Here are a couple videos people recorded as part of the Census Bureau’s Portrait of America road tour. As in the Springfield News-Leader article I wrote about a few weeks ago, the focus is on people needing help and the Census’ power to bring federal money.
The Tragic Ironies of Capitalism: A Love Story
I am delighted to discover that my favorite source for celebrity news, Perez Hilton, is also a source for state public policy. Yesterday on his blog, he reported that Michael Moore had been approved to receive a taxpayer subsidy for his 2009 film about the financial crises, Capitalism: A Love Story, through Michigan’s production incentives program.
Hilton asks, “Greedy Or A Coincidence?”
I respond “hypocritical,” largely for the following two reasons:
(1) Moore is doing exactly what he is condemning in his film: accepting taxpayer money.
In the film, he assails Wall Street executives for their greed and for accepting bailout cash, but apparently he is not opposed to accepting tax credits himself. From a Fox News article on the subject:
Any amount of taxpayer subsidy is a potential black eye for Moore, who argued emphatically in “Capitalism: A Love Story” that Wall Street banks and other big companies didn’t deserve the bailout money they received from the federal government as the economy was tanking.
(2) Moore was vehemently opposed to film production incentives such as tax credits before he was a recipient.
At a conference in July 2008, Moore said what I’ve been saying all along on this blog:
“These are large multinational corporations — Viacom, GE, Rupert Murdoch — that own these studios,” said Moore at the Traverse City event. “Why do they need our money, from Michigan, from our taxpayers, when we’re already broke here? I mean, they play one state against another, and so they get all this free cash when they’re making billions already in profits. What’s the thinking behind that?”
Urban Chicken Vote Is Here
Tonight, the Columbia City Council will vote on an urban chicken proposal. If it passes, Columbia residents will be free to keep up to six hens on each property.
The text of the proposed ordinance anticipates concerns about sanitation and possible nuisances, and it includes regulations to prevent problems. I hope that those clauses satisfy the critics. Cities like Columbia should not allow anyone to pack unsanitary numbers of poultry into city plots, but residents who raise a few hens in their backyards without harming their neighbors should be left alone.
If you’d like to learn more about urban chickens in Columbia, supporters have created a blog and a series of YouTube videos.
A Rising Tide Floats All Boats
Many critics of the “Fair Tax” argue that it would hurt people who have lower incomes. This is not completely true. For many reasons, the Fair Tax proposal would have many positive consequences for low-income individuals and families.
First, low-income individuals and families would see an automatic increase in their take-home income that is equal to the amount that they currently pay in income tax. They would be able to take home 100 percent of their earnings, because there would be no income tax withheld if the Fair Tax were implemented. This would be a tremendous benefit for those who live from paycheck to paycheck. In their recent policy study for the Show-Me Institute, “Previous Estimates Overstate ‘Fair Tax’ Rates, Harms,” Prof. Joseph Haslag and Abhi Sivasailam note the following:
In Missouri, the personal income tax rate is 6 percent; if this tax were repealed, consumers would be richer by that same amount.
In addition to having more money in their bank accounts, low-income individuals and families would also benefit from a personal exemption that would help them pay for the increase in sales tax. Like most Fair Tax proposals, the Missouri bill includes a “prebate” check system that is based on federal poverty guidelines and the number of people in each family.
Plus, eliminating corporate income taxes would place downward pressure on consumer prices and increase individual income even further. This is because businesses pay for corporate income taxes by passing them onto their consumers, employees, and shareholders. They do this by increasing the price that they charge for their products and services, reducing the amount that they pay their employees, and/or by eliminating or reducing dividends to shareholders.
States that have zero income taxes experience higher rates of growth as a consequence. For example, as Jenifer Zeigler Roland and Dave Roland recently demonstrated, the absence of an income tax caused Tennessee to outgrow Missouri. And, as the saying goes, a rising tide lifts all boats. The status quo hurts low-income individuals and families because income taxes discourage economic progress and because this population is disproportionately impacted by periods of slow economic growth. Low-income individuals and families are more likely to lose their jobs, possess fewer resources to endure periods of financial hardship, and are more in need of the initial employment opportunities that a healthy economy provides.
As another benefit of the Fair Tax, low-income individuals and families would benefit from increased employment opportunities. Eliminating the income tax would attract new businesses to Missouri, and they in turn would increase employment opportunities and broaden the tax base. Missouri needs all the help that it can get right now — the state’s unemployment rate was 9.5 percent in December.
Something that critics of the Fair Tax don’t address is that it eliminates loopholes and income tax exemptions in the existing income tax system that favor some businesses and individuals over others. High income individuals and corporations would no longer be able to use such loopholes to their advantage. As a consequence, the proposal would eliminate the mechanisms that are built into current tax law that send income tax revenues toward earmarks and special interests.
