Come Together, Right Now, on Charter Schools
When the editorial boards of the Washington Post and the Gray Lady, as well as opinion pieces in National Review,...
Free to Ride and Free to Earn
I recently spoke to an Uber driver who was arrested and booked for dropping a customer off at Lambert International...
TIF Requests in Affluent Areas: The Beat Goes On
If you drive by the St. Louis Galleria on any given day, you’ll find the area is a hive of...
Entrepreneurship in Missouri, Part 2: Where Is the Job Growth?
A week ago I wrote of the decline of entrepreneurial activity in the nation, Missouri, Kansas City, MO, and Saint...
Out with Football, in with Fútbol?
With the Rams on the West Coast, many Saint Louisans have shifted their attention to other sports. The Blues had...
Do You Hear That? It’s the Drumbeat for School Choice Getting Louder
In January 2011, Mike McShane and I co-wrote our first opinion editorial for a Missouri newspaper. At the time we...
Entrepreneurship in Missouri, Part 1: Techweek Masks Tough Times for Kansas City’s Entrepreneurs
Today is the final day of the Techweek conference in Kansas City. This week-long event fosters and promotes entrepreneurship and...
2016 Friedman Day Policy Panel
James Shuls, Ph.D., moderated this panel discussion about school choice in Missouri. The panel included Melissa Brickey, Executive Director of...
School Choice: The Personal and the Political
Parents naturally want the best schools for their children. In Saint Louis and Kansas City, this leads many parents to...
Personal Income in Missouri Continues to Lag
Recent economic data reinforces an old story: Missouri’s economy is not expanding fast enough to substantially raise its citizens’ income. ...
CEO Defends Centene Clayton Expansion
Last week Clayco CEO Bob Clark made a guest appearance on KTRS to discuss the Centene expansion being proposed in...
Unite the Region with a Sensible, Effective Transit Vision
In a recent Post-Dispatch column, Tony Messenger called for an ‘AND’ approach to transit planning in the St. Louis region....
If You Give a Developer a Subsidy
One of my favorite books as a child was If You Give a Mouse a Cookie. “If you give a...
Tax Dollars for Centene . . . Why?
St. Louis-based Centene is the largest managed care provider in the United States, and they're looking to expand with two...
Riding the Dream-Train to Development Bliss
We’re no real-estate experts, but what you see above (the Sunnen Station on the MetroLink Blue Line) clearly isn’t “beachfront...
North-South MetroLink Expansion: Snake Oil for Saint Louis
Mayor Slay and many—but not all—regional leaders are peddling a curious elixir: a $2 billion expansion of MetroLink. The expansion...
What’s a Nice TIF Like You Doing in a Place Like This?
Public subsidies have taken on an increasingly prominent role in new developments across the St. Louis region, and KP Development...
Streetcars: Suddenly a (Poorly Performing) Transportation Service
Despite consistently arguing that streetcars are economic development—not transportation—projects, transit advocates have recently claimed the Kansas City streetcar “really is...
Outsourcing Public Education
We ask a lot of our public schools. We ask that they not only educate children, but also transport them...
Kansas City Losing Downtown Millennials
All the money Kansas City is pouring into downtown doesn’t seem to be working. At least, when it comes to...
