The Perfect Example of Why MoDOT Should Be Governed As It Is

Posted on by David Stokes

In Missouri, we like to elect people to office and then not give them all the powers one might assume they would have. In Kansas City, the mayor is a glorified council member, while the city manager handles day-to-day operations. (Note: This is not a comment about any individual mayor, just a comment on the government structure; the same goes for my following comments.) In neither St. Louis nor Kansas City does the mayor have control over the police department, election board, school district, or judicial appointments. In St. Louis, the mayor has no control over the transit agency. Now, in some of these instances the mayors have some input — for example, both mayors serve as one of the members of the police board — but, in general, these things are run by the state-appointed boards.

Please understand, I am not saying this is automatically a bad thing. I particularly like the fact that the police in St. Louis are under the state’s control. My friends who are cops hate the idea of being controlled by 28 different aldermen, each exercising power within their respective wards. It’s much better that they report to a more independent entity — recent towing troubles aside.

This happens at the state level, too, with MoDOT being the most obvious example. The governor and legislature have little input once they select and confirm the members of the MoDOT board, which is independently funded and responsible to itself. If you want to see why this is good policy for Missouri, I shall point you to the top headlines at johncombest.com today: article after article of elected officials complaining that their cities are not getting enough from the stimulus spending. St. Louis city, St. Louis County, Jackson … they were particularly mad in Jackson:

When discussion turned to specifics, Lohr and Bollinger noted that Cape Girardeau has two projects and Jackson priorities were unfunded.

So, people who live in Jackson never drive in Cape? Will they not benefit from improvements five miles away? I am going to stop here, because I feel an episode of snippiness coming on.

In my opinion, it is far better to have an independent board making decisions based on what is good for the transportation network of the entire state than empowering politicians to fight over the funds.

It’s Assessment Day in St. Louis County

Posted on by David Stokes

Everybody’s favorite biannual activity is online today in St. Louis County. It’s reassessment day! Go to the county’s website and see how much your assessment has increased or decreased. The county reports an overall average decrease of 9 percent, but the school district breakdown will have to come later. Here is what you want to see:

  • You want to at least be on the average for your area. That way you will not see any tax increases when various taxing districts roll up their rates to guarantee at least the same amount of revenue as last year. Since right now we only have the countywide average, you at least want to see a 9-percent decrease.

  • The real winners in the assessment lottery are going to be the people whose assessments decrease more than the average for their school district. They are the ones who will see actual tax decreases.

  • With the coming tax roll-ups, anyone who sees an assessment increase, no matter how small, is in for a tax wallop when the bills come. One of my neighbors saw a 12-percent increase. When the taxes roll up, I assume by roughly 9 percent, the rate increase plus the assessment increase is going to give those people one hell of a tax hike.

  • It still feels like a lottery, no matter how much the assessor says it isn’t. My house and the houses belonging to my two neighbors received three very different assessments. Our home’s assessment decreased right on the average (and we’re very happy about that), one neighbor’s assessment decreased only slightly (like 2 percent), and the other neighbor’s assessment rose by 12 percent. Don’t tell me is isn’t a lottery.

  • I don’t blame anyone in particular for bringing about this lottery impression. With 360,000 parcels, it’s probably impossible to avoid, unless you abandon individual assessments in favor of area averages, which I proposed in 2007.

  • St. Louis County itself has decreased its tax rate, for which County Executive Charlie Dooley and the council should be commended. Now it is up to the school districts, etc., to hold their rates down. If they all automatically roll up by the full amount of the assessment loss, which they are legally entitled to do, then people are barely going to see any tax cuts at all. It is simply that the county makes up a small part of the overall tax rates.

  • Should the county average have decreased by more than 9 percent? Perhaps, but I really don’t know. Councilman Greg Quinn thinks they should have fallen much further, and he may well be right.

Iceland, the Financial Panic, and My Father-In-Law

Posted on by David Stokes

I am a big Michael Lewis fan. I have read Moneyball twice, along with many of the essays he is famous for. One of those essays/articles is in this month’s Vanity Fair, and I can’t recommend it enough. It is a brutally funny critique of the rise and fall of investment banking in Iceland, with a nice side trip to the world of elves. (I got the link to the article from Freakonomics.) The moral of the story is that, believe it or not, people without any experience in investment banking who are suddenly given control of billions of dollars don’t always do a good job. Now, I realize that in America, people with lots of experience on Wall Street didn’t necessarily do such a good job either, but the Iceland story is funnier, so let’s run with it.

