Channel 5 Warns Against Hot Slides

Posted on by David Stokes

Somehow, I messed up my prior post, so the following portion did not get added.

The disaster movie references were leading up to the fact that, last night on the 10 p.m. news, Channel 5 hit a new low in nanny-state obsessing. Leisa Zigman (who lives right by me, although she’s moving) had a story about the “silent danger” of hot plastic slides in St. Louis playgrounds. Needless to day, the station went just hyperplectic (might not be an actual word) [Editor’s note: “hyperplectic” sounds so nicely intemperate that I’m resisting the urge to change it to “apoplectic” — EDD] about the danger of hot slides. A two-year-old recently suffered second-degree burns from a plastic slide in Corondolet Park. And, of course, according to the story, it is the government’s responsibility to protect people from this danger.

I loved how the representative of the city of St. Louis basically told them the city was not going to do anything. Cities around the county have spent many millions replacing metal playground equipment with plastic pieces during the past decade. It is still not good enough for some people. I swear, some nanny state control freaks won’t be happy until we all have to put on our safety helmets before we get out of bed in the morning. Hey, parents: When it’s 95 degrees out, touch the frickin’ slide before you put your kids on it! This is St. Louis in the summer — it gets hot. And the city should not pay the medical expenses of the family. It is not the city’s fault or responsibility.

Another Round of Incentives for Centene

Posted on by Matt Simpson

Clayton, apparently, isn’t following my advice. According to the Post-Dispatch, the municipality is currently looking at an incentive plan for Centene Plaza. Yes, that Centene. Something tells me that tax incentives would be completely unnecessary in a town growing as quickly as Clayton. Robert Wislow, chairman and CEO of U.S. Equities of Chicago, the developer of Centene Plaza, confirms my suspicions:

Asked about the private financing, Wislow said, “We don’t think that we will have a problem with a project as well pre-leased and well-located as this.”

So, why are the tax incentives necessary again?

Developing the Core

Posted on by Matt Simpson

Kansas City’s mayor, Mark Funkhouser, is likely to appoint a new task force to help develop the urban core, the Kansas City Star reports. A number of ideas have already been tossed around, including:

  • Create a private investment funding source, with the help of financiers and foundations, to assist small businesses with loans or in other ways.
  • Provide college or vocational opportunities for needy high school students.
  • Create work force training centers in distressed areas.
  • Improve transportation and child care offerings to assist people in getting to work.
  • Provide specific incentives to employers who hire people living in distressed communities.

Kansas City could follow a simple recipe for growth: low taxes, lax regulations, and strong property rights. Implementing this isn’t necessarily easy, however. To start, the city could repeal the earnings tax, because it provides strong incentives for productive people and businesses to locate elsewhere. A sales tax or a tax on the value of land could raise the same amount of revenue without having as much of a negative effect on growth. A general rule of thumb would be to avoid TIFs, tax abatements, tax credits, and other special tax exemptions. Consumers and businesses will take notice and move in … perhaps with the help of our handy tax estimator.

A New Nanny State Low

Posted on by David Stokes

As our regular readers (hi, Frank and Mary!) know, I detest the way in which our lives and laws are constantly being regulated, in matters both large and small, for our own safety. We have been discussing how this situation came into being, where we are just so happy to let the government take care of us and our children. I run the risk of sending this post into book-length territory, so let me make this quick. Who do I blame for this?

I blame the following people and groups (this is fun): Hollywood, trial lawyers, consumer reporters, and parents too willing to let other entities take responsibility for their own children (and, yes, I have a child, and, no, it’s not your job to take care of him, unless his nanny is reading this, in which case it is indeed your job to watch him between 8:30 and 6:00). I honestly bet that you could trace a line from the consumer movement to our overwrought safety obsession with the disaster movies of the 1970s. This point hit home for me a few years ago, when I was watching The Towering Inferno. Check out these lines:

Chief O’Hallorhan: You know we were pretty lucky tonight, body count’s less then 200. You know, one of these days, you’re gonna kill ten-thousand in one of these firetraps, and I’m gonna keep eating smoke and carrying out bodies until someone asks us… how to build them.
Doug Roberts: Ok, I’m asking.
Chief O’Hallorhan: You know where to reach me.

Or:

Doug Roberts: I thought we were building something where people could work and live and be SAFE! If you had to cut costs, why didn’t you cut floors instead of corners?
James Duncan: Now listen. Any decisions that were made for the use of alternate building materials were made because I as a builder have a right to make those decisions. If I remained within the building code and god-dammit I did!
Doug Roberts: [Chuckling] Building code? Jesus. Building code. Come on, Dunc, I mean now that’s a standard cop-out for when you’re in trouble. See, I was crawling around up there. I mean duct holes weren’t fire-stopped! Corridors without fire doors in them, sprinklers that won’t work, and electrical system that’s good for what? I mean it’s good for starting fires! Phew, where was I when all this was going on? Because I’m just as guilty as you and that god-damned son-in-law of yours! What do they call it when you kill people?

