Farm to School: Large Expenditures for a Little Lesson

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

School districts in Minnesota are paying more for food produced in their state — up to twice what they would pay if they bought it from other places. The districts say there’s a didactic purpose:

But the expense is worth it, partly because serving local food is a good way to teach kids where their meals come from, said Wendy Knight, the district’s coordinator of food and nutrition services.

For Knight, the disconnect between modern kids and farms was illustrated last month by a small boy who drew a picture of the grass-fed beef hotdogs.

“He drew a picture of a hotdog eating grass,” she said.

That’s a cute story, but a poor basis for policy. Purchasing food in Minnesota doesn’t give the boy any information about hot dogs. Food from his home state doesn’t look any different from food grown somewhere else. To enlighten him, his teacher could read him a book about where food comes from, show a video on the topic, or help his class research food on the Internet. Those activities would teach students where their food comes from, and would serve as an effective and cheap alternative to wasteful local food policies.

Besides, all little kids have mistaken ideas, if not about hot dogs, then about other things. We can’t write policies to set every five-year-old straight. When a child says something silly, it should go into a home movie, not the state statutes.

“We’ve Got a Lot of Great People Who Live in Houses With Carports”

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

The Maryland Heights Planning and Zoning Commission sounds just a little bit defensive about the city’s ban on new carports:

“We’re not saying anything against anyone who lives in a house with a carport,” said Chuck Caverly, vice chairman of the city’s Planning and Zoning Commission, which recommended the change.

Is Maryland Heights targeting carports because they’re a danger to public peace or safety? No, some people just don’t think they look very nice.

Maryland Heights is not achieving an aesthetic ideal with this new law, either. Existing carports are grandfathered in, so people will continue to see them in the city. The law will prevent some people from building the new carports they want, while other carports remain visible for years to come.

Babysitting Is Legal in Michigan ? Up to $600

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

When I blogged about Michigan’s bill to exempt babysitters from daycare regulations, I didn’t know it imposed a $600 limit. The bill has been signed into law, and babysitters are free to watch kids in peace — as long as they earn less than that amount in a year.

A teenager who watches kids one night a week for $50 would exceed that limit, so I’d say Michigan’s daycare regulations still apply to way too many people.

Paved With Good Intentions?

Posted on by Caitlin Hartsell

Combest linked today to a Missourinet article about a decline in the state’s transportation funding:

State Transportation Director Pete Rahn has warned lawmakers that transportation funding will soon drop from $1.5 billion dollars to $421 million, which would end the ramped up construction the past few years which has vastly improved Missouri roads and bridges.

The article talks about proposals to address the decreased budget with more taxes, specifically targeting Missouri’s gas tax, which is lower than in all of our neighboring states — except for Oklahoma, which has the same 17-cent tax. A reliance on gas tax increases can only do so much, however. After all, as the article mentions, new cars are becoming more fuel efficient, and raising the gas tax only accelerates a switch to more fuel-efficient cars, decreasing the budget further.

Instead of taxes, what about tolls? The Show-Me Institute published a policy study last year about privately funding roads. It’s a model that has worked in Europe, and in other parts of the United States. The Skyway in Chicago is a good example of a public highway being successfully transferred to private ownership. A 99-year lease shifted a large cost from the government to a private company, and the people are paying directly for their travel on that road, rather than having to pay a flat fee regardless of their usage.

Maintenance of roads is expensive, but also potentially lucrative for a private company. The profit motive incentivizes companies to attract customers by maintaining the roads and keeping road closures to a minimum; so, a private company almost certainly wouldn’t entirely shut down a highway for two years to do roadwork. Rather than increasing taxes, Missouri should be transferring its expensive public roads to private companies that have a a financial stake in keeping the traffic flowing.

Happiness Is a Truck-Only Lane in Your Side-View Mirror

Posted on by David Stokes

The Warrensburg Daily Star-Journal weighed in with its position on truck-only lanes for Missouri. Its editorial view is really that truck-only lanes are worth considering and could be good for Missouri, but the paper didn’t stake out a strong view either way. The editorial is mildly disappointing, because although it mentions how the Kansas City Star has called for the use of toll roads (as have I), it then says that toll roads “aren’t perfect,” but never tells us what it views as the problems or weaknesses of toll roads. But the good news is that the paper is at least writing in positive terms about truck-only lanes, provided a fair financing system can be found.

Of course, a great financing system could pretty obviously be enacted simply by making the trucks that use the roads pay the tolls to finance the roads. For that matter, the entire highway should be tolled so that we all pay for whichever system we choose to use. I have no problem with gas taxes, and raising the gas tax to pay for highways is far preferable to raising the general sales tax. But using the gas tax as a financing system for truck-only lanes would make the people who drive only on local roads pay just as much for the highway as truckers and long-distance commuters would.

I won’t go into the extreme detail of how we fund transportation in Missouri, but we pay for our roads in many different ways. The people who primarily use local roads pay for them through gas, sales, and property taxes. Tolling the highway would be the fairest and most efficient way to make sure that the people who use the highway — especially people and truckers from out of state — pay for their use of the asset. Passenger cars and, I presume, trucks with enormous gas tanks can quite easily make it across Missouri without filling up and thereby paying gax taxes within Missouri. Currently, many people and trucks driving across the state intentionally stop and fill up while in Missouri because of the low gas taxes here. However, if we pay for a new I-70 and a new I-44 with increased gas taxes (which, again, isn’t the worst idea), we can expect some of the current fill-ups to be redirected across state lines.

