Opportunity cost. The concept is so simple that a first-grader could understand it. I know, because I used to teach it to first-graders. Had you walked past my classroom at just the right time, you might have heard 20-something first graders chanting, “Opportunity cost is the opportunity lost.” The students understood that our decisions have consequences. It was a lesson they learned every time they went out to recess. If they chose to play kickball, they couldn’t play basketball. This basic life lesson bears some repeating for the adults who set policy in our state.

Though the term opportunity cost was not coined until 1914, French economist and writer Frédéric Bastiat provided one of the most salient examples of the concept in his 1850 work, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.” Using the parable of the broken window, Bastiat explained how money being spent on one activity is money that cannot be put to more productive use elsewhere. Imagine that a pane of glass is broken at a baker’s shop. Obviously, the money that the baker must pay to have it repaired becomes revenue for the window repair man. Anyone walking by can see the repair man doing work and recognize that he’ll be paid for his labor. But it makes no sense to look at the repair man’s good fortune in isolation. Doing so would lead to the harebrained conclusion that breaking windows leads to economic growth! Instead we need to remember that, had the window stayed intact, the baker could have done something else productive with the money. The problem is that we can’t see what the baker could have done with the money—only what he actually did with it.

Unfortunately, our board of aldermen and other policymakers regularly make decisions based on what they see without accounting for what they can’t see. Take for example the earnings tax in Saint Louis. Policymakers can see the revenue generated by the tax, but they can’t see the economic activity that has been lost. They can’t see the jobs that might have been created had those dollars been reinvested by the businesses. Nor can they see the economic activity that might have been generated if those dollars had remained in workers’ pockets.

Think about opportunity cost the next time you see a ribbon-cutting at some new development that has received tax breaks or some other form of support from the government. Whether it is a property that has been blighted and given property tax abatements for development in the Central West End or a big box store that receives tax-increment financing, we can see the product of those government actions. We cannot see the harm they do to other businesses through unfair economic competition.

I was reminded of these ideas when I read Lindenwood economist Howard Wall’s most recent paper for the Show-Me Institute, “Is Growth in Outstate Missouri Tied to Growth in the Saint Louis and Kansas City Metro Areas?” Wall uses an econometric model known as Granger-causality to estimate the impact of employment growth in Saint Louis and Kansas City on the rest of the state. He finds a statistically significant downstream relationship between Saint Louis and the rest of Missouri. That is, employment growth in Saint Louis leads to employment growth in the state. He estimates that a 1 percentage point increase in growth in Saint Louis would lead to an increase of 0.35 percentage points in outstate Missouri within two or three years. Why this connection exists (he doesn’t find a similar relationship in Kansas City) is a matter for some hypothesizing or future research. Nevertheless, the point is clear—Saint Louis is an economic driver for the state.

While Wall’s paper does not deal directly with the idea of opportunity cost, his findings make it all the more important for policymakers to understand the importance of their actions. When they support an earnings tax or other policies that harm the city’s economic growth, they are hurting the economic growth of the entire state.

Missourians, not just those who live in the city, benefit from a thriving Saint Louis economy. That’s why we need policymakers to put in place pro-growth policies that create the economic conditions for the market to thrive.

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Using household employment data, Wall, a professor of economics at Lindenwood University, tests whether employment growth in the two major cities appears to cause employment growth throughout the rest of the state.

Interestingly, the data show a statistically significant relationship between growth in Saint Louis and outstate Missouri. For example, a one percentage point gain in employment in Saint Louis would lead to a half percentage point gain in outstate Missouri the following year and then smaller gains in the years after that. Wall did not find as strong of a relationship in Kansas City, though the results were not far from being statistically significant.

Why these findings occur is a matter that can be explored further, but the point is clear. Saint Louis and, to a lesser extent, Kansas City are economic drivers for the state. Missourians have a vested interest in seeing sound policies put in place to help these cities flourish.

Click here to read the full report.

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They discuss the recent GameStop stock controversy, the idea of a $15 federal minimum wage and more.

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But don’t take my word for it. Look at the research. An economic impact study was conducted by the Center for Economic Information at the Department of Economics at the University of Missouri-Kansas City that indicates between $15 and $17 million will be generated from the Zero Fare initiative. For those living paycheck to paycheck, as most Americans are, the cost of a monthly bus pass or cumulative single fares can make the difference in deciding which bills to pay. Tax revenue alone is expected to increase about $700,000 from the increased spending, and 100 jobs would be created.

