration of people in the 1980s, when the population fell 27.2 percent. From 2000 to 2010, the city’s population was down just 8 percent.

By contrast, Detroit’s population over the last decade fell a stunning 24.9 percent.

So, no, I do not think that St. Louis City is following Detroit down the road to ruin — or to bankruptcy, either. In a recent column in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Dave Nicklaus pointed out that with slightly more than twice the population of St. Louis, Detroit has six times as much debt.

What’s more, St. Louis has not experienced a massive breakdown in vital services. Far from taking an hour to respond to a call , St. Louis police, on average, are at a crime scene in 10.32 minutes. And where Detroit police cleared only 11.3 percent of murders and 12.7 percent of reported rapes through arrests in 2011, St. Louis police cleared 66.4 percent and 71.8 percent of such crimes, respectively.

Though far from perfect, St. Louis City still works for most people. Many old neighborhoods are flourishing again. Let’s hope that we are on the cusp of a real turnaround in the city’s fortunes.

Rick Edlund is the communications director at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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Blitz: Gov. Rick Perry To Visit Missouri And Run Ads Promoting Texas’ Business Climate

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

He’s already visited businesses in other floundering states — including Illinois, California, and New York — in an effort to get them to move to Texas. So it was inevitable that Gov. Rick Perry would eventually make a play for Missouri businesses, too. The only question was “when.” And as it turns out, the answer is … “now.”

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is at it again.

Next week, he’ll travel to Missouri to tout Texas’ low taxes, less regulation and high job creation rate.

Starting today, a 30-second television advertisement is running in the St. Louis, Springfield and Columbia-Jefferson City markets in Missouri. The ads feature small and immigrant business owners and women talking about what Texas offers, such as no state income tax. [Emphasis mine.]

And when it comes to job growth, he’ll have plenty to discuss.

While in Missouri, Perry plans to meet with employers, business leaders and the Missouri Chamber of Commerce to talk about things like Texas being a top job producer. Texas added 19,900 jobs in July, ranking No. 5 nationally, but it created 293,000 jobs in the last 12 months, more than any other state.

Now, you can love it or hate it, but to derisively call visits like this “poaching” is like calling the best looking guy in the room a girlfriend poacher: it’s an excuse for failure. Of course we lost, they’ll say. Texas is poaching. And there’s no mystery about what Perry’s objective is on his trip — it’s to get Missouri’s businesses.

But if we all know the score, the question is, will Missouri just let Texas take our businesses and jobs without a fight? Missouri entrepreneurs may have come here with the Show-Me State, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be leaving with it at the end of this economic dance. Is Missouri just going to sit there and take it as Texas continues to walk off with the state’s wealth?

A Tale Of Two Airports

Posted on by Patrick Tuohey

The Kansas City Aviation Department has proposed building a new terminal. Boosters for the plan, perhaps in an attempt to appear flexible, note that this is the second proposal — the first was rejected because it sought to move the airport south. But really, the plan is the same: an expensive new terminal.

Columbia Airport Alterantives

Meanwhile, the Columbia, Mo., aviation department also wants to build something new. It is a much smaller market and as a result, the plans are much more modest. But the report that officials provided to the public actually includes several different alternatives and a comparison of each.

Mind you, Columbia Regional Airport’s leadership has some of its own bad ideas, including airline incentives, tax increase proposals, and flawed assumptions about growth. But  officials haven’t hid alternatives from the public.

Imagine how much time and energy would have been saved if Kansas City Aviation Department leadership did the same, allowing officials and the public to consider various alternatives. Instead, they’ve tried selling the public on a huge and unpopular plan that seems to purposefully conflate figures.

The Master’s Degree Bump Boondoggle

Posted on by James V. Shuls

I have heard a lot of bellyaching lately in Missouri about how we need more money for education. However, little has been said about the other side of the coin — spending. As we have seen with recent audits of the Rockwood School District and the Early Childhood Development, Education, and Care Fund, not all of our dollars are being spent wisely. Yet, $22,500 for an in-home child care facility that has no children is just a drop in a bucket compared to another boondoggle that is staring us in the face in the form of automatic pay raises for teachers who receive a master’s degree.

A 2009 study by the Center on Reinventing Public Education estimated that Missouri is spending an extra $146,603,923 to fund the bump received when a teacher earns a master’s degree. The problem is that there is no evidence that earning a master’s degree actually makes a teacher better in the classroom. I can say this as someone who has studied the issue thoroughly and as someone who earned a master’s degree while teaching. Moreover, many teachers are receiving bumps for degrees, like administration, that will simply take them out of the classroom.

The master’s degree bump draws money away from other worthy endeavors that might improve educational outcomes for students. The editorial board of the Des Moines Register gets this. They recently wrote, “If Iowa truly wants to spend education money wisely, such automatic pay increases for teachers should be rethought.”

North Carolina recently moved to eliminate the master’s bump. Maybe Missouri school districts should follow that lead.

