One Way to Get Rid of the Jennings School District’s Handheld Computers

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

A school district in Florida found itself on the Drudge Report after it used stimulus funds to buy iPods. The iPods, which the district will give to parents in exchange for completing a survey, cost $350,000.

That’s a small sum compared to the $1.25 million the Jennings School District spent on hand-held computers for students. Most of those computers ended up in storage. Jennings is now selling some of the devices for a fraction of what it paid, and it plans to distribute others to graduating students over the course of a few years.

It would be wiser for Jennings to emulate the Florida district and give away whatever computers it can’t sell, as soon as possible. If the district gives them all out at once, recipients may be able to find some use for them. If it waits to hand them out to graduates in a couple of years, they’ll be completely obsolete. By then, graduates won’t want to do anything with the computers — except maybe to display them with their caps and gowns as mementos.

There’s no need to attach a survey; just get rid of the devices. But if Jennings does give them to survey participants, I can imagine what a common response will be: “Stop wasting money on gadgets that students don’t use!”

Serving Local Food Is a Daunting Task for School Districts

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

As we saw in Columbia, Missouri school districts that search in vain for local food to serve are getting a lesson on “where their food comes from.” I’ll give you a hint: It’s not from the Midwest. Indiana is now running into the same problem:

Indiana school districts are lagging behind the rest of the country in procuring locally grown fruits and vegetables for students.

It turns out that buying local food just isn’t practical for Indiana districts:

“I don’t know what local farmers could grow that could last through a school year, but it would be nice if they could,” said Joanne Baierwalter, food service director for Muncie schools. “Potatoes, maybe, but where would you store them? Who would deliver them?”

Some local food advocates would respond that districts should buy up every local produce item when it’s harvested, then carefully preserve it to serve when school is in session. I’m left wondering: When did districts get out of the business of educating kids in order to become canneries?

Negative Consequences of Reviewing Tax Credit Applications in the Missouri Legislature

Posted on by Christine Harbin

As Ben Wieder reported yesterday in the Columbia Missourian:

Senators who would be responsible for reviewing tax credit applications under a proposed bill are mixed on whether they should have the authority to do so.

I hope that the Missouri legislature ultimately decides that it shouldn’t have the authority, because this policy would have several negative consequences.

First, the legislature would be committed to a time-consuming review process. If the legislature spends this much time determining whether it should even have the authority to review tax credit applications, it would spend at least as much time arriving at a conclusion when actually reviewing the applications.

Second, subjecting tax credits to the appropriations process would discourage businesses from relocating to Missouri. Wieder introduces this idea in the article. Businesses would locate themselves in other states out of fear that the Missouri legislature would ultimately deny their application, or because they are not recipients of targeted tax credits in Missouri.

“What businesses need is certainty,” [State Economic Development Director David] Kerr said. “If it’s not certain, they will go to a state where they know what they’re getting.”

Third, if the legislature has the authority to decide which specific applications receive tax credits and which don’t, then there is an increased incentive for applicants to seek the favor of elected officials. This would aggravate the already-uneven playing field and encourage special interests.

Instead of providing tax credits that are targeted to specific businesses or industries, it should work to create an environment that affects all parties equally, such as reducing corporate income taxes or eliminating the earnings tax.

Because We Haven’t Banned Enough Products Yet

Posted on by John Payne

Some legislators in Jefferson City are trying to ban a drug called K2. The Post-Dispatch‘s Political Fix blog explains the situation:

Legislators say the spread of K2, a “herbal incense” more commonly referred to as a synthetic marijuana, is an epidemic.

Missouri state Rep. Ward Franz, R-West Plains sponsored a bill that would add K2 to Missouri’s list of illegal drugs. That bill was heard before the House Public Safety committee Tuesday.

“There are so many people, including adults, saying its legal so we think it’s safe, and that is not the case,” Franz said.

West Plains Police Department Detective Shawn Rhoades said in West Plains, students as young as middle school have been experimenting with the drugs. Last month, a West Plains high school student was hospitalized after smoking K2.