Tolling the highway, and eliminating gas taxes for the drivers who pay the tolls, is the best way to fund the changes. Fears of diverting trucks to lesser highways are overblown, especially if trucks are allowed to double-rig in the truck-only lanes, and the toll itself isn’t set too high. The goal is to bring in enough funding to build and maintain the road, not earn a profit.

Thanks to Combest for the link.

Uneven Playing Fields

Posted on by Dave Roland

As we have written previously, one of the great evils of tax increment financing (TIF) is that it offers special advantages to the beneficiaries selected by elected officials, forcing everyone else in the market to compete at a disadvantage. Sadly, there’s a new example of how destructive this sort of policy can be.

Months ago, the city of Rock Port, Mo., decided to approve a TIF project worth $175,000 in order to bring a new grocery store to town. The long-time owners of Rock Port Market (up to that time the only local grocery store serving the town’s residents) said they didn’t mind fair competition from a new store, but objected that the TIF would give the new store a gigantic financial advantage not offered to the existing business. Sadly, just six months later, the family that has operated Rock Port Market for nearly 80 years has decided to close the market’s doors.

True economic development happens best when governments allow businesses to compete on a field that offers no special advantages to any of the players. The government does a grave disservice to its citizens when it assumes the responsibility for picking winners and losers in the market, rather than letting businesses succeed or fail on their own merit.

Another Look at the BASIS Charter Schools

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

When I last blogged about the BASIS charter schools, I hadn’t had a chance to watch Two Million Minutes: The Twenty-First Century Solution, which is the fourth in the Two Million Minutes series. Now that I’ve seen the full documentary, I can revisit the question: “Is BASIS the 21st century education solution?”

I’m impressed by the dedication of BASIS schools’ founders, and by their commitment to bring students to a high level academically. However, it’s still unclear to me that BASIS could be replicated on the scale that would be necessary to change American education.

BASIS schools are not large. One of the students says, “This is such a small school,” and several describe it as a close-knit, caring community. The family-like environment allows the teachers to get to know individual students and help them catch up. One student recounts how she worked through several extra textbook chapters each week after she first enrolled in BASIS. It might be difficult to motivate kids to do that if they didn’t have a personal connection with their teachers. And, because of its size, BASIS is not directly comparable to the big suburban high schools shown in the first Two Million Minutes documentary.

The mention of distributing fliers on a university parking lot makes me suspect that BASIS students are above average in educational background, as do some of the students’ hobbies and interests — such as opera. And, while BASIS now runs schools in two cities with different demographics, it’s hard to tell whether the student bodies are representative of their respective communities, because in both cases, BASIS has encountered a lot of opposition from neighbors and drawn students from beyond its immediate surroundings. BASIS doesn’t report how many of its students are eligible for free- or reduced-price lunch, making it impossible for an outsider to judge whether its claims of economic diversity are accurate.

The schools’ founders are aware of criticisms of BASIS, and they respond briefly in the documentary. In particular, I appreciated Olga Block’s comments on the challenges of integrating students into BASIS midway through the program. I agree that she’s in a catch-22. If her schools don’t improve student achievement, she’s not doing her job; but when the students outperform their peers, she faces the charge of running an elite school.

Although we’ll have to wait to learn if BASIS can scale up, it’s already a good example of a charter that serves its students well. What matters for American education is not whether a specific school like BASIS is able to expand, but whether equally ambitious schools will be permitted to open and compete.

Olga Block says it best in this essay:

The curriculum and policies specific to BASIS are not formulaic. They cannot simply be applied, like fertilizer, to any system and ‘watch the students learn.’ The formula that makes this sort of success possible is the freedom to innovate and reform at the school level.

Yuletide Economics 101

Posted on by Christine Harbin

While they waited in line this morning, I wonder if any Black Friday shoppers read George Will’s op-ed, “The Gift of Not Giving,” in the Washington Post. He explains that holiday-related shopping activities destroy wealth and aggregate utility.

Gifts that people buy for other people are usually poorly matched to the recipients’ preferences. What the recipients would willingly pay for the gifts is usually less than the givers paid. The measure of the inefficiency of allocating value by gift-giving is the difference between the yield of satisfaction per dollar spent on gifts and the yield per dollar spent on the recipients’ own purchases. […]

Were it not for sentimentality about sentiments, which are highly overrated, we would behave rationally, giving cash, thereby avoiding value subtraction.

For our Easter baskets, beginning a couple of years ago, my sisters and I convinced our parents to give us cash instead of candy. Our reasoning wasn’t as well-worded as Will’s, but the principle was the same. If we really wanted candy, we could use the money to buy it. Mom and Dad agreed because it saves them a trip to the store. Plus, they’re not wasting money on plastic eggs and baskets every year. Cash is better because it doesn’t expire, unlike candy and gift cards. The Harbin family destroys no wealth on Easter.

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