UMKC’s Center for Economic Information (CEI) has no such study on its website. And the public information officer at KCATA responded that the CEI had not yet presented the final version of its paper. So I asked for a copy of whatever the KCATA CEO had used to make his claim. I was sent a four-page “draft mini report” dated December 5, 2019. (A PDF copy of this mini-report can be found at the bottom of this page.) The report does not list an author. But it didn’t require a degree in economics to see serious flaws in the analysis.

First, the study does not contemplate the net effect of a fare-free bus system—it simply adds up the costs saved by passengers and ignores any additional cost occurring elsewhere. It does not consider any additional tax, reduction on city spending in other programs or additional costs to the KCATA due to increased demand and wear and tear. Like a child arguing in favor of getting a family dog, the report counts all the benefits and none of the cost. For this reason alone this mini-report ought to be dismissed immediately.

I shared the draft report with some university economists for their comments. Each of them pointed out the failure to account for additional spending to cover the lost fare revenue.

Dr. Howard Wall at Lindenwood University in St. Louis pointed out that the authors misapplied the model they used to calculate the benefit. Understood correctly, the model, called IMPLAN, calculates the impact of additional money injected into an economy from outside—such as the local impact of a large federal grant. But this is not the case with fare-free buses in Kansas City. The policy would only move money already within the local economy by shifting the burden of bus fare. The UMKC mini-report argues, in effect, that one can fill a bathtub by moving water from one side of the tub to the other.

Dr. Byron Schlomach at Oklahoma State University was dismayed by the speciousness of the claims of growth in regional gross domestic product (GDP).  The only way regional GDP could rise by the amount claimed in the analysis is if free buses attracted huge numbers of people (or made workers more productive) and added money or physical capital such as buildings and machines. As you can guess, there is no evidence for this anywhere. It’s hard to imagine any scenario in which eliminating bus fare in Kansas City attracts significant residents, jobs, or capital.

Dr. Schlomach also offered another compelling point. He wrote by email, “Pricing plays an important role even in 90% subsidized, publicly-owned enterprises like bus transit. It can provide information for where and when the service is most highly valued and serve as an indicator for where resources should be allocated.” How would KCATA collect information on the popularity of routes if not through the farebox? Perhaps it could install people-counting sensors on every bus entrance, but then that too is an additional expense not considered in this analysis.

But the giveaway from UMKC is on the last page. The draft mini-report spends one-fifth of its total content discussing the ideas of Henri Lefebvre, a 20th-century French Marxist philosopher and sociologist. Why this is included in a memo claiming to be an “economic impact” analysis is a mystery. But it indicates that this was not an attempt to understand the impact of a significant change in public policy—it does none of that.

Rather, it seems that advocates of fare-free buses, aware that the research and experiences of others who have considered fare-free buses, sought out someone willing to make dubious claims of a positive economic impact. That UMKC lent its name to this is a shame.

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She was right to be skeptical of that claim. But it’s not the only claim that deserves scrutiny. The plan also claims it will create 12,600 new jobs. Economics professor Howard Wall responded on Twitter:

They find 12600 jobs through 2050 measured in “job years”. So 420 jobs. Their invented measure of jobs is buried in the impact study, but they tout the number as if they didn’t create a new use of the phrase.

The summary of findings upon which the Bike KC Master Plan claims are based states on page 6: “This increase in economic activity leads to 12,600 additional jobs (measured in job years) over the period.” The period is 30 years, 2020 through 2050. So dividing 12,600 “job years” by 30 years gets 420 actual jobs.

One can still be skeptical of that much smaller claim, but it is not the claim made by the Bike KC Master Plan, which prominently and repeatedly states 12,600 “new jobs.” This number is at best misleading.

Incidentally, the authors of the report upon which this is all based would not release the paper to the Show-Me Institute as they are not finished with it. Yet, the summary of the findings is available. How one can summarize findings before the paper itself is finished is a mystery. Perhaps that explains the questionable claims of 12,600 new jobs and 36 lives saved each year.

Anyone who is serious about public policy should be very skeptical about these claims.

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So how should cities measure success? Typically, city success is characterized by periods of sustained growth, whether that growth is in population or employment. Booming local economies bring businesses to an area, and those businesses bring more people to a region who can then contribute to the same economy. The idea seems simple, but not every city is going to have a booming economy. So what can struggling cities do to turn things around and grow their economy?

