What Is the Worst Way to Dispose of Extra Budget Money in Jackson County?

Posted on by David Stokes

The Kansas City Star has an article on the age-old question of what to do with leftover budget money.  I guess it’s not an age-old question; it really began with the evolution of democracy around 1776. Before that, the answer was always, "Give it to the King." But anyway, there is some leftover money in the budgets of the Jackson County Council and Election Board, and considering all the things they could do with the money, they have — shockingly — chosen the absolute worst: Give it to the hacks.

This is really atrocious. Let’s check out the things that could be done with extra money: 1) Return it to the county treasury for next year; 2) quickly pass legislation transferring it to a pressing need; 3) lower taxes; 4) use the public’s money to benefit your cronies. The Jackson County Council chose number four:

Tarwater and other legislators said they were giving bonuses because they had money left in their budgets and their aides were doing good jobs. Tarwater will give $4,000 by year’s end to his aide.

I used to be an aide at the Saint Louis County Council, so I had basically the same job. Never in a million years would the council have just given leftover money to the aides as a bonus. (For the record, the position of council aide in St. Louis — and I am sure this is true in Jackson Co., too — is a very good job for a number of reasons.)

The Jackson County Election Board is doing the same awful thing:

Tammy Brown, chairwoman of the Jackson County Election Board, said she would have enough money left in her 2007 budget to grant $78,000 in bonuses by year’s end to the 34 board employees. Rizzo, chairman of the legislature’s budget committee, said election employees do an exceptional job and he would support the bonuses.

2007 was not an election year, so I really doubt the people at the election board worked all that hard — certainly no harder than they are supposed to work as part of their job.

I have written before that Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders is becoming one of my favorite elected officials. While the council budget is outside of his control, at least we get this in the article:

The Sanders administration will not support fund transfers for pay bonuses, said Shelley Temple-Kneuvean, deputy chief administrative officer.

I should also say, good for the three councilmember who are not participating in the bonus scheme. Which is exactly what it is: a scheme to reward loyal supporters with public money. Just horrible.

“Statistics Are Elusive Things”

Posted on by Eric D. Dixon

Most journalists aren’t number people. If they were, they’d be much less likely to wind up in a profession dominated by words. We’re trying to ameliorate the situation, at least a little, by cosponsoring CARR training sessions here in Missouri with the Heritage Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Missouri Broadcasters Association. These sessions help to give journalists some basic grounding in computer-aided statistical reporting.

A recent article in The Washington Missourian about property tax assessments (I found the link via John Combest’s always useful page) highlights the need for journalists to check, doublecheck, and triplecheck their numbers — and always get another pair of math-savvy eyes to inspect their work:

Kim and Steve Obenauer were shocked last week when they found out their real estate tax bill has increased by nearly 87 percent this year. […]

The tax bill for the lot with the mobile home was $79.08 in 2006. This year’s tax bill for the property is $605.41.

Wait a second, I thought — wouldn’t that be an increase of more like 600 to 700 percent? I called up Windows’ trusty calculator, and found that, indeed, moving up from $79.08 to $605.41 constitutes an increase of 665.57 percent. Why such a large discrepancy between the actual figure and the reported figure, I wondered? I figured it was probably just a typo, and moved on. Then I found this sentence:

One woman’s tax bill increased 61 percent, from $390.63 in 2006 to $1,009.10 this year, Emmons said.

But that would be an increase of well over 100 percent! Sure enough, a quick trip to the calculator revealed an increase of 158.33 percent. That’s when I realized what the Missourian piece was doing wrong — it was taking a backward look at the numbers, as though the new tax figures were starting points.

Take the first set of numbers, $79.08 and $605.41. If a homeowner were assesed $605.41 one year and $79.08 the next, that would constitute a decrease of 86.94 percent — or, rounded up, 87 percent. The problem is, that same figure doesn’t apply in reverse. Percentage changes are relative, depending on which number is the starting point, so even though $79.08 is only 13.06 percent of $605.41, calculating the reverse shows that $605.41 is 765.57 percent of $79.08 — or, after subtracting the original 100 percent, an increase of 665.57 percent more than the original $79.08.

The same is true of the second set of numbers. Moving from $1,009.10 one year to $390.63 the next would be a decrease of 61.29 percent, but the reverse, moving up from $390.63 to $1,009.10, is an increase of 158.33 percent. In other words, if you take the difference between the lower figure and the higher — that difference being $618.47 — you can fit $390.63 into it 1.5833 times, which is where we get the 158.33-percent-increase figure. If you take that same difference and try to fit $1,009.10 into it, you’ll find that it fits 0.6128 times, which is where we get the 61.28-percent-decrease figure.

