Page 970 – Show-Me Institute

Sharon Fitzgerald: Victim of Eminent Domain Abuse

Posted on April 4, 2006May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

The summer of 2005 was not a good one for Sharon Fitzgerald. On Memorial Day, she learned she had inoperable lung cancer. Three days later, she got a knock on her door.

It was Jonathan Browne, head of real estate developer Novus Equities. He wanted to buy her house. And he made it clear that this was an offer she couldn’t refuse.

Michael Fitzgerald outside his “blighted” home. Sharon was too ill to come outside for this picture.

“He told us that if we didn’t sell, he’d just use eminent domain and take our home anyway,” said Sharon, “What could we do? With my health and everything and the chance to lose our home anyway, we didn’t really have a choice.”

Sharon and her husband Michael reluctantly agreed to sell. They wanted to get the issue behind them so they could concentrate on dealing with her illness. But when the time came to close on the house, they were dealt another blow: “It turned out that Browne didn’t have enough money from the banks to close,” said Sharon.

Residents say that Browne misled them and the city council about his capacity to complete the project. In reality, he didn’t have the money he needed to buy out the properties, and he was having trouble recruiting tenants for the shopping mall he wanted to build. When those facts came to light, the project collapsed.

Another Sunset Hills home condemned for “blight.”

That has put many Sunset Hills residents in a bind. Some of them had already entered into agreements with Browne to sell their homes to him, and they had made plans to move on the assumption that the contracts would be honored.

Even worse, some property owners have already moved, leaving their previous homes in a state of disrepair. There wasn’t much blight in Sunset Hills at the start of the process, but there is plenty now. Some of the most neglected homes in the neighborhood are owned by Browne, who has not kept them in good repair.

One Sunset Hills resident died without bequeathing his house to anyone, leaving the house abandoned. Sunset Hills doesn’t have any legal provision for handling abandoned property, and neighbors say that the city council hasn’t made any effort to address the problem, choosing instead to let the property deteriorate.

With the collapse of Browne’s development plan, the uncertainty faced by Sharon and Michael has only increased. There is talk of finding another developer, but that will take time. In the meantime, property values have begun to decline as the looming threat of condemnation discourages anyone from purchasing property in the area.

The home of Sharon’s parents, also condemned for blight.

Sharon and her husband weren’t the only ones whose lives were put on hold by Browne’s actions. Sharon’s parents live just down the street from her in the house they’ve owned since 1954. When Browne came to the door with threats of eminent domain, Sharon’s parents became quite frightened. “They were scared out of their minds,” said Sharon. “They’ve lived in that house for decades and they can’t afford house payments now, with their medical bills and other expenses. The entire experience has had a terrible effect on their health.”

Not all of Sharon’s neighbors were so easily intimidated. Resident Kathy Tripp decided to tell Mayor Hobbs about Browne’s strong-arm tactics. She got nowhere. “He assured me everything would be fine, but then he didn’t do anything at all,” said Kathy.

But Kathy isn’t easily deterred. She recently filed suit against Novus and Browne for fraud. The suit details Browne’s extensive harassment of residents.

This neglected property is owned by developer Jonathan Browne.

Kathy says that Browne’s harassment campaign was made possible by the city’s decision to use the power of eminent domain. When Browne approached the city with his development proposal, the city enthusiastically agreed to help him get the land he wanted. They commissioned a blight study from Peckham, Guyton, Albers, and Viets (PGAV), a consulting firm notorious for finding blighted conditions everywhere they look. After inspecting only 42 of the 262 homes, PGAV concluded the neighborhood was blighted, citing such problems as a broken rainspout, an unsettled concrete porch, and a family of four living in a 2-bedroom house. With the blight study in hand, Browne had a credible threat to use against residents who didn’t want to sell their homes.

Residents say that eminent domain has pitted neighbor against neighbor, as those who want to move blame those who want to stay, and vice versa. “I’ve been called every name in the book by some neighbors,” said Kathy. “Some people don’t like me standing up for my rights.”

But both Sharon, who signed a contract with Browne, and Kathy, who refused to do so, agree on this much: it’s not right to use eminent domain for private profit.

“It’s not right what Browne has done, or what the city has done.” Sharon said. “People’s homes shouldn’t be taken away just because the city can pocket some extra money. A hospital is one thing, but profit is different. And Brown has nearly destroyed our neighborhood, pitting one against the other. The hardest ones hit are the elderly.”

Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute. Jonathon Burns is a student at Truman State University.

Stadium Proposal is Unfair to Taxpayers

Posted on April 3, 2006May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

Should Kansas City’s taxpayers pay for the renovation of the Truman Sports Center? Advocates for the proposal offer two major reasons for doing so. They say it will spur economic growth in the Kansas City area. And it’s suggested that if the proposal isn’t approved, the Chiefs and the Royals will move their teams to another city that’s more willing to offer them handouts.

Do stadiums really create economic development? It’s a refrain that’s heard all across the country when sports teams seek subsidies for their stadiums. Unfortunately, it isn’t true.

Supporters like to focus on the new economic activity that inevitably occurs around the stadium. But they forget that a new or renovated stadium is in competition with a region’s existing restaurants and entertainment venues. Although the bars and restaurants immediately adjacent to the stadium may benefit from the new facility, that additional business may be drained away from other parts of the city.

Moreover, when touting the economic benefits of a new stadium, supporters rarely take into account the job losses inflicted by new taxes. When a new stadium is financed by tax dollars, every dollar taxed away to finance the stadium is a dollar that would otherwise have been spent by a private individual or business elsewhere in the economy.

Indeed, the evidence bears that out. The Cato Institute published a study in 2004 that examines the impact of new and renovated stadiums across the country. On average, they found that a new stadium project has a negative impact on the economic performance of the surrounding metropolitan area.

So the benefits of stadium subsidies to taxpayers are debatable at best. What’s indisputable is that the tax would be a windfall for the owners of the Chiefs and the Royals, who have spent hundreds of thousands of dollars promoting the proposal. Most private businesses are required to spend their own money if they want to upgrade their facilities. It’s hard to see why sports teams should be any different. It’s true that sports teams generate new jobs and tax revenues for the state, but so does every other successful business. There’s no reason to single out professional sports for special treatment.

In addition to touting the economic benefits, supporters of the stadium tax suggest that if the referendum fails, the Royals and the Chiefs will leave for another city that’s more willing to offer handouts. Sports teams have become adept at playing cities against each other, using the threat of relocation as a means of extracting ever-larger handouts from cities.

That’s a shame. Kansas City’s sports fans are known for being among the most loyal in the country, sticking to their teams through thick and thin. It’s disappointing to see that their loyalty is not being reciprocated by the teams they love. The proposed stadium renovation is a bad deal for taxpayers, but more importantly, it’s unfair to fans. It’s not right for the Royals and the Chiefs to use their fans’ love to line their own pockets.

Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute.

Saint Louis Can’t Afford an Earnings Tax

Posted on March 13, 2006May 5, 2026 by Rex Sinquefield

Saint Louis faces a sad irony. It boasts cultural institutions that many larger cities envy — its symphony, opera theatre, botanical garden, art museums, and zoo are among the best in the nation. Its professional and collegiate sports teams have a history of success and draw from the across the Midwest. The entire world recognizes the arch. The city is home to prominent universities, one of the nation’s top-ranked medical schools and a thriving biotechnology corridor. It is filled with beautiful parks, neighborhoods and architecture. All of these advantages ought to draw residents and businesses into the city.

Sadly, however, the city has been on a downhill slide for over 30 years. After adjusting for inflation, total personal income within the city limits has been falling since the 1970s. While the Saint Louis suburbs have been growing steadily, city residents collectively take home less money, in inflation-adjusted dollars, than they did three decades ago. Businesses have been leaving too. In 1970, the majority of Saint Louis area workers had jobs in the city. Today, only 20 percent work within the city limits. Most of the region’s businesses are now in the suburbs.

How can a city that has so much going for it turn in such a depressing economic performance? We believe that the city earnings tax is a major culprit. Of course, many factors contribute to a city’s economic performance. But compare Saint Louis’s performance with that of Missouri’s largest city without an earnings tax — Springfield. Over the same 35-year period, as Saint Louis has been stagnating, total personal income in Springfield has tripled. And Springfield has managed to keep the overwhelming majority of its jobs in the city. Springfield’s share of employment in its metro area has fallen only slightly, from 92 percent to 88 percent.

The same pattern can be seen across the nation. A new Show-Me Institute Policy Study by Mizzou professor Joseph Haslag collects data on per-capita income in 101 of the nation’s largest cities, 23 of which have an earnings tax. He finds a consistent pattern: cities with earnings taxes are falling behind their suburbs in per capita income faster than the cities without earnings taxes.

