The One Big Education Opportunity with Shaka Mitchell
Susan Pendergrass speaks with Shaka Mitchell, senior fellow at the American Federation for Children, about how a new federal scholarship...
Missouri Public Schools Have a Very Serious Reading Problem
Test scores on the Nation’s Report Card were released on January 29th, and Missouri faces a dire future if we...
EV Charging Stations Don’t Need Mandates to Succeed
Elected officials who want to put more electric vehicles (EVs) on the road face a Catch-22. Drivers won’t buy more...
Missouri’s Population Growth Is Still Lagging
The U.S. Census Bureau just released its updated state populations from the 2020 census, and the results were not good...
Multnomah County, Oregon Should’ve Called St. Louis Before Making This Mistake
Multnomah County, Oregon, which contains the city of Portland, recently approved a local income tax increase to fund tuition-free preschool....
Commentary: Funding Roads by the Mile, Not the Gallon
A version of this first appeared in the Columbia Daily Tribune. Missouri’s road maintenance funding is on a road to...
Funding Roads by Miles Traveled—There’s an App for That
Yesterday’s post explored odometer reporting as an imperfect but straightforward way to replace fuel taxes with a funding mechanism that...
Other States Are Deregulating. Missouri Should Too
The COVID-19 crisis has led to rules and regulations being relaxed or even temporarily eliminated in states across the country....
Good News on Housing Affordability in Missouri
Forget the Academy Awards, the 16th annual Demographia International Housing Affordability Survey has just been released! It has some great...
Port KC Versus Taxpayers
Steve Vockrodt over at The Kansas City Star has a story about Google wanting to invest $600 million in a...
2018 Blueprint: Open Collective Bargaining
THE PROBLEM: Under current Sunshine Law in Missouri, government bodies may close meetings, records, and votes relating to contract negotiations...
Is Amazon Getting into the Pharmacy Business? Let’s Hope So
Competition and supply are good things, and as we’ve said before, health care needs more of both. Innovations along those...
Policymakers Wisely Look Before They Leap
With a wave of new electric cars entering the auto market, policymakers in Missouri are faced with a decision about...
ER Visits Spike With Obamacare’s Medicaid Expansion
I’ve written at length about the negative effects of expanding a broken Medicaid program under Obamacare. Poor health outcomes and...
It Could Be Worse. Not Much Worse, but It Could Be Worse.
The Bureau of Economic Analysis recently released data on real GDP for all 50 states. Since Missouri’s growth in recent...
Cheap Rent: A Saint Louis Advantage
Recently, I talked to a financial advisor (who did not live in Saint Louis) about whether I should buy property....
Expansion Is Wrong Move For Medicaid
As first appearing in the Columbia Tribune: In his 2006 book The Audacity of Hope, then-U.S. Sen. Barack Obama was correct...
No, Kansas City Star, The Legislature Should NOT Expand Medicaid
I guess all of the big battles are the ones that are fought over and over again. In “A good...
Oregon Study: Medicaid Expansion Increases Emergency Room Use
One of the big arguments for expanding the Medicaid program in Missouri has been the notion that by doing so,...
What Would A Free-Market Medicaid Reform Look Like?
With all the discussion about Medicaid reform, transformation, and (an unwise) expansion, it’s worthwhile to remind ourselves what “success” for...
