Our former editor, Tim Lee, is talking about the Jim Roos case over at the Cato Institute’s blog. Go check it out.
Why Don’t They Just Designate the Building as Blighted? It’d Save Some Time
This has been a hot topic around the office, but as I was skimming through our recent posts, I realized that we have yet to mention it here.
Jim Roos, a veteran activist against eminent domain abuse in Missouri (and a notable contributor to our recent eminent domain study), has painted a two-story mural on the side of a brick apartment building near Soulard, owned by his housing ministry, which advocates an end to state eminent domain abuse. The mural is visible to drivers heading north toward downtown on I-55.
The city of St. Louis has cited Roos for displaying a sign that officials say violates city zoning ordinances. This has prompted a federal lawsuit challenging the ordinance on free speech grounds. In the Post-Dispatch‘s coverage of the issue, Roos has a really great quip:
“I think if it said, ‘Go Cardinals,’ we wouldn’t have any problems."
How sadly true.
The city of St. Louis routinely approves exemptions for large signs, but argues that its opposition to Roos’ particular sign is in the interest of “clutter” and neighborhood complaints — not political message. One city official commented:
"Can you imagine what our city would look like if everyone were allowed to paint a 363-square-foot, two-story sign on their buildings?"
I’m not sure, but I can guess that it would probably look something like all the buildings downtown with two-story “Go Cardinals” signs displayed on them.
But apparently that’s not “clutter.”
Clarification on Quote in Columbia Daily Tribune
This past Friday, MoDOT held a forum on future transportation funding in Missouri. It was a very worthwhile event, and the Columbia Daily-Tribune had a good article on it in their Saturday edition. I wanted to quickly clarify my quote in the article (and, by extension, alert you to it). Here is my quote:
David Stokes, a policy analyst for the Clayton-based Show Me Institute, said the state should seriously look at public-private partnerships as a way of operating new toll roads, as has been done in Illinois and Indiana.
"There’s many different ways to do it," Stokes said. "But you would have a private company get a contract under authority from the state. The state would own the road or the bridge. The private partner would build it and operate it and collect tolls to pay for it, but it would not own in any way the assets."
I think I also used Texas and Virginia as other examples, along with Illinois and Indiana. But I probably should have been more clear with the reporter that Texas and Virgina are better examples for Missouri, because they are building new toll roads via PPP from scratch, whereas Illinois (more specifically, Chicago) and Indiana took existing toll roads and turned them over to private operators. While I think those moves have been a great success for Chicago and Indiana, they don’t really apply to Missouri, as we have no toll roads to turn over to private firms. Just a small point I wanted to make.
Please don’t think I am criticising the reporter at all. Jason Rosenbaum quoted me accurately, I just should have had a different emphasis in my examples.
Take Two
Tax incentives for film producers might not be such a good idea after all. The Post-Dispatch reports that two directors complained about St. Louis after filming their movie:
They said the state of Missouri had offered the best tax incentives for the story, which was set in a nameless Midwestern city, but that the weather was too hot, rental-property owners were greedy and the local crew was inexperienced.
Even after that bad experience, the Joplin Globe now urges lawmakers to keep expanding tax breaks:
Movies are a multibillion-dollar business. Missouri and Kansas think they can get a chunk of the action. It is worth a try. Let the cameras roll!
It’s true there’s a lot of money in movie-making, but it’s not fair to give tax incentives to huge industries while small businesses struggle under full tax burdens. Lowering taxes for everybody would be more equitable. And if you don’t play favorites, you don’t have to worry about bad press after people who don’t really want to be in Missouri come just for the tax "opportunities."
Mizzou 38, OU 35
No, this is not a post about football.
The University of Missouri?Columbia has won approval to drop the hyphen from its name, in all but its most official communications.
This name change follows a series of identity crises suffered among Missouri universities. The University of Missouri?Rolla recently changed its name to Missouri University of Science and Technology; Southwest Missouri State University is now Missouri State University; and Central Missouri State University is now the University of Central Missouri.
OK, good — I’m glad that we’ve got that all cleared up now.
This name change bothers me. Yes, Mizzou, we all realize that you’re the flagship school of the University of Missouri system, but do you really have to change your name to prove it? UM?Columbia fears that the hyphen gives it the appearance of being a “regional” school.
Yes, in the same way the University of California?Berkeley is a “regional” school. Or how about that regional school, the University of Michigan?Ann Arbor. And UNC?Chapel Hill?