As Haslag’s report explains, this is what economic theory predicts. Economics tells us that businesses and workers will both seek to locate where their after-tax returns are the highest. The earnings tax penalizes workers and businesses for doing business or residing within the city limits. It’s hardly a surprise, therefore, that the vast majority of Saint Louis–area job creation occurs in the suburbs.

Of course, few will dispute that the earnings tax harms the city. It is not a popular tax. But because it accounts for 16 percent of the city budget, some people consider eliminating it politically impossible. They ask “What services would you cut to get rid of this tax?”

This is the wrong question and the wrong way of thinking about this issue. The earnings tax is killing the city. If we continue as we have, driving residents and businesses into the suburbs, the bad economic news will continue as well. Thirty years of decline will become 40, then 50. The city’s budget woes will only become more severe, and cuts to city services will become inevitable.

On the other hand, if we replace the earnings tax with something more benign, the city will boom once again. That will mean new tax revenues, which will create plenty of room in the budget for improved city services.

Show-Me Institute scholars are actively exploring ways to fix the problem and will present these ideas in the coming months. But the one thing we know is that something has got to change. As long as the earnings tax is on the books, it will continue to hold back the city we all love. Some ask how we can afford to cut the earnings tax, but we ask: can we afford not to?

Rex Sinquefield is the president and Timothy B. Lee is the editor of the Show-Me Institute.

One-Size-Fits-All Education is the Wrong Direction

Posted on February 2, 2006May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

Governor Blunt has proposed that schools be required to devote 65 percent of their budgets to classroom instruction. He deserves credit for highlighting the need for educational improvement, but unfortunately, his plan is more likely to lead to accounting gimmickry than genuine improvements in student performance. Instead of micromanaging the public schools, he should throw his weight behind school choice proposals that will empower parents while spurring public schools to improve.

The governor is right that more resources need to be devoted to instruction rather than to administrative overhead. But such changes will only be effective if they are embraced by principals. If schools merely comply with the letter of the law—say, by assigning a few of their administrators to supervise study hall for one period each day—that won’t do a thing to improve educational outcomes. And it will create added paperwork for schools that are already doing a good job.

Governor Blunt’s proposal rightly focuses on holding schools accountable. However, it’s important to ask: accountable to whom? The governor’s plan holds them accountable to state bean counters, by dictating how they spend their money. But what needed is to hold schools accountable to their customers: parents.

The best way to do that is to give parents more choices, so that if their children are not leaning in their current school, they have the option of taking them to a school that will do a better job. Only then will public school administrators truly feel the urgency to make the tough choices necessary to raise student achievement.

Opponents of the governor’s 65 percent plan have pointed out that out that not all districts—or all children in those districts—are the same. They’re right. Local school boards need the flexibility to decide how to make the best use of their limited resources. Different districts have different student bodies with different needs. One-size-fits-all education won’t work.

But that analysis applies to individual students, too. Just as each school district needs the flexibility to make educational choices tailored to the needs of the children in their districts, each parent needs the flexibility to choose the best educational option for his or her child. There is no reason to think that all the children in a particular school district need the same kind of instruction. One child might do best in a large school with a lot of extracurricular activities. Another might thrive in a small school where each student gets more personal attention. Some children might need an environment of strict discipline, while another might flourish in a school that lets students work at their own pace. Some might be interested in science, while others might be interested in arts or foreign languages.

Instead of further centralizing education with a one-size-fits-all spending rule, we should be exploring ways to increase choice and diversity in our education system. No two school districts are alike. And neither are any two children.

Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute. The mission of the Show-Me Institute is to to research, develop, and advance public policies that enhance economic growth and opportunity for all residents of Missouri.

‘A La Carte’ Cable: Bad Economics, Bad for Consumers

Posted on January 4, 2006May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

In the 1991 remake of the classic movie Father of the Bride, Steve Martin goes into a grocery store and begins ripping open hot dog bun packages. When confronted by a store clerk, he explains: “I’ll tell you what I’m doing. I want to buy eight hot dogs and eight hot dog buns to go with them. But no one sells eight hot dog buns! They only sell twelve hot dog buns. So I end up paying for four buns I don’t need. So I am removing the superfluous buns.”

