State Government Employee Thinks the Private Sector Exists to Serve Him

Posted on by David Stokes

There is a very weak letter-to-the-editor / small op-ed in the Springfield News-Leader today (hat tip to Combest) from someone with the state workers union, presumably some type of official affiliated with them. Here is the best part of the letter:

How does Missouri’s 48th worst pay for state workers in the nation contribute to our budget crisis? […] It doesn’t make sense, and it doesn’t position Missouri for future prosperity and economic growth.

So, logically, if Missouri wants to position itself for future prosperity and growth, the first thing we should do is give our state employees a raise? Because taking more from the general public to give more to state employees will result in spending multipliers so grand that we’ll all be living the good life? I guess that is the logic. Thank goodness the governor and the legislature don’t seem to agree.

I truly believe that a large public employment sector is a real threat to our financial stability and our economic freedom. For every police officer, fireman, and teacher doing important work out there, there is a clerk who got hired because they were some connected person’s cousin. Most public employees then become part of a consistent movement for more government and higher taxes, as they are the ones who benefit from that. Unfortunately, it takes a recession to generally see layoffs in the public sector – which many of us would agree is not the best time to lay anyone off. (I do give credit to former Gov. Matt Blunt for reducing the state payroll during good economic times, but that is a rarity.) However, if it has to be done during a recession, then it has to be done. There is nothing special about government jobs. They should be maintained only as long as it takes someone 40 hours a week to perform a needed public service. Once the service becomes unnecessary, the revenues are not there to support it, or it turns out that certain people are not needed for 40 hours (impossible to imagine for bureaucrats, I know) they should be let go.

What Is the Point of This Interactive Map?

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Census Bureau has created a map that allows you to track Census mail participation rates, which the bureau defines as the percentage of forms mailed back from households that received them. When I read the map this morning, Missouri’s participation rate was 28 percent, well above the national rate of 16 percent. The map also lists areas with the highest participation rates so far; this morning, two small towns in Iowa were tied at 74 percent.

The map is colorful and easy to use. Still, I can’t help wondering why the Census Bureau displays this information so prominently. The Census isn’t a contest in which we try to beat other states. It doesn’t really matter which cities or counties are “ahead” in mailing back their forms.

Ignoring Calorie Counts

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Thus begins the AP story about the national calorie count mandate, which will force restaurant chains comprising 20 or more locations to post calorie counts on menus:

A requirement tucked into the massive U.S health care bill will make calorie counts impossible for thousands of restaurants to hide and difficult for consumers to ignore.

I’m following it until I get to the words “difficult for consumers to ignore.” There’s evidence that consumers are pretty good at ignoring the numbers on the menu. For example, this research on New York City’s calorie count mandate found that less than a third of consumers reported taking the newly posted nutritional information into account when they ordered. When the researchers examined caloric data from fast food sales before and after the change in policy, they found no decrease in calories purchased. (The AP story does mention this study a couple of paragraphs from the end.)

Another study that looked at data from Starbucks alone found a small decrease in purchased calories in food, but no change in purchased calories in beverages — the main attraction at Starbucks. People who headed over to Starbucks in search of the high-calorie drinks for which it’s known didn’t suddenly change their minds when they read the calorie counts.

The calorie count mandate won’t make the population healthier, because people are good are ignoring numbers they don’t want to see. You can plaster nutritional data all over a restaurant, but if people aren’t interested, they’ll tune it out.

It’s unfortunate that the federal government imposed this mandate on all states. States like Missouri should be free to weigh the evidence from places that have imposed mandates and come to their own determinations on calorie-posting policy.

Page on Parents as Teachers Website Reinforces Gender Stereotypes

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Parents as Teachers website includes a list of tips on involving fathers in their children’s lives, and it also gives several reasons why fathers should be involved. Most of them look fine to me, but I take issue with this one:

Dads often have a special interest in analytical skills such as math and problem-solving, which can support a child’s intellectual development and promote school readiness.

The page also states that fathers “are usually more rough-and-tumble in their play with children than moms.”

Mothers can also focus on problem solving and their children’s cognitive growth, and I see no reason to highlight those characteristics as the special domain of men. There are plenty of couples that don’t fit these generalizations; it’s unfair to them to imply that an analytical father paired with a docile mother is the norm, or that this is what men and women are “usually” like.

Now, the wording on this one page should not be a deciding factor in funding Parents as Teachers. I’ve set out my arguments for limiting Parents as Teachers in previous posts, and my reasoning doesn’t depend on what a small section of the program’s website says. However, because Parents as Teachers receives state funds, taxpayers should be aware of what it tells participants. Public programs that give parenting advice can acquaint parents with information, but they can also provide a platform for the promulgation of opinions, biases, and stereotypes.

Governmental Things One Should Be Able to Do Online

Posted on by David Stokes

Over at the Freakonomics blog, they’re discussing a website focused on getting the U.S. Census to be made available online, thereby saving millions of dollars — maybe more. This post won’t devolve into a census discussion, but I will say that I absolutely hate those ads that constantly talk about filling out the form so that your community can get its fair share of funds for all the wonderful things government does. I reject that it is the role of government to do many of those things, and the constant talk of “fair share” makes me physically ill.