Free Market for Farmers’ Markets
There’s an interesting editorial in the Kansas City Star written by somebody who was revolted by a front page photo of pigs in a modern factory farm. Instead of rallying her readers to implore government action on the matter, the author encouraged them to “vote with your wallet each time you eat.” She specifically mentioned the Kansas City Food Circle as a resource for finding “responsible” food; the group describes itself as “an all-volunteer, grassroots organization created to promote the development of a permanently sustainable local food system.”
The power of consumers to influence producers with their money is something we’ve discussed before on Show-Me Daily. It is not a pipe dream, either, considering that companies like McDonald’s are listening. Entire businesses (like Whole Foods) have sprung up around the environmentally-conscious consumer.
Last semester, as a final project for my research methods class, my group conducted a survey about people’s meat-buying habits and their knowledge of farm conditions. Although I can’t mention specific results — we conducted the project for educational purposes only — we generally observed that most people claimed price to be the biggest factor when they bought meat. After we showed them pictures and information about industrial farms, a significant percentage said that knowledge of farming practices and conditions would affect their future purchasing decisions.
If these sort of things are important to you, voting with your wallet — and encouraging your friends to do the same — is the best way for the market to select for companies that most closely align with societal norms. One common misperception about free markets is that profit is the only important factor, and that the only way for a company to survive is for it to offer the lowest prices — and cut quality accordingly. But that’s merely a straw man: Product quality and any number of social considerations, including “eco-consciousness,” can have value for consumers.
Price is a limiting factor for some people, and they may not be willing or able to pay a higher price in order to make purchases that satisfy whatever environmental concerns they may have — and that should be their prerogative. Many people say they want environmental concessions, but they may not be willing to pay the difference in price that those concessions would require. Government regulations can therefore harm some number people by increasing compliance costs and therefore raising the price of food. By using the market as a tool to affect change instead, people can make their own cost/environmental-consciousness trade-offs. Voting with money allows companies with successful business plans — for some, that will mean alternative production methods or types of food — to succeed. It is the most democratic of processes, because each person is able to decide where they wish to draw the line.
Missouri Can Be Proud of Its High-Speed Rail Allocation
Here are some things to be happy about! Missouri ranks last among the 50 states in the number of professions subject to occupational licensing; we have generally low excise taxes; and, (in all likelihood) the way the state will use rail stimulus funds is probably best use we could have hoped for. Before everyone jumps all over me, let me explain why it is the best we could have reasonably hoped for:
- Missouri’s portion of the rail stimulus is a (comparatively) small amount of tax dollars that DOES NOT commit Missouri to building some new high-speed rail system.
- The dollars will likely be used in a manner that will bring demonstrable and measurable improvements to our current rail system. Or maybe they won’t, but at least we’ll know if that’s the case and have the ability to test and measure results before we commit to spending more money. So far, the first of these projects (undertaken without stimulus money) has had measurable success in reducing delays and allowing for increased traffic. (I believe strongly that eliminating delays is more important than speeding up the trip.)
- If the state spends a reasonable amount of money making demonstrable improvements to our current system, that will increase voluntary ridership (it already has) — which will (presumably and hopefully) decrease the required subsidy amount.
It is theoretically sound, but practically unrealistic, to expect that MoDOT would not have applied for stimulus funds and that the state would not have have received any for high-speed rail. MoDOT deserves credit for applying for shovel-ready projects that will improve our current Amtrak service rather than reaching for the fantasy world of bullet trains to Ballwin.
The projects that MoDOT will undertake with this money, and the project they already completed without stimulus funds, are based on engineering — not on delusions of taking the Orient Express at 250 mph. A study completed in 2007 by Mizzou engineers listed the most cost effective ways for MoDOT to improve existing rail service. The study recommended projects, such as the recently completed California (Mo.) rail-siding extension (scroll about two-thirds down the page) that would immediately improve rail service. Those are the projects for which MoDOT received funding, not pie-in-the-sky projects requiring newer, larger, and interminable subsidies.
The nationwide high-speed rail plan as a whole, announced last week, is a sad joke, as aptly described by Chrissy in her recent post. However, Missouri’s part in it is a relative bright spot, and MoDOT deserves commendation for keeping its plans focused — almost as much commendation as that candidate in Illinois who made the Simpsons monorail reference before I did:
“All this money to get from Chicago to St. Louis 45 minutes faster? This isn’t informed public policy, it’s a ‘Simpsons’ episode,” gubernatorial candidate Dan Proft said in a statement.