The dried herbs come in 3-gram packages of various flavors, and are available online and in several stores in the St. Louis area for about $30 – less than the cost of a tank of gas.

“We don’t know much about this, but it’s going to end up killing somebody,” Franz said.

There are so many flaws in the reasoning behind this bill that it would take a lengthy essay to unravel them all — and the commenters on the post have made a great start — but here are some of the more rudimentary ones.

Judging by the fact that I have never even heard of K2, I doubt its use is all that widespread — but, even if it were widespread, it could not be considered an epidemic. Epidemics are diseases that are extremely communicable and infect others even when they take steps to avoid infection. K2 is a drug that people have to consume (voluntarily, unless someone forces them to do so, or they are tricked) in order to feel its effects.

Furthermore, it is a very foolish person indeed who believes that any product that is not illegal is therefore safe. Just to stay in the realm of drugs, drinking a fifth of whiskey and smoking three packs of cigarettes a day is hardly safe, but it is perfectly legal. A free society is supposed to allow people to take such risks, provided they do not harm anyone else in the process.

Next comes the appeal that we must ban K2 to protect the children, because some middle school students have used it and one high school student was hospitalized after using it (note that the story didn’t say the student was hospitalized because of K2; that’s a possibility, but the article does not confirm the scenario). Well, I got drunk for the first time in middle school, and high school students are hospitalized all the time for drinking. Does that mean we should completely ban alcohol?

The paragraph about the cost of K2 is essentially meaningless. Three grams costs $30, it tells us, but that’s completely useless information without knowing the active dose. If three grams is what it takes to get high, I sincerely doubt K2 will ever catch on in any major way.

Finally, the legislator who introduced the bill is convinced it will kill somebody if it is not banned, but given the fact that he just admitted he knows little about the drug, I’m guessing that his certainty is based on exactly zero toxicological evidence. I don’t know specifically how K2 differs from marijuana, but unless it is dramatically more dangerous than its organic cousin, it is — for all intents and purposes — impossible to overdose on the drug.

Later in the article, a different legislator claims, “This has no legitimate use in society that we’re aware of.” Well, that depends on your definition of “legitimate”. If people are buying it and coming back for more, they must be enjoying it. Is enjoyment not a legitimate use? If not, I wonder whether the General Assembly should next take up the issue of banning carnivals. After all, the Scat routinely makes people sick, and it’s only a matter of time before one of the carts flies off the Zipper.

Finally, there is a presumption on the part of supporters of a ban that the legislation will be effective. Perhaps they should reflect on the history of marijuana prohibition. Marijuana is far more popular today than it was when it was originally banned in 1937. That trend may not repeat itself if K2 is banned, because people might simply opt to smoke the already widely available original as opposed to the newly developed synthetic, but no ban will keep people from altering their consciousness.

Back in high school, I was a policy debater, and in policy debate, the affirmative team advancing a policy proposal had the burden of proof to show that the policy was necessary. Each plan had to meet five so-called “stock issues” to prove it was good policy. Foremost among those were “solvency,” “harms,” and “significance” — meaning that the plan had to solve a significant problem that had major harms. If this proposal to ban K2 were advanced in a high school policy debate, it would lose without the negative team having to say a word because those advancing it have not shown that there is a significant problem or harm associated with the status quo, nor that the policy would actually achieve its intended goal. It’s a pity that the ban proposal will inevitably receive more consideration (and likely pass) in the General Assembly than it would from a high school debate judge.

Registering Teenage Voters, Years in Advance

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Kansas City Prime Buzz links to a post about preregistering teenagers to vote. A bill introduced in the Kansas State Legislature would allow people as young as 14 to preregister.

In Missouri, you can register six months before your 18th birthday. That gives people plenty of time before they’re eligible to vote, so I don’t see a need for Missouri to adopt a new policy. Opening preregistration years early looks like another product of the mindset I discussed in my post about anti-obesity efforts — the notion that everything worth doing should be made easy by law.