Foundation(s)

Posted on by Audrey Spalding

Resolved, that next to life and liberty, we consider education the greatest blessing bestowed upon mankind.
Resolved, that the public funds should be appropriated (to a reasonable extent) to the purpose of education upon a regular system that shall insure the opportunity to every individual of obtaining a competent education before he shall have arrived at the age of maturity.

So voted New York City’s party of Mechanics and Workingmen in 1829.

There wasn’t always public education in the United States. And the state didn’t always pay. Our current system, in which property owners pay for public education regardless of whether they have children in school, came about after decades of debate. My most recent posts have touched on school district tax levies and state funding. Before going further, I wanted to reach back to where this all began. How did we arrive at this system of partial federal and state funding combined with local property tax levies?

There is a fantastic reference, Public Education in the United States, that discusses education’s history from the founding of the colonies until the book’s publication in 1919. The book itself is out of print, but a used bookstore should be able to track it down for you cheaply. Or, even better, the entire book is free to read online.

Its history of public finance for schools is something I want to summarize, in part. Our current system of public education, which seems like such a basic right now, was an argument that spanned decades in the mid-1800s. Author Ellwood Cubberly wrote: “Excepting the battle for the abolition of slavery, perhaps no question has ever been before the American people for settlement which caused so much feeling or aroused such bitter antagonisms.”

Continue reading “Foundation(s)”

Show-Me Institute in the Papers This Past Weekend

Posted on by David Stokes

The Show-Me Institute appeared in two major newspapers this past weekend. The Kansas City Star carried an op-ed by Dr. Joe Haslag, which johncombest.com also linked. To review the full op-ed (the Star had to do some length editing) you can check on the version hosted by the Missouri Political News Service.

The Springfield News-Leader also ran a very detailed article on ethanol use in Missouri, written by Chad Livengood. I was quoted a few times in it, and wish to make one correction. The article says that our study did not count the decrease in fuel efficiency that results from using E-10 fuel instead of ordinary gasoline, as part of the additional cost to Missouri drivers. Actually, our study does include it as part of the additional cost. I may have misspoke in my phone interview, or perhaps was unclear somehow, but it’s not a big deal — these things happen, and blogs are a quick and convenient way to make a brief correction. While our study was a very focused piece, this News-Leader article takes a wide look at ethanol in Missouri and I recommend it highly.

Is It Just Too Much?

Posted on by Cynthia Juedemann

After you hear it the fifth or sixth time, you start to believe it.

All this time, I’ve been thinking I had the short end of the stick in filing Sunshine Law requests for school district election results with Missouri county clerks. But, as it turns out, they may be just as frustrated as I am.

“I am covered up right now,” said Don Firebaugh, Madison County‘s clerk, when I called to ask for some additional information.

Well, August is fast approaching, so it occurred to me there might be some truth in that statement. But, at the time, I brushed it off as one more attempt to keep from doing the work. Of course these clerks are busy, but how difficult could it be to look up a couple of numbers? And how many requests for public information do they really get?

Well, the answer might be more than you would suspect.

Continue reading “Is It Just Too Much?”

The Law of Incentives

Posted on by Dan Grana

A story in the St. Louis Business Journal (the first few paragraphs of which are available for free online) reports that two of the area’s largest law firms, Thompson Coburn LLP and Armstrong Teasdale LLP, are considering moving from downtown St. Louis to Clayton. These considerations will potentially move more than 1,000 jobs from the city to the county. Despite the fact that comparable office space costs 23 percent less downtown than in Clayton, those involved in the decision suggest that “employee satisfaction and location” are enough motivation to move.

Although Clayton is probably closer to home for many St. Louis lawyers, there are relevant costs that certainly factor into any moving decision. The most obvious disincentive for high-earnings professionals, like lawyers, to work in St. Louis city is the earnings tax. A detailed case against the earnings tax can be found on the Show-Me Institutes’s website. In short, the earnings tax imposes costs on being productive and promotes this westward migration that the city ardently fights. If either of these firms moves, the earnings tax will continue its distortionary effects without yielding some of the revenues it was engineered to extract.

One potentially disastrous fix to retaining economic activity in the city would be the use of tax incentives. Others have articulated the negative effects of using tax credits, especially as they pertained to the recent “mega-project” proposal in Kansas City. These same arguments hold true in St. Louis.

If St. Louis officials intervene in the law firms’ decision making, they will have two readily available options. Potentially, they could see instant results and help the city’s long-term prospects by eliminating the earnings tax. Hopefully, they won’t settle for preferential tax treatments that leave local business owners and taxpayers worse off for benefits that they don’t have access to.

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