Columbia Shelter Reacts to Urban Chicken Proposal

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Central Missouri Humane Society is alarmed by a proposal to allow urban chickens in Columbia. It anticipates trouble caring for and finding homes for the chickens that would end up in the shelter:

Shelter Relations Coordinator Allison Toth said a chicken was brought in during the summer. The staff named it Tyson, after the food manufacturing company.

[…] It was a small inconvenience until Tyson was finally adopted by board member Ann Korschgen, who owns a farm.

But staff cannot rely on such acts on a regular basis.

The argument that no one should be permitted to keep chickens because a few of them will probably be abandoned is unpersuasive. By that reasoning, the city should ban cats and dogs, too, because some owners leave them at shelters. And, although it’s inconvenient for a shelter to build new coops, the city’s animal population changes over time and shelters need to evolve.

The shelter’s contract for 2010 excludes chickens, and the city is thinking of other ways to deal with abandoned chickens this year — perhaps paying a farmer to take care of them. That means the shelter would have a whole year to prepare for the chickens’ arrival.

And I don’t buy the argument that no one will adopt chickens. When urban chickens are illegal, the shelter has to wait for someone from a farm to take a stray chicken. But if city residents could keep chickens, there would be many more potential chicken owners. Finding homes for abandoned chickens would be easier.

Texas Keeps Out of the Race

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

In the Race to the Top, Texas is prudently sitting on the sidelines. Texas’ education commissioner explains why it’s not worth it for the state to comply with the Department of Education’s conditions:

“Even if we won the full amount, it would only run our schools for two days, so for that we weren’t going to cede control over our curriculum standards,” Mr. Scott said.

One-time cash awards won’t be very helpful to Race to the Top winners in the long term, as Texas officials can foresee. Nor will the process give reforms a chance to sprint ahead. Race to the Top asks states to make changes on paper that might not affect what goes on in schools at all. For example, to be competitive, states have to remove legislative caps on the number of charter schools that can operate. But they don’t have to approve any new charters. So, states could lift their charter caps, win cash and praise from Arne Duncan, and then turn down all charter proposals for spurious reasons. The states would have more money, but students wouldn’t have any more choices than what they started with.

There’s good reason to be skeptical of Race to the Top demands including abolishing caps on charters. As we’ve seen in Oregon, legislative caps are not always the main barrier to opening a charter. Oregon requires charter proposals to be submitted to school boards. These boards govern the same districts that the proposed charters would compete with, were they approved. Understandably reluctant to admit competitors to their districts, the boards deny charters on weak grounds or force them to resubmit proposals with minute improvements.

The Department of Education can’t correct this problem with a blanket directive to all states. It would have to examine each state’s charter approval process and identify which policies are holding back charter expansion. And it’s the same for other Race to the Top priorities: In some states, laws separating teacher data from student data may rule out merit pay, while for other states, merit pay may be illegal or difficult to implement for unrelated reasons. And so on.

Thus far, Missouri hasn’t shown Texas’ discretion — the state plans to apply for a Race to the Top grant. I hope Race to the Top won’t distract the state from meaningful reforms. Missouri officials should bear in mind that the ultimate goal is to make substantive policy improvements, not to win an award.

All Census, All the Time

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

I learned from the Census Bureau’s advertising launch today that the bureau will be the top advertiser in the United States during the next few weeks. Agency officials intend to bombard the average person with pro-census messages 42 times.

The gargantuan campaign won’t end when the census forms are released. According to the Census Project’s website, some meteorologists will be reporting local census response rates along with high temperatures and the chance of rain.

Why the sudden onslaught of publicity for something that the country has always done every 10 years? The bureau is touting its campaign as “unprecedented,” as though this year’s census were different from previous counts and required a radically new approach. I noticed that sentiment in today’s advertising kickoff, particularly when MTV Networks’ executive vice president of public affairs stated that people should participate in the 2010 Census because it will be “the most important count of their lifetimes.” This characterization is puzzling given that we’re going to conduct another census a decade from now.

One thing that I’ll admit sets this census apart is its timing: As the economy slowly pulls out of a deep recession, any large enterprise that generates employment is welcome. Still, it would be unwise to expect the census to have a big effect on the economy, even through its biggest campaign ever. I agree with MyTwoCensus.com’s prediction that the Census Bureau’s hiring won’t spur economic growth because the jobs last only six weeks. Fortunately, no one is lobbying for continuous recounts to make those jobs permanent, the way fans of tax breaks for filmmakers would like Missouri to grant tax credit after tax credit, year round.

