To piggyback on Patrick’s earlier post, I stumbled across this interesting chart from the Wall Street Journal last night.
We forget how low fuel taxes are in the United States (particularly in Missouri). The recent rise in energy prices have had a much smaller impact on European wallets, where taxes account for a much larger share of total fuel prices.
This only underscores the need for significant transportation reform as cars become more fuel-efficient and gas tax revenues level off.
I spotted an interesting article today in the Post-Dispatch discussing frustrations that many parents are having with a school in Arnold, Mo. The article describes how several families had become disillusioned with a particular private school that they had chosen for their children, and how they were going about finding schools that would better meet their children’s needs.
The piece is a nice portrait of school choice in action, where parents recognize that their current school is failing their kids and take the initiative to find a better educational option. These are the choices that relatively affluent people have at their disposal, and it’s a significant part of the reason that children of wealthy families are far more likely than their financially-disadvantaged peers to attain educational success and economic prosperity.
Seeing the way that educational choice benefits these families, we, as a society, should be outraged that so many public school districts flatly refuse to offer even the smallest degree of choice to as many children as possible. Ideally, all families would be able to choose from among both public and private options, but even if private options were not included, shouldn’t students be able to attend any school within their district? After all, these families’ tax dollars are paying for the operation of all the schools in the district, so it’s only fair that they should have the chance to benefit from the best that the district has to offer. Yet even so modest a pro-student reform as this recently drew opposition from the Missouri
Council of School Administrators, the Missouri Council of Administrators of Special Education, the Missouri School Boards’ Association, the Cooperating School Districts of Greater Kansas City, the Missouri National Education Association, the Missouri State Teachers Association, the Kansas City Missouri School District, St. Louis Public Schools, and the Cooperating School Districts of Greater St. Louis.
Because those who have the financial means have
already left the public schools, the only ones left are those without
the the economic and political power to make an impression on the
legislature. And the concerted opposition of the aforementioned groups is what leaves the economically-disadvantaged (and predominantly minority) children of the state at the mercy of schools and districts that, to put it bluntly, aren’t interested in offering them the best opportunity to succeed if that opportunity would mean changing the educational status quo.
Yesterday afternoon, Sen. Kit Bond outlined his energy bill, which somehow faltered in the Senate. It seems that typical politicking got in the way of a bill that could have substantially lowered our rising gas prices. Shocking. I know. This bill would have helped combat the ridiculously high gas prices in several different ways. It called for environmentally friendly drilling in places such as Alaska and oil shale deposits in the Rocky Mountains, which would have relieved some of our dependence on foreign oil while increasing the supply. This spike in gas prices may be attributable partly to speculating, but mostly to simple economics. I don’t care how many econ courses I take, it all comes down to supply and demand. With the increase in world demand, something needs to be done to increase supply.
Sen. Bond also called for "Streamlining the oil refinery permitting process, without relaxing any requirements." Hooray! I am OK with taking baby steps to get the the free market, as long as we get there. The U.S. government has put up so many regulations, it has become nearly impossible to build refineries. Hopefully, this "streamlining" can lead to some deregulation, and we can see a substantial drop in gas prices. All in all, I think Sen. Bond summed it up best when criticizing a colleague who actually suggested the oil industry be nationalized (no joke, albeit that is funny):
"I can tell you, you don’t want the government running energy. The free
market may not be perfect, but it doesn’t screw things up like the
government does."
Oh, and of course we can talk about the taxation issue as well, but Justin has already covered that aspect.
In case you haven’t read it, I highly recommend David Boaz’s (of the Cato Institute) op-ed in yesterday’s Wall Street Journal about the hypocrisy of the current presidential nominees’ calls for Americans to "do something noble" like "public service":
The real issue is that Messrs. Obama and McCain are telling us Americans that our normal lives are not good enough, that pursuing our own happiness is "self-indulgence," that building a business is "chasing after our money culture," that working to provide a better life for our families is a "narrow concern."
They’re wrong. Every human life counts. Your life counts. You have a right to live it as you choose, to follow your bliss. You have a right to seek satisfaction in accomplishment. And if you chase after the almighty dollar, you just might find that you are led, as if by an invisible hand, to do things that improve the lives of others.
Who is John Galt?
Let me preface this post by saying that I appreciate the attention that Henry Waters, publisher of the Columbia Daily Tribune, pays to educational matters. He has written several columns in the past with which I wholeheartedly agree. But he missed the mark in a recent column advocating that public schools should be given responsibility for providing universal preschool.
While there is some evidence (thanks to Janese Heavin for the links) suggesting that preschool might be useful in helping low-income and minority students keep pace with more well-to-do classmates, it would be a terrible idea to make preschool mandatory — especially if the task is given to public schools. The communities that would seem to benefit most from exposure to preschooling live predominantly in Missouri’s urban centers. It is no secret that the public schools in those areas are at the same time among the most expensive and the least effective in the state. So why would Mr. Waters ever want to give failing school districts such as Kansas City’s or St. Louis’ even more control over students’ lives?
While not perfect, a far better solution was proposed this past legislative session by state Senator Jeff Smith, whose bill would have granted scholarships for disadvantaged children in unaccredited or provisionally accredited school districts to attend preschool at licensed facilities, at least half of which would not be operated by public schools. Senator Smith’s bill did not go into detail about the degree of choice that parents would have under his program, but the idea has a lot of promise if it could be properly structured.
