I’ll let David concentrate on the "sexy" news stories of today (like MoDOT’s revenue shortfalls and year-round school), and instead write about something of fundamental importance.
Apparently, Mizzou awards golf caddy scholarships.
This is my second Chevy Chase reference in a week — a new record.
MoDOT is predicting that road projects in Missouri, except for the New I-64/40, will be delayed because (according to the Post-Dispatch, via Combest):
Ed Hassinger, the Missouri Department of Transportation’s district engineer for St. Louis, said a triple whammy of higher bond payments, a looming deficit in the federal highway Trust Fund and dropping state fuel tax revenue would reduce the number of dollars available to build roads and bridges.
I sure wish a Missouri-based, free-market think tank had written a study about ways to fund and operate needed road, bridge, and transit projects using innovative solutions (public-private partnerships) and user-based fees (tolls) to fund transportation in Missouri. That might come in handy right now. …
The proposed Textbook Transparency Act hopes to reduce seemingly exorbitant prices to students by mandating that publishers and bookstores provide a wealth of extra information about their books, and restricting their ability to bundle individual items for sale. Although our skepticism has been explained, the Missouri bill’s strong chances of success and the national momentum behind similar legislation warrant further consideration of this issue.
My fellow critics have described how mandated information sharing will fail to effect any change for all but the least discriminating consumers (those who don’t check prices online). Also, the potential abuses of a tuition-funded book purchasing system are glaringly obvious. They rightly suggest that communication costs between producers and bookstores, especially regarding bundling, would necessarily increase prices to students.
The simple fact is that textbook authors enjoy an intellectual monopoly. The tremendous input costs of time and expertise, coupled with the overwhelming risk that a new book will not replace the existing standard, afford successful authors handsome payoffs. Textbook bundling is simply a tactic employed to partially reconcile monopolistic prices with what consumers think is fair. If Missouri lawmakers take away this option, producers will have little trouble reclaiming their lost profits elsewhere. In fact, more common than bundles are supplementary software packages and personalized website codes sold alongside lone textbooks. At the end of the day, authors of quality textbooks could always resort to overt price increases without facing much penalty from eagerly subscribing professors.
Only one provision of the act, the ineffectual mandated information bit, addresses the bookselling practice most widely begrudged among college students — the seemingly unnecessary and frustratingly frequent release of new editions. I can hardly think of a more potent insult to a room full of economics majors than to deny them aftermarket prices on their textbooks so that they can receive essentially the same product, now with four font colors. But then, legislation cannot (and should not) decide for authors when it’s appropriate to revise their works.
In the end, successful authors deserve proper reimbursement for providing a superior resource. As the chances of the Textbook Transparency Act’s passage grow,
Tony’s Kansas City blog, which is far superior to our own in its choice of pictures, weighs in on light rail for Kansas City. I recommend the post, and will of course take the opportunity to remind you of SMI’s own study on the subject.
That’s right, your traditional May 19 deadline is approaching. Because of the floods, procrastinators were given an extra month to procrastinate even further. While the Missouri Budget Project would have us believe that taxes pay for all sorts of wonderful things, and only some selfish bastards would like to keep more of their own money, I would like to take this opportunity to remind you that taxes also pay for crap like this.
I tend to be fairly negative on this blog (that’s what happens when you’re an ugly cynic like me), so it’s important for me to recognize good work when praise is due.
For better or worse, St. Louis has a dangerous reputation. It routinely ranks near the top of the list in those annual “America’s Most Dangerous Cities” publications, and is repeatedly portrayed in the entertainment media as crime-ridden (I’m looking at you, Chevy Chase).
But the St. Louis police department has really made some important strides during the past several years (and this comes from a repeat area crime victim). Since 2000, crime has decreased by about 2.5 percent per year on average, in both absolute and per-capita terms. And the metropolitan police department has gone to great lengths to make city crime data readily available to the city’s citizens.
For example, Safe City (which went online earlier this year, I believe) is a great interactive tool put together by the St. Louis police department that lets users research an address or neighborhood by reported crime incidents. You can search for particular types of crimes and even pull up a basic outline of the original police report. And the police department also publishes a monthly crime report on its website in case you’re weird like me and would rather look at numbers than pictures.
I even love Safe City‘s mission statement:
Safe City is based on the idea that in a democracy, people should have the greatest possible access to information about matters affecting their lives.
