Page 937 – Show-Me Institute

I’ll Miss Rep. Bearden

Posted on July 13, 2007May 5, 2026 by Maurice Harris

It was announced yesterday that Rep. Carl Bearden is resigning from the Missouri House. As a person who wants to see the education system improve, it’s a sad day to know that someone who fought for parents and students to have more options will leave the place where he could have made changes. I think this quote sums up his beliefs (courtesy of the Columbia Tribun e):

“The educational establishment seems to have this opinion that unless
it’s your idea, or unless it’s blessed by you, no one outside of
education is smart enough to disagree. It almost comes across as, ‘How
dare you, as a non-educator, question or challenge what we think?’ That
attitude is growing very thin in this building.”

Bearden didn’t make many friends in the public school system in Missouri, but it’s difficult to make friends in the establishment when you fight for reform. Good luck in whatever you do, Rep. Bearden.

More Flexible Certification Could Help Ease Teacher Shortages

Posted on July 13, 2007May 5, 2026 by Sarah Brodsky

When schools hire teachers for a new school year, they generally find that some subjects are harder to staff than others. For instance, rural districts might not have enough candidates who are fluent in foreign languages. Another possible shortage area is special education, which calls for patience and dedication beyond what is required in working with other students. And science and math positions are notoriously difficult to fill, because people with degrees in those areas are offered well-paying jobs in business. The list could go on: The U.S. Department of Education has designated these and 13 other fields as teacher shortage areas in Missouri.

Missouri could alleviate the shortage by making it easier for professionals in other fields to become teachers. One reason for the shortage is the teacher certification process. The standard route to certification involves earning a bachelor’s degree in education. This prerequisite would make sense if people chose their careers while in college and did the same work for the following four decades. It’s less reasonable today, when workers learn new skills on the job and often change careers over the course of their lives.

Some people who earn bachelor’s degrees in science or math will decide they want to become teachers. And many education school graduates will decide not to go into teaching after all, or will quit teaching after a short time. Employment data show the severity of the problem. According to the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES), only 47.5 percent of people who earned bachelor’s degrees in education in 1992-93 were teaching in 1994, and 35 percent of the 1999-2000 education graduates were not teaching the following year. The NCES also reports that about half of all new teachers have left teaching after five years.

Districts wouldn’t find enough teachers if they had to rely on education school graduates alone. That’s why all 50 states have instituted alternative routes to teaching certification. The alternative routes allow college graduates to work toward full certification by gaining teaching experience, participating in mentoring programs, and completing coursework on teaching methods. These programs are remarkably successful: About one-third of new teachers hired in the U.S. have earned alternative certifications.

Missouri’s alternative route to certification is a good start, but it’s not yet flexible enough to meet the state’s demand for new teachers. Missouri requires candidates to have completed or be enrolled in courses on the “psychology of learning” and other topics, and to finish an additional eight credit hours of education coursework during the following year. Other states allow candidates for certification to complete distance-learning courses while working full-time.

For example, in Florida candidates begin teaching after passing a background check and a test of subject-area knowledge. They receive training in lesson planning and other teaching skills from their school districts before the first day of school. Then, the candidates receive guidance and feedback from experienced teachers as they begin teaching. Candidates complete education coursework through online courses; the amount of time it takes to fulfill this requirement varies from candidate to candidate. This flexibility allows candidates for certification in Florida to gain practical knowledge right away.

Modeling Missouri’s alternative route to teaching certification after Florida’s would help attract more professionals to teaching, and prepare them for successful careers in education. It would also enable districts to hire qualified teachers for math, science, and other hard-to-staff subjects.

Sarah Brodsky is a policy analyst at the Show-Me Institute.

Corrected Numbers for Sen. McCaskill

Posted on July 12, 2007May 5, 2026 by Eric D. Dixon

John Hancock at MissouriPulse.com reports that Pork Busters miscalculated in its appropriations ranking of Sen. Claire McCaskill, which Maurice commented on yesterday:

Good news for Sen. Claire McCaskill. The government watchdogs at Pork Busters made an error. In a new report, Pork Busters mistakenly gave McCaskill the third worst Senate earmark index reform score of 16.6. The score was derived from 12 votes considered to be genuine opportunities to support earmark reform. A look at McCaskill’s vote-by-vote analysis finds that she was mistakenly held accountable for five votes cast prior to her election last fall.