Detailed commentary will follow, but I wanted to get Mayor Funkhouser’s new regional Kansas City transit plan up on our blog. Here is the Kansas City Star‘s story. Here is some typical boosterism. Here is some blunt critisicm. Here is the Show-Me Institute’s contribution to the discussion. I do like how the mayor’s plan includes some less expensive and efficient parts, like bus?rapid tranit, express buses, and even commuter rail, assuming there is enough demand for the commuter rail. But $600 million for 11 miles of light rail sounds low, considering it cost St. Louis that same amount to do just seven miles from 2004 to 2006 — although that included two miles with significant tunnelling. As I said, much more analysis of this to come.
Missourinet covers the continuing drama of the pre-need funeral scandals (seriously, what a bizarre thing for a scandal). It seems the summer will be spent in a series of investigative hearings designed to disentangle the issue:
The state has gotten an agreement with National Prearranged Services to suspend all sales of pre-need contracts in Missouri….and has gotten a consent order with the parent company, Lincoln Memorial Life, to stop manipulating the trust funds without telling those buying the plans.
For a quick refresher, prepaid funerals allow households to set aside money for funeral expenses with an insurance broker. Brokers are then legally required to set aside the money in a trust fund, but they maintain rights to 20 percent of the total amount, in the event of cancellation or other changes. Apparently, unscrupulous insurers haven’t been doing their duty and have skipped town with large sums of their clients’ funds. In April, Nick, our former-intern-turned-law-student, argued:
While we advocate free-market solutions here at the Show-Me Institute that shy away from extensive government interference, I don’t think anyone can reasonably claim that a market with a definite and defined end is truly free, and I hope stronger legislation can be put in place to protect consumers of these unique services.
First of all, better laws aren’t the problem. Enforcing the existing laws is the problem. Whenever a scandal erupts, the gut reaction is to legislate because at least it creates the pretense of doing “something.” But if insurers broke the existing laws, what makes anyone think that they won’t do the same thing with news laws? Not only will we face the same problem, but we’ll invite greater government intrusion into our lives.
Second of all, prepaid funerals are a colossally stupid idea. You could just set aside $1,000 in a savings account for 40 years and have more than enough to pay for a funeral. Plus, you’d have the freedom to do whatever you wanted with that money, without penalty, in the event that you decided not to use it for a funeral. Unless there’s some kind of great tax benefit or significant funeral discount for a prepaid plan, I see no reason not to use a savings account instead. Really, I think David said it best in one of his previous posts:
If agreements are not being honored, then the companies should be prosecuted. But that should not serve as a jumping-off point for more laws or more control. […]
Just because something may be a bad deal […] should not automatically be a reason for the government to jump in to protect us from ourselves. This is the type of reaction that leads to the ever-expanding role of government in our lives.
Indeed.
Check out this new website. The Missouri Foundation for Health set it up to educate people about insurance coverage and collect ideas for policy solutions.
Giving people information about health care options is a great idea. And this website is easy to navigate, and has lots of information. Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be as effective as it should be because it’s more focused on insurance than on health care. The question we should be asking is: Can everyone pay for health care? (There are different ways to pay for care, like using a regular savings account, an HSA, catastrophic insurance coverage, traditional insurance, or some combination of the above.) Instead, this website asks, "Is everyone enrolled in a traditional insurance plan?" and then panics when the answer is no, without considering whether that kind of plan would be appropriate for everyone. Surely, we can all agree that a billionaire doesn’t need traditional insurance to cover routine check-ups, even though he or she might want long-term care insurance or a designated savings account.
This feedback form offers a humorous illustration of the website’s misplaced priorities. Along with basic information like your name, zip code, and email address, you’re supposed to check off whether you are "insured" or "uninsured." But without detailed information about someone’s financial and medical situation, a simple yes-or-no answer to to the "Are you insured?" question doesn’t mean very much.
Every Memorial Day that I can recall while I grew up in Portland, Ore., we went to visit my mom’s parents’ resting place. After moving away, first for college and later for work, I got out of the habit of visiting family members’ graves on Memorial Day. There just weren’t any within driving distance.
Now that I’m living in Missouri, it’s a little easier — my great-great-great-great grandpa is buried about an hour and a half northeast of Kansas City, lying at the bottom of an abandoned well with several other people after they were all murdered. Although I visited the site in March, and had considered going there again over the Memorial Day weekend, a nasty bug has laid me out for the past few days … and the rain would have been a dealbreaker anyway — my car didn’t handle so well on the muddy back roads last time.
I did, however, spend some time on Monday thinking about the value of civil society. Because we live in a country largely founded on principles of freedom, tolerance, and the rule of law, people with wildly different cultures, backgrounds, and belief systems can live comfortably together in the same communities. And although from time to time tragic incidents may occur — like the one that killed one of my progenitors, and drove several others out of Missouri — they are by far the exception rather than the rule. There are places in the world where this sort of organized persecution and violent purging happens all the time.
Ultimately, this is one of the most important historical innovations of the United States — despite our differences, for the most part we all manage to live and work together in peace.