The state should not make it unnecessarily difficult to register, or set up hurdles to prevent people from voting. However, asking people to wait until they’re almost old enough to vote before they register is not imposing a hardship on them. We do need laws to facilitate voter registration, but it’s OK if the process calls for a little bit of initiative on the part of voters.

We don’t allow 14-year-olds to sign up early for their driver licenses or concealed-carry permits. They wait until they’re old enough for the licenses and permits to matter to them. It’s reasonable for them to wait a few years before they register to vote, too.

Buying Local Not Always Environmentally Friendly

Posted on by Caitlin Hartsell

The Weekly Standard published an article this past week about the realities of buying “local,” written by a Missouri farmer. The farmer’s piece responds to the new $65 million USDA program “Know Your Farmer, Know Your Food,” which states its program mission on its website:

It is also the start of a national conversation about the importance of understanding where your food comes from and how it gets to your plate. Today, there is too much distance between the average American and their farmer and we are marshalling resources from across USDA to help create the link between local production and local consumption.

The USDA’s program relies on the premise that local production is a social and environmental good that should be encouraged by the government. Blake Hurst, the author of the Weekly Standard article, debunks the idea that local is necessarily more “carbon neutral.” He cites a study by Hiroko Shimizu and Pierre Desrochers for the Property and Environment Research Center about “food miles.” The study’s abstract includes this conclusion (emphasis added):

The evidence presented suggests that food miles are, at best, a marketing fad that frequently and severely distorts the environmental impacts of agricultural production. At worst, food miles constitute a dangerous distraction from the very real and serious issues that affect energy consumption and the environmental impact of modern food production and the affordability of food.

Certain climates and types of land are better suited for particular agricultural purposes. The local-food movement trumpets locality and proximity above all else, though, ignoring the enormous energy inputs required to grow food on land that is not well-suited for that purpose. An assessment of the environmental impact of food growing needs to take into account all of the inputs — not just the distance traveled from the farm to the store.

The USDA has created its own matrix for evaluating the most important environmental factor for farms — proximity — without taking into account other criteria that could also have significant environmental impact. If an individual thinks it is important to buy locally, that is fine. But that decision should be made by the individual, without the help of a massive advertising campaign by a governmental agency that expends large sums of taxpayer dollars in order to promote their particular environmental model.

(This discussion is related to my recent post about farmers’ markets, and to Sarah Brodsky’s blog posts about local food.)

Another problem, in addition to USDA program’s misguided focus on buying local, are the implications that local food is somehow healthier. Fruit grown in Missouri is not any more nutritious than fruit grown in California or Florida, yet the USDA program seems to conflate the idea with statements like, “USDA wants to expand access to local, nutritious foods,” implying that proximity could contribute to nutritional value. Local food may not even be as fresh as food transported from other locales; in fact, the PERC study found that because larger farms ship much more frequently than small farms, their food is often more likely to be fresh when it reaches market. The USDA’s misleading claims about the purported environmental and health benefits of local food makes its program even more questionable, beyond the way in which it exerts influence on consumer choices.

Buying local food is not always the best way to be environmentally or health-conscious. At any rate, it is not the government’s job to influence consumer behavior, and the $65 million used by the USDA in its program to promote local food surely has a better use.

Unintended Consequences

Posted on by Charis Fischer

The Missouri Chamber of Commerce conducted an interesting survey of business owners back in December about their thoughts on the proposals for health care reform. This article in the Springfield Business Journal details some of the responses to the survey questions, as well as some of the concerns shared by restaurant and hotel owners in particular. These industries typically have a lot of part-time workers, many of whom one hotel owner said would have to be laid off in the event of a mandate requiring that employers provide health care for their employees. If an 8-percent payroll tax were charged as a penalty to employers who did not provide insurance, 47 percent of the businesses surveyed would pay the fine and 51 percent said they would provide insurance. So barely half of these businesses would provide insurance, while the rest would be unnecessarily crippled with a higher tax burden and leave their employees without health insurance — not to mention the employees who would lose their jobs as a result. All this would follow from a benevolent attempt on the part of the government to help more people obtain health insurance.