I am pleased to say that my father-in-law is loosely involved in this story, though not by name or specifics and not in a way that at all involves the financial collapse. There are really only two businesses in Iceland, aside from the now-killed financial industry: fishing and aluminum smelting. My father-in-law works for Alcoa as an engineer, and has spent a lot of time in Iceland working on the smelting plant discussed in the Vanity Fair story. So, now I have to ask him whether the men of Iceland are really as aggressive as the story says they are, and also whether he had to do any of the work certifying that no elves were being harmed. …

The best line in the whole, terrific essay:

It was a delicate corporate situation, an Alcoa spokesman told me, because they had to pay hard cash to declare the site elf-free but, as he put it, “we couldn’t as a company be in a position of acknowledging the existence of hidden people.”

Disenfranchisement

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Thanks to Combest for linking to this op-ed about early voting. Early voting does sound nice, especially given the long lines people have to wait in on election day. But I disagree that students are being disenfranchised because many of them miss deadlines or forget which day to vote. Everyone knows you vote for presidents in the fall, so even if students don’t have a clue which month you vote in or which day, they have all summer to familiarize themselves with the process. If students can’t take enough initiative to figure out which day to vote, then I don’t trust them to research candidates either.

The Little Engine That Could

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Train service around here can be awfully slow. Not so slow as the horse-drawn carriages the government allowed to fade away, but slow nonetheless. (Although you do sometimes see carriages at fancy weddings. Wouldn’t it be funny if people rented Amtrak cars for romantic occasions? That’s another idea for a reality show.)

Some of the federal stimulus money may be used to speed things up. This article in the Kansas City Star gives the details: The Obama administration wants to spend $13 billion during the next five years to make train service faster. But not much faster. And Amtrak is blaming its slow-as-a-turtle pace on our free-enterprise economy:

“We are where we are because of where we’ve been,” said Amtrak spokesman Marc Magliari. “Our rail system has functioned on a private ownership model going back to the 1800s. In the much more compact countries of Europe, they work on a government model.”

I’m thinking: What about Japan? Japan’s high-speed rail system is usually held up as a model of excellence. This is what the Mackinac Center concluded in a report on privatization and passenger rail:

In Japan, privatization has reinvigorated development efforts, and the new railways have designed more experimental trains using more advanced technology than the old national railway would have.

And as for Amtrak’s private ownership roots, here’s a lengthy Wikipedia article on the subject of Amtrak’s funding from federal and state governments. Given Amtrak’s extensive support from several levels of government, the comments about being hindered by too much capitalism sound like poor excuses for sticking to the same outdated technologies. Passengers would be better served by private ownership of the railways and healthy competition.

Or Amtrak could just continue on its uphill course, saying, “I think I can, I think I can, I think I can …”

David Nicklaus on “Buy Local”

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

David Nicklaus continues to write about the locavore movement. Here are my comments on a column he wrote a few weeks ago. I think this explanation from his blog post is exactly on target:

Illinois produces corn for the rest of the world, and Illinoisans buy vegetables and fruit from places like California and Mexico. That arrangement creates wealth for all sides — producers make the highest possible profits, and consumers buy at the lowest possible prices. Reversing the arrangement, therefore – growing more vegetables in Illinois and making Californians grow their own corn – would make all sides worse off.

Nicklaus sounds exasperated that this economic fallacy is being dressed up by advocates as a “stimulus.” But it’s not surprising, because the run-of-the-mill stimulus plans operate on much the same principle. They encourage production that wouldn’t have happened without a directive from the state, ignoring comparative advantage and the market’s precise timing. And when stimulus advocates predict huge gains in wealth, they leave out the loss of what all those resources would have been used for if the stimulus hadn’t interfered.

Some of the typical stimulus plans are better than the locavores’ schemes because they don’t take resources so far away from their ideal uses in a free market. Building a bridge may be expensive, but some people can use the bridge for its intended purpose. Building a greenhouse to grow bananas in Illinois is like planting dollars in the ground and hoping they’ll grow into tropical fruit. It’s waste without any redeeming qualities.

Post on Resolutions Hits Close to Home

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

Brad Hollerbach’s post would be funnier if it didn’t sound so realistic:

Since, Easter is fast approaching and a lot of people — myself included — really like the Reese’s Peanut Butter Eggs, I think the Missouri Legislature should consider a resolution honoring that candy.

Hollerbach is responding to the proliferation of resolutions in the General Assembly, which record legislators’ opinions and preferences about almost everything. But since we already have an official state dessert, to go along with our official state reptiles, invertebrates, game birds, and other stuff, a resolution honoring peanut butter eggs isn’t far-fetched. Hollerbach might have an easier time getting it passed if he could convince a fourth-grade civics class to adopt it, though.

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