I couldn’t agree more. In fact, the idea of making information readily available to the public played a large role in the development of the Show-Me Institute’s newest website, Show-Me: Living. You might already be familiar with our tax estimator on that site. But we’ve recently released some new tools on public school education performance as well. We plan to continue to provide our visitors with new tools for understanding public policy issues in an effort to help Missourians make the best possible decisions for their lives.
But the real point of this post is to say that the St. Louis police department should be commended for its efforts to improve safety in the city, and for its commitment to working with the public to provide useful information about the city’s crime statistics. A better-informed public makes for a stronger democracy.
Dave and I have debated tax holidays before, but even he thinks the gas tax holiday is a bad idea (and so does Judy Blume, apparently). Now Cato has just published an article about the gas tax holiday. The authors, Peter Van Doren and Thomas A. Firey, show that the savings from the holiday could go to consumers rather than producers if certain conditions are met. They argue that to determine whether a gas tax holiday would be appropriate, one should simply weigh the benefit to consumers against the loss of tax revenue.
The article does a good job of showing how the burden of the tax could fall on consumers, but evaluating a gas tax holiday proposal is more complicated than they make it out to be. Basically, Van Doren and Firey analyze the holiday as if it were a permanent repeal of the tax. In fact, the holiday would offer a reprieve for only a few months. And when you get rid of a tax for a short amount of time, you have to consider the economic distortion that would result — not just the lost tax revenue. When people change their behavior in response to the arbitrary dates of the tax holiday — for example, by going on a car trip in July instead of in May — they make worse choices than they would have without the holiday. That causes economic waste. In order for the economy is function optimally, consumers must be responding to real price changes that reflect supply and demand, not government fiat.
Now, any tax changes price levels and results in some distortion. We accept this because the government needs to collect revenue. But legislators should avoid unneccesarily magnifying that distortion, which means resisting the temptation to create lots of holidays.
This article addresses the issue of women and discrimination in the General Assembly. It sounds like some women legislators have heard obnoxious comments from their male colleagues, who should cut it out. (Although I’m dubious that sensitivity training is going to have the desired effect.)
I agree that respectful treatment of women is important. But I disagree that some minimum percentage of all representatives needs to be female, as is implied by statements like these:
In Missouri, women hold four of the eight statewide elected offices — secretary of state, state auditor, state treasurer and one of the two U.S. Senate seats. But of the 197 state legislative positions, only 39 of the seats are held by women. Ironically, that near 20 percent representation of women is lower than the 25 percent mandated in the Iraqi constitution for the minimum number of women in its representative body.
First of all, what is the point of the comparison with Iraq? Since when do we take our ideas of model government from war zones in the Middle East? If we’re supposed to conclude that as a result women are worse off in Missouri than in Iraq, that’s crazy, because women here enjoy safety, stability, and many other benefits attendant on U.S. residence — benefits that far outweigh whatever gains follow from the additional women in the Iraqi legislature.
Still, you could argue that sex quotas in legislatures are intrinsically good, and it just happens to be one thing that Iraq has gotten right and Missouri has gotten wrong. But does anyone really want to enforce strict sex ratios in other occupations? Most ballet dancers are women, even though you can’t perform the great ballets without men. And this article about employment notes that men are much less likely than women to go into nursing — only about 10 percent of nursing students are male — despite the fact that the demand for nurses is growing. In fact, because women outnumber men in thriving sectors like education and health care, they suffer less from recessions that hit other industries harder:
From last November through this April, American women aged 20 and up gained nearly 300,000 jobs, according to the household survey of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS). At the same time, American men lost nearly 700,000 jobs.
Missouri women should have the opportunity to go into state government if they want to put up with annoying constituents, boring committee meetings, hectic schedules, and looming term limits. But we shouldn’t consign some arbitrary number of women to that fate.
Well, this is news that is sure to make David Stokes happy.
Of course, there was a nice little useless addendum (that I’m sure we both oppose) added to it (from the Kansas City Star):
The House committee also added a provision that would provide tax breaks for development of a business park on 6,000 acres owned by Kansas City near the airport. A 500,000-square-foot warehouse slated for development by Trammel Crow, a Dallas real estate developer, is the first of 11 buildings planned for the park.
The tax break would set the building’s tax assessment at the fair market value minus the cost of erecting the building on city-owned land. The Park Hill and Platte County R-3 school districts had protested the tax break, saying it would cripple their ability to generate tax revenue to pay for the additional students that the developments would attract.
It still seems to me that if your house goes up in value, you should pay more in taxes. Unless this bill increases your tax rate when the value of your house declines, it only serves to protect existing homeowners at the expense of new homeowners.