Show-Me Institute in the Media, and Dr. Haslag on With McGraw Tomorrow

Posted on by David Stokes

We have had a rather busy week or so in the media. More important than the past, though, is the future — so everyone in St. Louis please listen in tomorrow morning during the 10 a.m. hour, when Professor Joe Haslag will be appearing with McGraw Millhaven on the Big 550, KTRS, to discuss income and earnings taxes.

Also, I appeared last night on KMOV Channel 4 in St. Louis to talk about the Show-Me Institute’s several state income tax studies that were conducted by others here. (Why did I do the interview if others did the work? Because I was the only one available at that exact time, that’s why.)

There have also been a number of stories about the earnings tax in the Kansas City Star. In the interest of brevity, I’ll just link to the one column in the Star that favorably discusses the idea of replacing the earnings tax with a land tax. Another piece takes a less glowing approach, but we appreciate the Star taking the debate seriously.

Dave Roland was quoted in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch with his thoughts about the government spending millions to retrain St. Louis auto workers for the anticipated green jobs of the future. You can probably guess how he felt about the insane proposition that the government has any idea what the jobs of the future are.

Finally, our research assistant Josh Smith did his first radio interview with the Eagle, 93.7 FM in Columbia, about the proposal to require a prescription for all sales of medicine containing pseudoephedrine. Needless to say, Josh (and I) think that proposal is wrong, to put it politely. I should clarify that it was Josh’s first radio news interview while he has been with the Show-Me Institute. He has been on the radio before. In fact, I am pretty sure he was the seventh caller when he was in fourth grade and won tickets to the New Kids on the Block Show. He is still pretty psyched about that. …

Voting With Your Feet Grocery Cart

Posted on by Christine Harbin

Fox4KC recently aired a story about how the governor’s proposal to increase the state sales tax rate will raise the cost of groceries and cause Kansas residents to shop at grocery stores in Missouri.

Differences in tax rates across states can encourage people to vote with their feet. Caitlin Hartsell has previously discussed this on this blog. Grocery stores in Missouri probably will see more Kansas residents than they did before the sales tax hike. However, there are some factual errors in the story. The differences in tax rates on groceries between Kansas and Missouri are not as stark as Fox4KC reports, and I anticipate that the marginal increase in border-hopping grocery shoppers will be much smaller than they suggest.

The following portion of the article is just plain wrong (emphasis mine):

The one percent state-wide increase would push the tax rate on groceries in some Kansas stores to nearly nine percent. Across the state line in Missouri, there is no state sales tax on groceries, and shoppers pay less than five percent tax on grocery purchases in total.

Missouri does tax groceries. This tax rate in Missouri is 1.225 percent, and certain foods (e.g., prepared foods) are taxed at the full rate of general sales tax, which is 4.225 percent. Kansas taxes groceries at the full rate of the state sales tax, which is 5.3 percent.

The other statements relating to tax rates are true; Missouri does have lower taxes on gasoline, liquor, and cigarettes than Kansas. In the (unlikely) event that anyone besides myself is interested in comparing Missouri’s tax rates with those of Kansas and Illinois, I have organized this information in the following table:

Picture 1

There are additional reasons why I believe that the marginal increase will be small. First, the number of people who will cross the state border is limited to those living very close to it. The revenue loss that results from people voting with their grocery carts is small relative to the increase in revenue from grocery shoppers in the rest of the state. Second, there are extra time and transportation costs associated with crossing the state border that serve as a disincentive to shoppers. For example, Missouri and Illinois are separated by a river, so individual may not find it worth her while to make a special trip across the bridge if she will only save $0.81 on a pack of cigarettes or 0.225 percent in grocery taxes.

More About the Licensing of Tax Preparers

Posted on by David Stokes

Jim Gallagher over at the Post-Dispatch had a nice column about the question of whether to license tax preparers, as was proposed recently by the IRS and mentioned on this blog. The best thing about this article is that it at least poses the question of how the licensing costs will affect the industry. Other recent stories about licensing that I have seen fail to even consider the idea that licensing can cause costs to rise at all. The only bad part of the column is the insulting title:

“No skills needed to be a tax preparer”

But it may be that the editors chose the title, so we can’t necessarily blame Gallagher for that.

Not surprisingly, current owners of tax preparations companies support the proposed nationwide licensing:

“It’s a great thing. It will hold accountability to tax preparers,” says Salah. “They’ll know what they’re doing. There are lots of tax preparers who are not qualified.”

Of course, it is always those who currently hold an occupation who support licensing that occupation, because it helps prevent future competition. The vast majority of licensing laws are enacted as a result of lobbying pressure from current practitioners of the occupation in question. Recent successful efforts to license interior designers and massage therapists in Missouri are examples of that phenomenon.