Martin’s character would probably have favored government regulation of bun-packaging practices. More recently, activists have begun demanding “unbundling” in another industry: they want to require cable TV companies to sell channels “a la carte” rather than bundling them together in “tiers.”

This effort to force cable companies to sell their cable channels individually is just as misguided as Martin’s demand to purchase individual hot dog buns. Companies don’t bundle products together to “force” customers to purchase things they don’t want. Rather, bundling is a mechanism for lowering the per-unit cost of goods and services by spreading costs over a larger number of units. That benefits consumers because the price per bun—or per channel—is lower than it would be if the company were forced to sell their product one piece at a time.

This is easy to see in the case of hot dog buns. The price of a 12-pack of buns includes the manufacturing costs of the buns, but it also includes the labor and materials needed for packaging, shipping, stocking, and ringing up the product. Packaging a 12-pack of buns, for example, might only require three times as much material and labor as packaging an individual bun by itself, thereby reducing the per-bun packaging costs by a factor of four. These savings are passed onto the consumer.

The same can be seen in another example of bundling—the newspaper. Some readers read the business section but not the sports section. So why don’t newspapers let their customers pick and choose which sections of the newspapers they want to receive?

The reason is that most of a newspaper’s costs don’t vary by the number of customers who take a particular section. Delivering the paper, for example, costs virtually the same whether the paper is fat or thin. And the columnists and reporters who produce the content in the sports sections will collect the same salary regardless of how many readers get their section. So the better question is: if it doesn’t cost more, why not include every section in every paper?

Precisely the same considerations apply to cable TV. Most of the costs of delivering cable content to a consumer’s home are fixed costs that don’t change with the number of channels an individual subscriber receives. The Fox News Channel, for example, costs the same to produce whether it has one viewer or a billion. And the infrastructure that delivers that content to a consumer’s home costs virtually the same to deploy whether the consumer takes one channel or 100.

Advocates of a la carte pricing seem to think that, if 50 cable channels cost $50/month, then one cable channel ought to cost $1/month. But that’s absurd. Taking only one channel doesn’t make cable infrastructure any cheaper to build or maintain. In fact, more staff might be needed to cope with the greater administrative overhead of keeping track of which customers have chosen which channels.

But won’t cable companies at least save money by not having to pay as much in license fees to the studios that create television channels? It’s not likely. Cable channels keep their rates low by spreading the costs over tens of millions of households. If the number of subscribers per channel dropped dramatically, the channels would be forced to raise their rates dramatically.

In practice mandating “a la carte” pricing would force cable companies to drastically raise per-channel prices in order to cover their costs. The result would be that consumers would pay about the same, on average, but would get a lot fewer channels for their money. That’s every bit as irrational as Steve Martin’s bun crusade.

Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute, a non-partisan public policy research organization based in St. Louis. This article originally appeared in the Chicago Sun-Times.

Missouri Needs a Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights

Posted on December 21, 2005May 5, 2026 by Michael J. New

The passage of Referendum C last month in Colorado has editorial boards swooning. Colorado voters had “good reason” to suspend their state’s revenue limit, cheered the St. Louis Post-Dispatch while the New York Times proclaimed that “Colorado Got Its Government Back.” In their eyes, the victory of Referendum C proves that Colorado’s Taxpayer’s Bill of Rights (TABOR) was a failure and cripples efforts to enact similar proposals in other states. However, these editorial boards greatly overstate their case. An honest appraisal of the past 13 years shows that TABOR was a success in Colorado and that similar limits have a bright future in Missouri and across the country.

TABOR was enacted in Colorado in 1992 and took effect in fiscal 1994. It established a low limit for revenue growth and mandated immediate rebates of all surplus revenues to taxpayers. Starting in fiscal 1997, state revenues began to exceed the TABOR limit, and between 1997 and 2001, Colorado taxpayers received $3.2 billion in tax rebates. This tax relief was a boon the state economy. Between 1995 and 2000 Colorado led the country in the growth of gross state product and personal income.

It is true that Colorado began to face fiscal pressures in 2001. However, an honest analysis of Colorado’s recent fiscal history indicates that TABOR is not the culprit. The September 11 terrorist attacks hit Colorado’s economy especially hard because the attacks occurred right before the start of ski season. Visits to slopes declined by 14 percent in the months after September 11. A severe drought in 2002 put the state in even more substantial economic stress. For the first time since the 1970s, each of Colorado’s 64 counties was declared a federal disaster area, and by some measures it was the worst statewide drought since the 1500s. Not surprisingly, it devastated Colorado’s agriculture and tourism industries. Overall, tax revenues declined by over $1 billion between 2001 and 2003–approximately 15 percent of Colorado’s general fund.