Figuring out how to attract new residents and businesses is something cities of all sizes across the country struggle with. Aaron Renn, of the Manhattan Institute, argued that cities should take steps to harness their unique characteristics and build a more desirable brand. Gary Ritter, of St. Louis University, explained that quality schools are essential to the recruitment of businesses and their employee’s families, but also help adequately train the workforce for the emerging jobs in that city’s economy. Howard Wall, of the Hammond Institute at Lindenwood University, asserted that rapid population growth for cities over an extended period of time is rare and quite difficult, and that perhaps St. Louis’s success has been hampered by its previous growth.   

Eileen Norcross, of the Mercatus Center at George Mason University, discussed some of her research surrounding the rise and fall of historically successful cities. She found ultimate success for older cities was tied to how it responded to the decline of the local manufacturing sector.  Despite her assertion that regulatory and institutional environments are more important for prospective businesses, many of these cities spent incredible sums of tax payer dollars to lure businesses without otherwise addressing the business environment. In the end, those moves hurt the city’s long-term financial health without providing the desired opportunity for future economic growth.

While there doesn’t appear to be a silver bullet for city success, the seminar provided a variety of ideas for research and reform, including occupational licensing, regulatory changes, and tax policy.

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One reason is the City’s deserved reputation as a crime center. As recently as 2016, the city was ranked the most violent city in America by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and property crime remains a major issue for residents and visitors alike. What drives the crime is subject to interpretation and analysis; poverty and the region’s long-simmering racial tensions are factors. But whatever its source, crime affects whether people stay in the city—or for that matter, whether they come to the city in the first place.

Taxes are also an enormously important piece of the puzzle. The negative impact of income and earnings taxes on economic growth appears in the academic literature again and again, and yet St. Louis policymakers and others have refused to change course. In a paper written for the Show-Me Institute in 2014, economist Howard Wall found that half of the population loss that took place in the city between 2000 and 2010 could be attributed to the earnings tax. Even if the effect were only half as big, it would still be a massive problem.

Additional research, including a host of Show-Me Institute papers, have demonstrated similar growth issues related to the City’s earnings tax. Still, establishment political interests continue to rally around it. Whether that’s out of stubbornness or fear, the negative impact the tax has on the City and its future remains the same.

Capital and labor are mobile, and because they are, leaving the city is very easy. Factor in that the city gives away millions in tax dollars to a cavalcade of long-entrenched special interests, and it becomes clear that an economic system that robs Peter Taxpayer to pay Paul only works if Peter sticks around. And Peter hasn’t.

The city hasn’t just beggared taxpayers through the earnings tax and its tax subsidies; it has also beggared some of the very public services that lure young families to a city. I will leave the heavy lifting on education policy to my colleagues at the Show-Me Institute, but I will observe that a city steering $30 million per year from basic city services like education does so at its own peril. Yet, that’s exactly what the St. Louis does.

There is a charm to the urban environment that attracts many. That charm can be enough to compensate for the negative effect of somewhat higher taxes, or somewhat greater risk, or somewhat poorer services.

But there is a limit. If you were 30, married, and had children or were planning to, would you put down roots in a place bedeviled by St. Louis’s problems? Or would you go someplace where safety, educational opportunity, and tax stewardship were high priorities? When fundamental public needs are left unmet, it isn’t fleeing residents who are at fault; it’s the city that is.

Regional power is moving to the north and west of the city, through St. Louis County and toward St. Charles County. Lest we forget, St. Charles County is now larger than St. Louis City—and it’s positioned to widen that population gap for the foreseeable future.

The City’s greatest issue isn’t whether it will be the economic center of the region. Its greatest issue, the one that will determine its long-term viability, is whether it will be a competent steward of public money and the public’s trust—whether the City will address the policy questions that ultimately underpin and promote long-term development and population growth. Doing so will require a meticulous commitment to getting the fundamentals of governance right and eschewing the rest.

It’s said that the best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, and the next best time is to plant a tree is today. For the sake of its future, now is the right time for St. Louis to address its fundamental and widely recognized issues of governance in a serious and research-driven manner. Until the city gets serious about regaining public trust by getting back to the basics of governance—above all, a full commitment to security, education, and the stewardship of the public checkbook—no one should be surprised when more St. Louisans follow their predecessors out the door.

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You might assume that as a red state, Missouri’s corporate income taxes would be low. Since 1993, the top corporate income tax rate for Missouri has been 6.25 percent, currently the fifteenth-lowest in the country. However, a new essay by R.W. Hafer and Howard J. Wall argues that categorizing Missouri as a low-business-tax state isn’t quite that simple.