I don’t write this as an unfriendly challenge to anybody at the Missourian. Rather, I simply hope it illustrates that, as Judge J. Smith Henly wrote, "Statistics are elusive things at best," and nudges Missouri journalists toward using a little more care when working with figures.

Mommy Missouri

Posted on by Justin Hauke

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, spoke this month before the Missouri House of Representatives’ Interim Committee on Poverty about how Missouri can expand medical coverage to poor residents by embracing freedom and deregulating an insurance industry dominated by special interests.

Mr. Cannon argues that expanding current medical social programs, such as Medicaid and SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), is attractive because for every dollar Missouri spends on coverage, the state receives $1.50 from the federal government. But expanding government health care is ultimately unsuccessful, as these programs subsidize health care costs for thousands of non-needy individuals (such as senior citizens with substantial retirement assets), drive up the cost of private medical insurance, and do nothing to address systematic quality programs among low-income recipients.

Worse, however, Mr. Cannon argues that the expansion of government anti-poverty programs snares low-income families in a “low-wage” trap — particularly in heavily subsidized health care states like Missouri. Like most states, Missouri offers various forms of assistance to families with low incomes, and these benefits decrease as wages increase. This means that within certain income ranges, a rising wage will actually decrease annual income, as recipients receive fewer government benefits while they pay higher taxes. Mr. Cannon presents some striking examples of the “low-wage” trap for Missourians:

Consider the case of a single mother of two who lives in Missouri and works full-time:

  • If she earns $8 per hour and receives a $2-per-hour raise, her annual income would go down by more than $5,000.
  • Her hourly wage could double to $16 per hour, and she would still be more than $2,000
    worse off. Just to break even, her hourly wage would have to rise above $18 per hour.
  • In other words, if she earns $17,000 and could somehow increase her earnings to
    $37,000, she would lose all of that $20,000 to taxes and forgone government benefits.
    (Economists would say she faces a marginal effective tax rate of 100 percent.)

This “wage-trap” is inexcusable. Many low-income individuals may not have the means to advance fast enough up the economic ladder to compensate them for their loss of benefits, forcing them to stagnate in poverty.

A better solution would be for Missouri to reduce the monopolistic protectionist polices that are designed to protect the state’s insurance providers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that state regulations increase the cost of private health insurance by as much as 15 percent. Allowing Missourians to choose their levels insurance coverage (rather than being subject to levels of coverage that are mandated as "appropriate" by officials — such as coverage for chiropractors, and even hairpieces, of all things), and allowing residents to choose coverage from out-of-state insurers, would dramatically decrease the cost of private health care in the state.

Instead, Missouri legislators have consistently bowed down to insurance industry special interests, which continue to bankroll their campaigns.

Real freedom entails freedom of choice, and the responsibility of living with those choices. All I ask is that legislators treat individuals as adults, rather than having the arrogance to treat certain groups (like the poor) as children, always insisting that "We know what’s best."

I like to believe that most people want the same.

Incentives, Recycling, and Trash

Posted on by David Stokes

The Kansas City area is addressing the way it handles waste, just as St. Louis County has been doing. Here is an excellent commentary on the changes in St. Louis County, written recently by a member of our board of scholars, Michael Pakko. I agree with much of Michael’s argument, although I think the fact that the St. Louis County plan would clearly improve the quality of the local roads in unincorporated areas — which are paid for by everyone in St. Louis County, rather than just the unincorporated residents — is a strong argument in favor of the plan, and deserves careful consideration. But I digress.

The Kansas City area is considering many options — some good, some bad. I like this one a lot:

Even before the solid waste plan is done, the city is arranging to have Missouri Organic Recycling, a Kansas City firm, start taking food waste from the City Market by the end of the year. Food scraps will go to the firm’s composting facility south of Liberty and then will be sold to large landscapers and homeowners.

I also like the idea of paying according to the amount of trash you generate. I don’t see why an elderly person living alone should pay as much for trash collection as a family of six. From the article:

Johnson County [Kan.] residents may begin to see a pay-as-you-throw trash rate that provides an incentive to recycle.

However, some bureaucrats still don’t understand basic rules of incentives (emphasis added):

“There’s an unfortunate attitude from some residents that they shouldn’t have to pay for recycling,” said Betsy Betros, Johnson County’s director of pollution control. “But everybody doing their part will really make a difference.”