Making matters worse, another strain on taxpayers had already been baked into the budget cake. In 2000, teachers unions in Colorado passed Amendment 23, which mandated large annual increases in state spending for K-12 education even if revenue declined–and exempted this spending from the TABOR cap. This led to an increase in education spending of $450 million between 2001 and 2003, at a time when state revenues were falling sharply. Together, the September 11 attacks, a drought, and a ill-conceived education spending mandate are responsible for Colorado’s fiscal woes.

Nonetheless, TABOR opponents in Colorado have opportunistically blamed TABOR for Colorado’s fiscal woes and are rejoicing at the victory of Referendum C. But it’s important to understand that Colorado voters did not abolish TABOR when they voted for Referendum C. They simply voted to allow the state legislature to spend rather than rebate a projected $3.7 billion in excess revenues over the next 5 years. While some are disappointed with the outcome, Colorado voters doubtless appreciate the fact that the choice to increase spending was in their hands, and not the hands of the legislature.

Indeed, during the 1990s, voters repeatedly rejected attempts to spend more than the limit mandated by TABOR. Every year from 1993 to 1999 there was a measure on the Colorado ballot to either raise taxes or spend in excess of the TABOR limit. Each of these measures lost. They included an effort to increase the gasoline tax in 1997 and a 1998 proposal to use half the TABOR rebate for road construction. Overall, despite consistent criticism by the media, unions, and much of the state legislature, TABOR has proven to be both a popular and durable fiscal limit for the past 13 years.

TABOR-style revenue limits merit support in Missouri and across the country. While Missouri does have its Hancock Amendment, the limit has become so loose that it has ceased to be a meaningful constraint on government growth. Colorado’s TABOR experience suggests that a tighter limit would generate tax relief and help spur Missouri’s economy. It would force the state legislature to examine current government programs more critically. Perhaps even more importantly, it would go a long way toward providing the lean and efficient government that Missouri taxpayers deserve.

Michael J. New is an adjunct scholar at the Cato Institute and an assistant professor at the University of Alabama. He holds a Ph.D. in political science from Stanford University.

Telecom Policy is Stuck in the 20th Century

Posted on December 13, 2005May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

The video marketplace is changing so fast that it’s gotten hard to keep track of it all. In October, Apple Computer unveiled a new iPod that allows users to purchase popular television shows like Lost and Desperate Housewives for $1.99 an episode and watch them on the go. By the end of the month, the company had sold a million episodes over the Internet. Then in November, Yahoo! and TiVo announced an agreement to deliver Yahoo! content via the Internet to TiVo set-top boxes. Not to be outdone, AOL and Warner Brothers announced a new service called In2TV, which will allow consumers to watch older TV shows for free over the Internet.

But while every month brings new developments in the video marketplace, the telecommunications laws that govern it are stuck in the 20th Century. Missouri state law gives local governments the power to decide which companies may do business in their jurisdictions, and in many cases city governments have created soviet-style five-year plans in which only one company is permitted to offer video services. Those “franchise” requirements harm consumers by raising the cost of entry for new companies wishing to offer video services, leading to fewer choices and higher prices.Cable TV franchising was originally created on the assumption that pay television service is a “natural monopoly.” Policymakers worried that without municipal oversight, such monopolies would gouge consumers and fail to provide responsive service. But whatever merit that argument might have had in the early days of the cable television industry, it has no basis in reality today. Virtually all Missouri households enjoy vigorous competition between cable and satellite television. And more competition is on the way. Phone companies like AT&T (formerly SBC) and Verizon have announced plans to build new fiber-optic networks to millions of households nationwide and use them to deliver video, voice, and data services.

Ironically, the franchising rules themselves have become a serious obstacle to competition. A company wishing to offer video services across the state of Missouri is required to negotiate hundreds of local franchise agreements with cities and counties across the state. It’s a time-consuming, burdensome process that is likely to delay the deployment of new services by several years.

To see how Missouri could be doing things better, we need only look to the state of Texas, which passed a sweeping telecommunications reform law this summer. The legislation swept away the old municipal franchising system and replaced it with a streamlined process for obtaining permission to deploy video services state-wide.