But at least Gallagher understands that these types of plans entail costs and harms that might not be obvious at first:

The story may be different for the bookkeeper-turned-homemaker who does tax returns on her (or his) dining room table. Some may find another way to earn money.

People who find themselves in a similar situation to this example should be allowed to do this type of work for as long as people voluntarily choose to hire them. If they do a poor job and their customers keep getting penalized as a result, people will stop hiring them. What’s more, just because you hire a tax preparer does not mean you don’t bear the responsibility of your return being accurate. I like the comment by the CPA at the end of the article:

“I am a retired CPA. It is amazing the number of people who could prepare their rather easy return choose not to. Usually their answer is I may make a mistake. The mistake that we have all made is electing people who have given us a tax law that is impossible to comply with. This is not a political statement but a fact.”

Well said.

Raw Milk Regulations Protect Commercial Milk Producers’ Business

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Regarding raw milk regulations, the Springfield News-Leader reports:

Most commercial dairy producers are against the unregulated sale of raw milk because they fear if anyone got sick from it, the pasteurized milk industry would suffer from the bad publicity and confusion.

Fear of bad publicity can’t fully explain why Missouri law allows farmers to sell raw milk from their farms but not from makeshift stands in parking lots. Nor does it justify other states’ stricter controls, such as Oregon’s ban on advertising raw milk. If avoiding negative publicity were the only object, it would be sufficient to keep raw milk out of grocery store aisles. There would be no need for fine distinctions between customers ordering milk ahead of time or paying for it on the spot.

In fact, commercial producers who truly hoped to prevent a public relations disaster would want raw milk to be more visible, not less. Confusion might arise if people heard that someone got sick from raw milk, but they didn’t know what raw milk was or where people got it. They might erroneously assume they were buying raw milk themselves. If raw milk were widely advertised and many people saw it available at independent stands and distribution centers, they’d understand that raw milk is not the same product as the milk they find at the store.

The plethora of raw milk regulations are more effective from the point of view of avoiding competition. When consumers can’t hear about raw milk sales because advertising is forbidden, or when there’s no convenient way to pick up raw milk because it’s sold on a distant farm, most will buy pasteurized milk at the store. Producers stand to lose from easy access to raw milk.

Follow-Up on Work Opportunities for Felons

Posted on by David Stokes

In a recent post, I commented on how I supported preventing felons from working as bail bondsman, but stated that I did think, on the whole, that we were being too restrictive about which positions that felons can work in once they serve their sentences. So, I was delighted to read that in Kansas City Councilman John Sharpe has introduced legislation changing the city’s liquor code to allow felons to work in bars. I think that this is a very positive change, and I commend Councilman Sharpe. There is no reason that felons who have done their time should not be able to serve drinks, or work in any of the other assorted jobs that are available in bars. (I, myself, used to be a barback and a bouncer — although no, I am not a felon.) I hope this change goes through, so it can give former convicts a few more opportunities to build back their lives after they serve their punishments.

I was also delighted to read the story first at Tony’s Kansas City, which is always informative and fun to read for a number of reasons — which you will discover as soon as you visit.

Political Correctness

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

A legislator in Washington state wants to rewrite laws that characterize poor children as “disadvantaged” or “at-risk,” so that they instead read “at hope.” She thinks there’s a significant difference between those phrases:

Positive labeling is more than a gimmick or political correctness, Franklin says. She believes her idea could lead to a paradigm shift in state government and to changes in classrooms across the state.

The paradigm shift won’t happen, although political correctness is not to blame. There’s a place for political correctness; in some cases, updating legal language to be more sensitive is the right thing to do. For example, laws that were written many years ago may refer to medical conditions or physical disabilities in terms we would now consider offensive. That’s the reason behind this proposal to change the name of a Missouri agency. Racial designations are also susceptible to obsolescence, although switching to the politically correct language is not always easy, as the Census Bureau has found with the word “Negro.” (While many people take umbrage at the name, a diminishing number of people still identify with it, so removing it from forms could impair the accuracy of the Census.)

Politically correct language is useful when you want to avoid antagonizing people. However, you can’t solve a problem just by describing it with different words. Proponents of the “at hope” label argue that children respond to expectations, but the phrase wouldn’t change anyone’s expectations. People form expectations based on their experiences and on available information, not on the legal lexicon. The phrase could actually lower people’s expectations if they suppose that the state wouldn’t establish a euphemism to describe children who really had potential.

Expecting a phrase to transform education is like asking children to learn music with the “think system.” It’s an attractive idea, but it lacks a basis in reality.

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