Filling the Cavities in Missouri’s Dental Care
Missouri’s oral health is among the worst in the nation. The Centers for Disease Control ranked the state 47th in terms of the percentage of the population that visited a dentist last year, and 50 of Missouri’s 114 counties have a shortage of dental professionals. In response to this public health crisis, the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services (DHSS) released its 2009 statewide oral health plan, which addressed the difficulty of recruiting dentists to rural areas. Although the plan points out that enabling improved oral hygiene and regular visits to a dental practitioner would narrow the disparity, it fails to address an underlying cause of Missouri’s dental predicament: the professional licensing law, and its restrictive definition of who can provide dental care in Missouri.
Alaska had a similar dental problem in its tribal areas, which had the worst rates of oral health in the country. Alaskan dental therapists — trained to do most basic dental work, like drilling and cleaning, but not oral surgery — became a much-needed solution to the problem. The American Dental Association (ADA) sued the Alaskan Native Tribal Health Consortium (ANTHC) as a result, and the two groups ultimately reached an agreement that limited the program’s scope. The ADA argued that dental therapists cannot adequately provide health care. However, a 2008 pilot study of the Alaskan program, funded by Texas A&M University, did not find any significant differences between the quality of care provided by dental therapists and dentists.
Other groups have argued that there are too many dentists already, and that opening the market to paraprofessionals is unnecessary. If dentists are so accessible, though, why are Missouri’s oral health outcomes so much lower than other states? Cost and access are both issues; even those who can conveniently reach a dentist may deem dental services to be too expensive when money is tight. Dental therapists, because they require less training, are able to provide comparable care for a wide range of dental services, at a more affordable rate. Those who need more than basic drilling and cleaning can be referred to a professional dentist. Dental therapists would not replace dentists; already, dental hygienists provide the majority of basic dental care before patients see a dentist. Also, in the same way that some people prefer to see a general practitioner rather than a nurse practitioner, some will always prefer a professional dentist to a paraprofessional. Dental therapists merely provide a less expensive alternative for those who cannot afford a professional dental checkup.
Dental therapists have been successful in England, Canada, and Australia at providing quality dental care. In Australia, dental therapists are proving their worth beyond the provision of basic oral care. A recent study found that nearly 94.6 percent of restorations performed by dental therapists were successful, and that patients were satisfied. Another study demonstrated that dental therapists can improve children’s oral health, especially in areas without proper coverage. Throughout the United States, new legislation is capitalizing on the international success of dental therapists; in the spring of 2009, Minnesota passed a bill creating a bachelor’s degree program in dental therapy.
Opening the market to dental therapists provides more than just quality, affordable health care. It also provides jobs, especially in depressed rural economies that have trouble attracting professional dentists on a permanent basis. A change in the law would benefit both those newly employed therapists and their patients, who would have significantly better access to dental care. This is an important contributing factor to general human welfare, because improving oral health helps to improve overall health. Recent studies have indicated that gum disease is correlated with increased risk — and is potentially a contributing factor — for other health problems, like heart disease.
Dental therapists provide an economical way to combat tooth decay, and public health officials have already suggested plans to implement training programs in the United States. The only obstacle to their introduction in Missouri — and to subsequent improvement in the oral health of Missourians — is the regulatory barrier of Missouri’s professional licensing law.
Caitlin Hartsell is a public health graduate student at Washington University and an intern for the Show-Me Institute.
Massachusetts Tells Preschools to Brush Kids’ Teeth
In an article about Massachusetts’ new law requiring certain preschools and day care centers to teach children how to brush their teeth, the New York Times quoted a teacher who opposes the regulation:
“I don’t want someone’s hand in my child’s mouth,” said Sarah Brodsky, a teacher at First Path Day Care in Watertown and mother of 4-month-old Noah. “It’s a little too much” government intervention, Ms. Brodsky added.
I’m not the Sarah Brodsky in this article, although we do have the same name and her quote is basically what I would have said. She’s right; the decision of whether to incorporate teeth brushing into the school day should be left to preschools and day care centers.
The new law is an intrusion into preschool management, and the fact that parents can opt out is little consolation from a preschool director’s point of view. Every preschool now has to set up sinks and take time away from other activities in order to brush teeth, all while keeping track of which students’ parents opted out. Preschool teachers are sure to hear complaints from parents if one child sticks someone else’s toothbrush in his mouth, or if an opted-out child inadvertently gets into the toothpaste. Those kinds of mix-ups are unavoidable when you have a bunch of little kids brushing their teeth at the same time.
I hope Missouri won’t follow Massachusetts’ lead and mandate teeth brushing in day care centers. But now that I think about it, I don’t know whether the in-school dental care policy would catch on in Missouri — people would probably demand taxpayer-funded home visits!
It Appears That Superfreakonomics Was Right
About the drunk walking bit, at least … and Superfreakonomics is probably right about a number of other things, too.