But let’s move on. We are talking a lot around here about ways to cut the state’s budget. Although this idea is more closely related to Missouri’s county governments, personal property tax declarations could very easily be done online. As far as I can tell, only Jackson County allows you to do the entire process online. That saves every taxpayer the postage cost of two letters, and it should be emulated by every other county. St. Louis County offers some helpful things online, but I think they should go the full mile here and try to phase out the requirement for physical mailings of property tax declarations for as many people as possible. Cutting costs here might also save the state at least a little money, given that the state reimburses counties for portions of their assessment expenses.

Please let me know if you are aware of other counties that have gone completely online with this process.

Continuing the Fight for Fewer State Reps

Posted on by David Stokes

Today’s Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal has an op-ed about the size of Missouri’s House of Representatives. In short, the House is too big and we could do just fine with fewer elected state reps. It is a very good editorial and sounds many of the same arguments I’ve made in my writings on this subject. I recommend the piece highly — thanks to Combest for catching it. The key argument:

The annual savings on pay and per diem of $39,751 per House member, multiplied by 95, tops $3.75 million per year.

That money adds up. Decreasing the number of people who have a say in how we live our lives would be another benefit of reducing the size of the House.

Public Programs Should Substantiate Claims About Child Development

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Last week, I blogged about some advice a Parents as Teachers participant received from a program representative. She says she was told that she “needed” to read to her unborn child every day, and that it was important to read the exact same book each time. I criticized this advice as lacking a scientific basis; in addition, it’s liable to provoke anxiety or unrealistic expectations in parents.

This incident brings to mind a program that was introduced in Georgia back in 1998. The state distributed free classical music tapes and CDs to the parents of newborns, in hopes that listening to the music would stimulate babies’ cognitive development.

In both cases, public programs inappropriately extrapolated from scientific research to prescribe parenting behaviors. Babies can enjoy music — and psychologists have debated the existence of a “Mozart effect” — but that does not mean all babies need to listen to CDs for healthy development. Likewise, research shows that fetuses can detect sounds and that young brains learn from repetition, but that does not imply that reading one book every day will be beneficial. It’s worth noting that despite the research on repetition, repetitive exposure to Baby Einstein language videos has been shown not to help babies’ linguistic abilities. The manner of repetition makes a difference. It’s not sufficient for Parents as Teachers to point to studies about repetition in general; the program would have to show that this specific repetitive activity has a positive effect.

It’s been brought up in our comments section that Parents as Teachers might endorse other ways of interacting with fetuses. This could be true. Similarly, if pressed, Georgia’s governor might have been forced to admit that country music has as much chance of promoting development as classical music. But what matters is the advice that was actually conveyed by the program. When participants honestly come away from a class under the impression that they need to do one particular thing — and I have no reason to believe the blogger I linked to was trying to misrepresent Parents as Teachers or make it look bad — we should evaluate whether that activity is as important as the program claimed. If Parents as Teachers never intended to promote one activity over others, then the program needs to do a better job of communicating with parents so they don’t form erroneous conclusions.

What Can We Do Without?

Posted on by Audrey Spalding

As you may already know, Missouri is running a large budget deficit, despite several rounds of budget cuts recently made by Gov. Jay Nixon. According to the Post-Dispatch, Missouri may have to cut an additional $500 million from its budget.

Some Show-Me Institute staff members are considering a set of suggestions for additional cuts that the state could make without hurting its core programs. Hopefully, we can find line items within the state budget that can be cut without negatively impacting other areas of state spending. But this is a time-sensitive issue, and researchers combing through the state budget might not see an area of spending that others know through experience to be ineffective.

So, if you happen to know offhand of certain programs that could easily be cut, let us know. The comment section is open. Or, if you’d like to take a closer look at state spending, you can use our Show-Me: The Books tool, which lets you create graphs, tables, and charts of state spending, with data that’s updated every week. You can see the most current version of the state budget here.

Spending on Health

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

These two counties in Wisconsin, like Oklahoma City, want their residents to be more healthy and physically fit. Unlike Oklahoma City, they are using public funds to pursue their goals. The money comes in the form of a $2.3 million stimulus grant, and the counties will spend it over the course of two years.

I wonder how the counties will use the grant to change residents’ behavior. They have ample public funding, but many of the behaviors they want to alter fall squarely in the private sector. For example, one of the stated goals is reducing the time people spend watching television. Do the counties plan to purchase a set of TV-B-Gone devices and manually turn off televisions? Presumably not, but how else can they get people to change?

Here are a few more things the counties want to accomplish:

Rauter said further efforts will be directed toward providing nutritional information for school lunches and restaurants, and making healthy choices more affordable in grocery stores. The program will promote community gardens, including implementing a Farm-to-School program, encouraging breast-feeding-friendly work sites and promoting overall good nutrition and physical activity.

Again, I’m curious how the counties will go about this. Changing workers’ attitudes toward breastfeeding is going to be harder than writing a check. And to make healthy groceries more affordable, the counties would have to either start their own grocery stores, or go into private grocery stores and tell them what products to carry and how much to charge.

If Missouri has to choose between the two approaches, I would prefer a campaign like Oklahoma City’s that’s financed by voluntary donations. But my first choice would be no campaign at all.

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