This doesn’t improve her score by too much, but we present the correction because we strive for accuracy.

It’s not our goal here to try to make particular politicians look bad —? our goal is to make a case for good policy and good political decisions. That may mean we criticize bad policy at times, but we’re also happy to see good efforts to succeed. And I genuinely hope that McCaskill’s efforts to reform the congressional earmark process are successful. It’s a battle well worth fighting.

Maurice is Micro-Right and Macro-Wrong

Posted on July 12, 2007May 5, 2026 by David Stokes

Two errors have been made in the discussion of whether pensions should be taxed. The error I made was not getting enough personal information from Maurice before posting, although in my defense it is not my business to know the details of his family’s finances, and I did not want to pry. The error he made, and continues to make in his latest post, is in following Mickey Kaus’ first rule of journalism, which is to always generalize wildly from your own personal experience.

Maurice’s father may be getting double-taxed on his pension. I trust Maurice’s info on his family, but we don’t know whether his dad was able to take a tax deduction for those contributions, which is very likely and would make his union-pension similar to a traditional IRA. Anyway, the point is moot, as the majority of traditional pensions in America, the defined benfit plans, are corporate- and employer- funded. In those majority of cases, the income was never counted or taxed for the individual.

Maurice may be right about union-sponsored, post-tax plans, and if so I completely agree that, presuming no tax deduction at the time of contribution, they should be tax-exempt during retirement. But that is a minority of pensions in America. Most pensions are employer-funded. Most people who receive pensions never paid any taxes at all on that money. As long as we are taxing anyone’s income, those penions should be taxed as well.

We Are All In This Together, Except For Westwood

Posted on July 12, 2007May 5, 2026 by David Stokes

In today’s punch-right-between-the-eyes example of why Saint Louis County has too many municipalities, the Village of Westwood wants to contribute to the greater good by closing access to a major alternate route during I-64/40 reconstruction. Westwood, with a population of 284, and previously known mostly for its country club, and for being the home of the player who hit the most home runs in the old Busch Stadium, does not want traffic coming down Conway Road instead of I-64.

St. Louis County has said it will consider taking over Conway within Westwood if Westwood moves forward with this. That is a surprisingly easy thing for the county to do, and although Westwood has threatened to sue if that happens, I doubt that threat puts much fear into St. Louis County. Previously, St. Louis County has reached agreements with other municipalities to make the necessary road improvements during I-64 reconstruction. I particularly liked getting rid of that stupid stop sign on eastbound Clayton Road at McCutcheon. Hopefully, good sense will prevail in Westwood and they will be a better neighbor. But, if not, I hope St. Louis moves ahead with a takeover of the road for the length of the project.

The idea that a tiny village could put a log-jam like this into such an important project is just insane. Everybody is going to have to make sacrifices during this project, and everybody includes Westwood.

Taxing Pensions is Double Taxation

Posted on July 12, 2007May 5, 2026 by Maurice Harris

Here at the Show-Me Institute, we do have disagreements on policy, and I have one with David Stokes. In his blog entry yesterday about taxing pensions, he says that in many cases, since employers put money into people’s 401(k) plans or Roth IRAs, money paid out of pension funds should be taxed — because that income wasn’t taxed in the first place.

Well, in those cases I’ll agree with him that it might be fair that those funds are taxed, since they were not taxed in the first place as real income.

Yet I don’t agree with this reasoning for all plans. My father doesn’t have an IRA or a 401(k) plan; he is on a defined benefit plan sponsored by the union he is in. This plan was funded by his post-tax wages, so everything in the fund has already been subject to an income tax. This pretty much means that when he receives his defined amount every month, if it’s taxed, it reduces the funds he has to live on. This deduction rises well over $100 a month.