Some Texas city officials argued that the change was anti-democratic, because it deprived local communities of the right to regulate their own affairs. That’s nonsense. The Texas law doesn’t empower state government at the expense of local governments. Rather, it empowers consumers to decide for themselves what video services they wish to purchase.

The cable industry, on the other hand, argued that the change was unfair because, in some communities, they are locked into multi-year franchise agreements that have stricter requirements than those of the state franchise. That, they claim, puts them at a disadvantage. It’s a valid point, but the industry vastly overstates its case. The differential treatment will only last until the current franchise agreements expire, after which all service providers will compete on a level playing field. And the industry ignores the tremendous benefits it will continue to enjoy as incumbents: cable companies control more than 70 percent of the pay television market. If they focus on keeping those customers happy, they should have little to fear from additional competition.

Texas’s telecom reform has already begun to pay dividends. On November 17, SBC (now AT&T) cited the state’s telecom reform as it announced $800 million in new technology investments in Texas, bringing new services and increased competition to the state. It’s not surprising that companies would focus their technology investments in states where the regulatory burdens are low. Streamlining our own archaic telecommunication laws will help attract the new investments necessary to put Missouri at the forefront of the broadband Internet revolution.

Timothy B. Lee is editor at the Show-Me Institute.

‘Jock Tax’ Is Poor Sportsmanship

Posted on November 28, 2005May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

We were all heartbroken when the Cardinals lost the playoffs to the Astros. Losing hurts, especially when the stakes are as high as they were last month. Still, most of us know the difference between a game and real life. We teach our kids that however much we may hate losing, that doesn’t make it ok to lash out at the other team or at officials. Good sports are fierce competitors on the field, but they’re also friendly and respectful of others after the game.

Rep. Jeffrey Roorda (D-Barnhart), it seems, never learned that lesson. He blames the Cardinals’ loss on bad decisions by the umpires, and he’s decided to express his frustration through legislation. He wants to extend the state’s athletes and entertainers tax–some call it the “jock tax”–which levies taxes on out-of-state athletes who play away games in Missouri, to include the umpires as well.

His proposal isn’t just bad sportsmanship, it’s bad public policy too. For that matter, the “jock tax” itself is ill-conceived. It’s burdensome, unfair, and adds practically nothing to the state’s bottom line. Instead of expanding it, the legislature should be working to eliminate it.

The first “jock tax” was levied by the state of California to punish Michael Jordan for the Chicago Bulls’ defeat of the Los Angeles Lakers in 1991. The next year, Illinois retaliated with a tax of their own, which local papers called “Michael Jordan’s revenge.” Other states jumped on the bandwagon. A 2004 survey by the Tax Foundation found that 20 of the 24 states with professional sports teams now levy income taxes on the employees of professional sports teams.
The result has been a paperwork nightmare for the employees of professional sports teams. The taxes were intended to target the wealthiest athletes, but state tax officials send tax returns to everyone on the team’s payroll who travels to the state. That includes lower-paid athletes, assistant coaches, scouts, and trainers, many of whom have quite modest incomes. Many employees are forced to file more than a dozen income tax forms, each with a different tax rate and a different set of complicated rules. Of course, Albert Pujols can afford to hire an accountant to deal with all that paperwork, but to a scout making $25,000 a year, it’s a significant expense, not to mention a major headache.

Moreover, it’s unfair to single out athletes when other traveling professionals–many of them with earnings comparable to those of professional athletes–generally don’t pay income taxes to the states they visit. Doctors and lawyers often make as much as football players, and corporate executives can make quite a bit more. Yet they are free to travel on business without filling out a new tax form every time they cross a state border. Moreover, although professional athletes enjoy high salaries in their 20s, their short careers mean that their lifetime earnings can be much lower than other high-wage professions.

The irony is that on net, “jock taxes” actually generate very little revenue. Missouri’s gross revenues from the tax are about $20 million, which amounts to three-tenths of one percent of the state’s budget. But Missouri athletes who pay other states’ jock taxes are able to subtract those tax payments from their Missouri tax bills. When you subtract the revenue lost from other states’ jock taxes, the result is practically a wash. If all 20 states repealed their jock taxes simultaneously, states would get virtually the same revenue with a lot less administrative overhead.

States need to put an end to this pointless arms race. Ideally, the Missouri legislature should take the high ground and simply repeal the tax. But if legislators are concerned about unilateral disarmament, here’s a compromise: Missouri should exempt from taxation any visiting athlete whose home state does not tax Missouri’s athletes. That would give other states an incentive to pass similar laws, without allowing other states to take advantage of us.