If you want people to recycle, which most of us do, then just charge for trash by the pound — but make recycled trash free, or at least heavily subsized (as the article indicates it may be). Don’t couch your argument for higher taxes or fees in some sort of "Let’s all pull together" garbage (pun intended).

Soapbox Gripe

Posted on by Justin Hauke

The National Motorists Association has compiled a state-by-state list of the “Worst Speed Trap Cities” in the country. For Missouri, the undisputed winner was the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. The small town of 330 people issued more then 3,200 traffic-related tickets in 2006, with overall fines totaling $284,367.

Nothing makes me angrier than cities that use traffic violations as their primary source of revenue. There is no reason why small towns in urban counties should even maintain a police department, let alone use it to enforce traffic laws on interstate and state highways. Clearly this is a job that would be better performed at the county level, where law enforcement should be used to protect motorists from reckless drivers (rather than issuing tickets to motorists going three or four miles over the speed limit on a rural road). And this goes for red-light cameras, police checkpoints, and everything else Dave likes to quip about, too.

When small towns (I’m looking at you, Bella Villa and St. George), use their police forces to intimidate and harass motorists, they undermine support for the state’s police officers in general. And that’s not fair to the thousands of honest, hardworking police officers who are protecting Missouri’s citizens.

Things to Be Thankful For

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

This holiday weekend, let’s be thankful … that we don’t have too many national holidays. We all take a few days off together, but most people take longer vacations at times that are convenient for them and their employers, rather than times mandated by the state. Things are different in China. This AP article (also in the Post-Dispatch, although I couldn’t find it on their website) describes the chaos that follows from planned holidays:

As China becomes more prosperous, its people are traveling more on their vacations – and overwhelming the facilities. The resulting public backlash is prompting the government to rethink its tightly regulated national holiday policy.

Most Chinese cannot take a break when they want. Rather, the government has set three weeks a year as national holidays.

The article describes a new plan to break up a weeklong holiday into several daylong holidays at different times of the year. Here is my favorite sentence in the article:

The plan has set off a lively debate in the state-run media.

Yeah, right.

Choices for Truants

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

From this article in the Post-Dispatch, it’s not clear whether students are being pulled away from school or pushed out (emphasis added):

"The reasons that kids miss school are as varied as the bugs in your garden," said Jodi Heilbrunn, an analyst with the National Center on School Engagement, which studies truancy. "Kids who are really smart and bored to tears, kids who have learning disabilities, health problems, mental health problems."

If kids are leaving school because of boredom and learning disabilities, that sounds like the schools aren’t responding to kids’ needs. Sending them back to the same bad situation isn’t the answer, so I was glad to read the article’s headline: "Truancy Court Offers Choices, Support." However, the only choices mentioned in the article are rewards and punishments for the truants. If they go back to their old school, they can earn a gift certificate to Target. So while they’re sitting in school, bored to tears or struggling with a disability, they can be thinking of all the underwear and household goods they’ll get to buy at Target.

I think choices in education are a good thing, but the choices I had in mind were more along the lines of choosing schools where students can be happy, safe, and academically successful — not choosing which bribe to take for showing up.

Show-Me Institute Mislabeled, Misidentified, Misconstrued … Again

Posted on by Sarah Brodsky

There’s some discussion over at NCLBlog about research by Show-Me Institute scholar Mike Podgursky that was published in Education Next. This particular article deals with teacher pensions in states other than Missouri, and wasn’t published by the Show-Me Institute — but because how we pay teachers is a hot issue here, too, I’ll try to cover the substantive points in a later post. Right now, I just want to point out something funny in the comments on NCLBlog. When they mentioned MIke’s affiliation with SMI, they labeled it (as people often do) a "right-wing" think tank. I’ve just about given up on correcting that error by now — the funny part is what comes next. Someone else commented that the "right-wing" label is unhelpful, and here’s the response:

I don’t think it’s juvenile or ad hominem to label a right-wing think tank as such. I think it’s important to remember the folks who told us the smoking gun might become a mushroom cloud, that there were WMDs in Iraq, that Sadaam was in league with Al Queda, that they’d welcome us with flowers, that it might be six days, six weeks, they doubt six months, that the mission was accomplished, that catching Sadaam’s kids would end the war, that catching Sadaam would end the war, that things were getting better, that if we didn’t fight them there we’d fight them here, and whatever other notions they’d created.

People, you’re thinking of some other think tank. We don’t write about Iraq or take any positions on foreign policy. Trust me, this is a Show-Me Institute rule, and it’s enforced. I risk getting my Show-Me Daily posts pulled altogether if I even mention words like "Iraq" and "war."

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