Fall Internships At The Show-Me Institute

Posted on by David Stokes

If you are a college  or graduate student, or a recent graduate looking for a fun fall opportunity, consider applying for a Show-Me Institute internship. Interns research, write, blog, and help with videos for all the topics that the Institute covers. Previous interns have had op-eds and letters to the editor published by major Missouri newspapers. We have part-time and full-time openings for the fall.

Check it out — the deadline is this Friday. (If you are just hearing about this and contact us by 5 p.m. Friday to let us know the application will be in by the end of the weekend, that will be acceptable.)

Part-Time Nation: Forever 21 Stores Cap Staff Hours

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

As I’ve said before, one of the least-covered consequences of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) since its passage was the impact it would have on young people. Along with directly imposing onerous new health insurance mandates on young workers who 1.) generally can’t afford them and 2.) generally don’t use much in the way of health services, the ACA also gave companies the perverse incentive to reduce employees from full-time to part-time status as a way to avoid Obamacare’s employer penalties. In fact, a 2012 Congressional Budget Office described as much, estimating that the equivalent of about 800,000 jobs would be eliminated from the economy because of the law.

So what will the Obamacare part-time “new normal” look like? Like this:

“Forever 21,” reads the memo from human resources associate director Carla Macias, “recently audited its staffing levels, staffing needs and payroll in conjunction with reviewing its overall operating budget. As a result, we are reducing a number of full-time non-management positions.” All employees who received the memo will be reduced to a schedule to not exceed 29.5 hours per week. Why is that the magic number? Because under President Obama’s Affordable Care Act, mid- and large-sized employers are required to pay for health insurance for employees who work 30 hours or more. Forever 21 thinks it can get around this simply by reducing its technically-full time staff to part-time positions.

And they’re right.

Yes they are. Of course, Forever 21 is now denying that the move has anything to do with the health care law, but there’s plenty of reason for skepticism there. Why 29.5 hours? Why not 31 hours? Or 30 hours? Heck, why not a round number? And this is not the first time we’ve seen the ACA’s 30-hour work week limitations come into play. As I’ve written before, Obamacare also incentivizes companies to ship jobs overseas to avoid the 30-hour full-time equivalent work and health care requirements. Maybe legislators should have read the bill to find out what was in it before they passed it, not after.

Young people want gainful full-time employment. For many, the Affordable Care Act is standing foursquare in their way.

Is It Time For Teacher Tenure Reform?

Posted on by James V. Shuls

Debates about teacher tenure often are contentious. Teachers’ unions argue that tenure laws are necessary because they give teachers access to due process. Opponents of tenure often argue that tenure makes it impossible to remove an awful teacher. So, which is it? This is one of the questions addressed in a new essay that I co-authored with Kacie Barnes, “The Power to Lead: Analysis of Superintendent Survey Responses Regarding Teacher Tenure.”

We surveyed 192 Missouri public school superintendents. We thought these individuals would be in the best position to tell the truth about teacher tenure. What did we find?

Seventy-three percent of superintendents in our survey stated that it is somewhat or very difficult to remove a tenured teacher. They note that the process of removing a teacher based on his or her performance in the classroom takes much effort and could cost a significant amount of money. For these reasons, among others, approximately 92 percent of the superintendents stated they would be supportive of some type of tenure reform.

According to the superintendents in our survey, it is time for tenure reform. The question is, what type of reform should it be? Superintendents have thoughts on that as well.

You can read the full paper below.

That Sucking Sound Is Your Money Being Taken From Missouri’s Private Economy

Posted on by Patrick Ishmael

Whose money is it?

Supporters of higher taxes have spilled a lot of ink suggesting that Missouri House Bill 253 will decimate the state’s budget, the bill’s revenue triggers notwithstanding. Taking their figures as gospel only for the sake of argument, I wonder, do tax hike supporters recognize that all that tax money is actually the taxpayers’ money first and foremost? By sustaining the governor’s veto, tax cut opponents are actually taking every dollar it “costs” the state or a political subdivision from the private economy to grow the size of government. Put another way: Does taking more money out of taxpayers’ hands and letting the state spend it — a state that, under the present status quo, ranks 48th in the country in GDP growth since 1997 — sound like a recipe for economic success to you? Sounds like business as usual, and here in Missouri, business has been too bad for too long.

The implication at the core of the veto supporters’ argument is that the state knows how to spend that money better than we do. I disagree. If you support smaller government, you support tax cuts. If you support bigger government, you make excuses.

James Shuls, Ph.D., on Teacher Tenure Reform

Posted on by Kacie Barnes (Galbraith)

Of all the decisions an employer must make, none may be as important as staffing. This does not just include who they hire, but also who they fire. An effective leader should be able to identify those who are not performing at an acceptable level, work with that individual to help them improve, and terminate him or her when necessary. But what if state law does not provide such flexibility? What if the employer is required to give the employee 90 working days to improve before finally being able to dismiss the employee and replace him or her with a higher quality employee? That type of regulation does not seem optimal for a business’ success, but it is exactly the position in which Missouri school leaders find themselves. In many instances, these restrictions limit the power principals and superintendents have to effectively lead their schools.

Read the essay: The Power to Lead.

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