At the very least, the legislature should reject ill-considered plans to extend the taxes to additional workers, such as umpires, whose salaries are nowhere near those of superstar athletes. Any good high school baseball coach will tell his players that the players on the away team are their guests and should be treated with respect and hospitality. Someone needs to tell that to Rep. Roorda.

Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute. This article originally appeared in the St. Louis Business Journal.

School Choice: A Truly Intelligent Design

Posted on November 17, 2005May 5, 2026 by Timothy B. Lee

Here we go again. In a bitter 6-4 vote, before a standing-room-only crowd, the Kansas Board of Education adopted new curriculum standards last week that cast doubt on the theory of evolution. Republican board member John Bacon hailed the vote for doing away with “a lot of the dogma that is taught in science class today.” Democrat Janet Waugh countered that the changes undermine science. “We’re becoming a laughingstock, not only of the nation, but of the world,” she said.

Many Kansans are getting a sense of deja vu. Conservatives on the board enacted similar standards in 1999, only to have the changes repealed after they lost the majority in 2000. Liberals hope for another victory when the board comes up for re-election next year

Whatever one thinks of the theory of evolution, there’s a larger issue at stake. The dispute in Kansas isn’t ultimately about the merits of the theory of evolution, or whether all the alternatives are, as opponents argue, based on religious faith. The bigger fight is about who gets to impose their beliefs on whom. It’s just the latest symptom of a deeper illness that necessarily afflicts a school system where all the educational decisions are made by government bureaucrats.

Imagine you live in a town where you are required to pay several thousand dollars of taxes each year into a public fund that is used to buy food for the entire community. There is a publicly elected “Menu Board” that determines each year’s offerings. You wanted rye this year? Sorry! The Board voted for Wonder Bread. Again! You could, in principle, opt out of the public food system and buy rye, pumpernickel, or seven grain oat-nut crunch at a fancy private store. But you’ve already paid thousands in taxes, and can’t afford to pay twice for everything you eat. The Menu Board picks it. You eat it.

Imagine the controversy. Vegetarians (“You’ll get lentil loaf and like it!”) will lock horns with the Atkins lobby (“You can have my bacon when you pry it from my cold, dead fingers!”) to wrest control of the Menu Board. The kosher set will rail against shrimp-lovers; Mormons will fight against the Starbucks crowd; Hindus will agitate against the forces of barbeque.

Public school boards and curriculum committees are like menu boards for our children’s minds. Isn’t what we teach our children more important than what we feed them? Bitter and divisive conflict over curriculum is inevitable. Evolution is to creationists what pork is to Muslims.

The question we should be asking is not whether intelligent design theory deserves a place in the science curriculum, but, rather, why we do education this way in the first place. We live in an incredibly diverse society, and there’s no way we’re all going to agree, even if some of us really are right about the best way to do things. Suppose you knew with absolute certainty that there was one objectively best diet. Would that justify forcing shrimp down unwilling throats? Why treat schools differently?

One simple solution to conflicts like the one in Kansas is to give more control to parents through a system of school choice. Parents would then be free to put their children’s education in the hands of schools that reflect their beliefs, not the beliefs of school boards, curriculum committees, and the teachers unions.

It might also provide our children with better education. Defenders of evolution should take the theory of natural selection to heart. Darwin said that the competition among animals causes the fittest animals to survive and reproduce in higher numbers, leading to a steady improvement in animals’ adaptation to their environment.

Could we unleash the same forces in our education system? Right now, many poor kids see the opposite trend: they’re in bad schools that seem never to improve, they aren’t allowed to leave, and their schools are never held accountable. School choice would change all that: the most effective schools would attract more students and expand, while less effective ones would lose students and eventually go out of business. Over time, the quality of our schools would steadily improve. But such beneficial competition can’t happen if the state imposes the same curriculum on everyone. No variation means no evolution. No wonder our schools are so dismal.

School choice would kill two birds with one stone: parents would bicker less while kids would learn more. We may never agree on the theory of evolution, but surely we can all support that.

Will Wilkinson was born in Independence, Missouri. He is a policy analyst at the Cato Institute in Washington, DC. Timothy B. Lee is an editor at the Show-Me Institute in St. Louis. This article originally appeared in the West End Word.

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