In other words, he is being double-taxed on the money he put into his pension. It was taxed as income when he contributed, and it’s taxed as income now that he’s drawing on the funds. The real amount he could be living on each month as a retiree is reduced, because the federal and state taxes he pays on his pension check, in effect, reduce the standard of living that he worked for, for his retirement.

So I will temper my strong statement earlier, but I still believe that most retirement funds, especially pensions, shouldn’t be taxed.

I also agree with David on this: There needs to be serious reform on tax policy in Missouri and the United States. We can give tax credits to only so many people before we have to raise tax rates on others to make up the shortfall. Hopefully, one day when I retire, I will not be taxed for saving for my future.

Check Out How Missouri Spends

Posted on July 12, 2007May 5, 2026 by Maurice Harris

You can finally know how the state spends your money! Yesterday, Missouri launched the Missouri Accountability Portal, where any person can see what the state purchases, from contracts to daily purchases made by state workers. According to the AP (via Springfield News-Leader), the governor says the website is one-of-a kind — updating the numbers daily to show how spending progresses. The new website is also receiving rave reviews from Grover Norquist, of Americans for Tax Reform:

What Missouri has done is the most extensive, and it got there first.

This is a great benefit not only for organizations like the Show-Me Institute, which wants to make sure state government is responsibly spending tax dollars, but also for average citizens who want to make sure their money is spent well. Gov. Blunt has offered a good service for the people of Missouri to make sure government is accountable and transparent.

Shame on You, McCaskill

Posted on July 11, 2007May 5, 2026 by Maurice Harris

Thanks to some digging by David Stokes here in the office, we’ve found a blog entry at The Riverfront Times that discusses Sen. McCaskill’s tendency to partake of the proverbial appropriations trough:

The results paint Missouri’s senators as decidedly un-kosher. Ranked on a
scale of 0 to 100:

Kit Bond (R): 8.33 (tied for
second-worst overall)
Claire McCaskill (D): 16.6 (tied for third-worst)

Apparently I was mistaken when I congratulated Sen. McCaskill on fighting pork-barrel spending. Sure, it’s fine to propose earmark reforms, but when you don’t live up to those principles on other spending bills, it calls into question your sincerity on the entire issue. So the question is for the Senator: Will you truly fight pork barrel spending?

P.S.: Sen. Bond, how about cutting back on some pork yourself?

I’ll Say It: Pensions Should be Taxed

Posted on July 11, 2007May 5, 2026 by David Stokes

I disagree with our uber-blogging intern Maurice Harris’s statement that the State of Missouri should go further to reducing the tax liability of senior citizens and eliminate the income taxes on pensions. Maurice writes:

A good next step would be to save other citizens’ retirement funds from taxation as well — for instance, the state taxes my father’s pension check every month.

Why should retirees get to benefit from untaxed income as opposed to the rest of us? Maurice’s father likely has a defined benefit plan, the type being replaced just about everywhere by defined contribution plans — 401(k)s, etc. The defined benefit plans that were so common until recently are a type of benefit not previously taxed as wages, unlike Social Security, where the amount deducted for SSI is included in determining how much income tax should be withheld from your paycheck every other week.

In all other types of common retirement savings, IRAs, Roth IRAs, 401(k)s, the money is taxed as income at some point, either before it is put away (Roths) or after it is withdrawn when you are retired (IRAs and 401(k)s). The amount the company put away years ago to fund a current retiree’s pension was never taxed as individual income for that employee. So it is more than fair that it be taxed as income now, when that person is likely in a lower tax bracket than they were when they worked. In the interest of full disclosure, I will have a pension when I turn 65 from six years of work for St. Louis County government. I fully expect that money will be taxed as income, as it should be.

Eliminating the tax on pensions would, like eliminating it on Social Security, increase the pressure to keep income taxes higher on everyone else. That does not mean I oppose the SSI tax reduction — I support it — but all income should be taxed by the federal and state governments once, at as low and hopefully one-day flat a rate as possible. Now, if we want to eliminate the income tax on pensions by the state of Missouri, we could do it as part of getting rid of the state income tax entirely for all of us. That I would support!

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