An individual mandate would be similarly counterproductive. The Wall Street Journal reports on an analysis by the Heritage Foundation showing that “roughly 93 percent of uninsured households under age 35 who face a penalty for remaining uninsured would rather pay the penalty than buy health insurance.” As the article points out, paying this penalty would require money that would have otherwise been spent or saved, causing an unnecessary drain on both the economy and the individuals who are forced to pay this fine.

This is a perfect example of the unintended consequences that so often occur as a result of well-intentioned legislation. It seems like legislators are usually more focused on how their proposals sound, rather than on the actual results of those policies. Unfortunately, this never ends well; we all know the saying about the road that’s paved with good intentions.

More Pointless Legislation

Posted on by John Payne

While anti-texting laws may be ineffective attempts to deal with a real problem, the most charitable thing I can say about this is that it is a solution in search of a problem:

A bill heard in committee Monday would prohibit felons from commercially using fireworks.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Brad Lager, R-Maryville, would prohibit anyone guilty of a felony or anyone without proof of liability insurance from getting a permit to sell, make or ship fireworks. It would also allow the state fire marshal to examine sales records to make sure businesses buy and sell only from those with a permit.

I can understand the liability insurance requirement and fire marshal oversight, but is there really a serious problem in Missouri with felons selling fireworks? The article does not mention any reason it should be illegal for felons to sell fireworks. Even if there are a great many felons going into that line of work, that is not in itself cause for alarm. In fact, we should be glad those individuals are reintegrating themselves into productive society. I suppose the concern is that felons are more inclined toward violence and could use the fireworks for that end, but fireworks — although dangerous if mishandled — aren’t terribly effective weapons. They are hard to aim and are usually designed to minimize damage to people and property if they are misused. Let’s not go making it even harder for felons to get jobs outside of crime just because it sounds kind of scary to have them around gunpowder.

“No Coherent Strategy” for Teaching Foreign Languages

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The New York Times‘ Room for Debate blog asks whether Chinese instruction will take hold in American schools or whether interest in the language is just a passing fad. A few of the respondents dismiss the apparent upswing in the popularity of learning Chinese. They describe American culture as indifferent to foreign languages, and blame this on a lack of state directives. For example (emphasis mine):

I believe the main reason for this disparity is that foreign languages are treated by our public education system as less important than math, science and English. In contrast, E.U. governments expect their citizens to become fluent in at least two languages plus their native tongue.

Another panelist laments the fact that “unlike Europe, the U.S. has no coherent strategy for making our society bilingual.”

I suspect European countries’ policies are a reflection of their citizens’ interest in languages, rather than the cause. Europeans have ample reason to study languages; they all live within a short distance of other countries where different languages are spoken. As Norman Matloff notes in his response to the Room for Debate question, Americans who live close to the border with Mexico show more enthusiasm for learning Spanish than do their fellow citizens to the north.

Could it be that although proximity to foreign language speakers can spark people’s interest, policies are what really make them use other languages? If that’s the case, I’d be hard pressed to explain what happened in Ontario, Canada, where a ceremony was conducted in English a few weeks ago. That was despite French’s status as an official language of Canada, and despite the French-language public school boards and community colleges that are established throughout the province. When a language isn’t useful to people, policymakers who promote it are wasting their time.

The United States shouldn’t order everyone to learn languages, but the education system should give opportunities to become bilingual to people who are interested. Magnet schools and charter schools are good environments for language specialization, as are the optional language-immersion programs offered by some traditional districts. (Examples in Missouri are Academie Lafayette, the St. Louis Language Immersion Schools, and the Kansas City School District’s Foreign Language Academy.) Parents who want their children to have a lot of foreign language exposure can enroll them in these schools.

If Chinese language education is to continue growing, more people must be free to choose schools that teach it. Policymakers who are worried about American students learning English only ought to try to make it easier to open new language-immersion choice schools.

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