Maybe now that the “University of Missouri” has solved its name issue, it can concetrate on competing with those other “regional” schools in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.
Online Harassment Legislation
I just listened to State Sen. Rupp on KMOX (thanks, Combest), discussing legislation that targets online harassment. The Dardenne Prairie law was drafted in response to the tragic suicide of a teen girl after a woman claiming to be a 16-year-old boy allegedly made hurtful comments to her on the MySpace website.
I agree with Rupp that legislators need to be careful when writing this kind of legislation. An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson explains why the law should be rethought:
The law is also extremely vague. It defines harassment as engaging in a “pattern of conduct” that would cause a reasonable person to suffer “substantial emotional distress.” But what period of time results in the distinction of a “pattern” rather than haphazard nastiness? And what does “substantial” entail for the “average” person? Suicide? A few tears?
However, I think the op-ed might be going too far when it compares what happened in this case with the usual teasing all teens experience at some point. Creating a fake Internet personality for the purpose of humiliating someone isn’t quite the same as merely saying to her face, "You look like a dork." Some online harassment is so pernicious that the law should address it. But we want to be careful not to criminalize every tactless email-writer.
Health Care: Cheaper Than Ever Before
This looks like an interesting report about Missourians’ health insurance coverage and spending on health care. I enjoy learning new statistics (or facts, or numbers — whatever Dave and Justin want to call them) about Missourians’ medical spending. Unfortunately, Families USA has taken what could have been a great opportunity to analyze data and turned it into an opportunity to spread fear and panic about health insurance.
The report details the percentage of income spent on health care for various segments of Missouri’s population. It shows that 1,225,000 Missourians under age 65 are projected to spend more than 10 percent of their pre-tax income on health care, and 341,000 are projected to spend more than 25 percent. The press release concludes that this is a "health care affordability crisis."
I’m not convinced. First, the quality of health care is continually rising. All kinds of new drugs and procedures are available now that didn’t exist in the past. These are often expensive when first introduced, but their cost decreases with time. Some drugs are now so cheap that stores can give them away for free. Health care consumers have more options now than they once did, and treatments that have been around for a while are getting cheaper and cheaper.
Second, looking at percentage of income is the wrong way to go. Once, we were all hunter-gatherers who spent 100 percent of our "income" on food and shelter. Health care wasn’t really available at all. Fast forward through a lot of economic growth, and today we spend larger percentages of our income on human capital investments like health care and education. Likewise, we spend larger percentages of our income on computers than we did 30 years ago. That’s not because computers are becoming more expensive — they’re getting cheaper all the time — but because they used to be so expensive that most people didn’t spend any part of their income that way. Computer spending and health care spending are rising. Computer costs and health care costs are not.
Finally, there’s one obvious way to give people more pre-tax income to spend on stuff other than health care: lower taxes!
High Taxes. Zero Growth. Coincidence?
The Kansas City Star has an article today (link via Combest), on the small town of Farley in Platte County. There are some classic nuggets in this article. I wonder whether the civic leaders of Farley are able to see the possible connections here (emphasis added):
Farley has little chance of increasing revenue in the foreseeable future because its growth rate has been small. The village is at its maximum allowable property tax levy and has no businesses that could generate sales-tax revenue.
I wonder if there could possibly be a connection? To the credit of Farley’s civic leaders, at least they gave consideration to the dramatic and usually overlooked possibility of disincorporation. But sometimes you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t:
Kincaid said she had discussed the situation with representatives from Mack’s Creek, a community near Lake of the Ozarks. There, she said, the community spent money on an election required to unincorporate, but the measure failed, increasing the community’s financial burden.
It’s true: Elections aren’t free to hold. If you try to disincorporate, and fail, you just owe even more money. I guess the moral of the story is to convince the voters that if you are in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.
Carbon Copy Laws
David Weigel at Reason’s Hit and Run blog comments on Gov. Blunt’s plan to keep illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses, and on his promise to punish anyone who helps them get licenses illegally:
Are there fifth columnists in the Missouri DMV who are handing out licenses to people with fistfuls of pesos and kindly winks? If not, it’s already illegal to forge drivers’ licenses, but under-21s try […] Will Jefferson City be cracking down on all of them? Just the ones who help out illegal immigrants?
Weigel makes a good point. MIssouri doesn’t grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants now, and we already have laws against fake applications and forging licenses. If a few people manage to get licenses illegally under the current system, new laws about it aren’t going to stop them. We should concentrate on better enforcing our existing laws, not passing duplicate ones.