Drawing on data from the Tax Foundation, Hafer and Wall examine the total tax burden facing businesses, including income, property, sales, and unemployment taxes. They find that the tax burden on a business depends heavily on the type of industry the company is in. Because of different incentives and tax breaks offered to businesses in different industries, the effective tax rates paid by some firms are much higher than what others pay. For example, manufacturers enjoy a relatively hospitable tax environment; retail establishments and distribution centers, not so much.

This uneven distribution of tax burdens might not be harmful if the firms that were taxed the least were those that have the most beneficial effects on the economy. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be the case. It turns out that the industry Missouri favors (manufacturing) seems to be the one in which low taxes are not related to higher state growth.

It seems (again) as if policymakers are trying to pick winners and losers—and finding out how hard it is to make the right call.

The essay, available at the link below, also explores the different tax burdens faced by companies in the same industry depending on whether they are new or established firms. Hafer and Wall’s findings help explain why our allegedly low-business-tax state has experienced such anemic growth in recent years.

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Drawing on data from the Tax Foundation, Hafer and Wall examine the total tax burden facing businesses, including income, property, sales, and unemployment taxes. They find that the tax burden on a business depends heavily on the type of industry the company is in. Because of different incentives and tax breaks offered to businesses in different industries, the effective tax rates paid by some firms are much higher than what others pay. For example, manufacturers enjoy a relatively hospitable tax environment; retail establishments and distribution centers, not so much.

This uneven distribution of tax burdens might not be harmful if the firms that were taxed the least were those that have the most beneficial effects on the economy. Unfortunately, the opposite seems to be the case. It turns out that the industry Missouri favors (manufacturing) seems to be the one in which low taxes are not related to higher state growth.

It seems (again) as if policymakers are trying to pick winners and losers—and finding out how hard it is to make the right call.

The essay, available at the link below, also explores the different tax burdens faced by companies in the same industry depending on whether they are new or established firms. Hafer and Wall’s findings help explain why our allegedly low-business-tax state has experienced such anemic growth in recent years.

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Instead of losing population between 1990-2000, the cities without an earnings tax gained population over that period. This new result strengthens Professor Wall’s conclusion that earnings taxes negatively impact a city’s growth.

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Why the marked differences in population growth between Missouri’s two major cities and their surrounding areas? Undoubtedly, there are a number of factors involved, like housing prices, amenities, and school quality. But what about taxes? Specifically, what about the 1 percent earnings tax that both cities impose on everyone who works there and on everyone who lives there even if they work someplace else? A new study by Howard Wall, commissioned by the Show-Me Institute, suggests that the earnings tax could be impeding the population growth of both cities.

In 1947 the Missouri Legislature authorized cities with populations of 70,000 or more to levy an earnings tax, capped at 1 percent. Only Saint Louis and Kansas City chose to impose this tax. But earnings taxes are known to have bad economic side effects. A study by Dr. Joseph Haslag of the University of Missouri–Columbia found that Saint Louis and Kansas City’s earnings taxes help explain the decline in personal income in those cities relative to the surrounding non-taxed metro areas during the first part of the 2000s. Wall, the director of the Hammond Institute for Free Enterprise and the Center for Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University, tackles a different question: Does the imposition of earnings taxes help explain differences in population growth across cities?

Wall conducted his investigation using population growth rates for 185 cities (population 25,000 or more) over the period 2000 through 2010. Seventy-nine of the cities included in his study levy an earnings tax. Nineteen Missouri cities are included, of which only Saint Louis and Kansas City have an earnings tax.

After controlling for other factors that might explain differences in population growth, Wall finds that having an earnings tax has a statistically significant, negative effect on population growth. And the impact is not small: A 1 percentage-point increase in the earnings tax is associated with about a 4 percentage-point reduction in population growth over a decade.

What does that mean for Saint Louis and Kansas City? Based on his results, Wall suggests that the earnings tax in Saint Louis accounts for about half of the population decline experienced over the decade. For Kansas City, the earnings tax may have cut its population growth in half.

The effects of the earnings tax apparently do not stop at city borders. Wall finds that there are negative metro-wide effects emanating from the central city’s earnings tax. The population loss of Saint Louis City dwarfs the population increase in its ring cities, yielding a net reduction in the metropolitan population. The effect is similar for Kansas City. There are substantially fewer residents living in the metro area than there would have been were it not for Kansas City’s earnings tax. Employing an earnings tax has adverse effects on population growth for the taxing city that spill over into surrounding communities.

Even though the earnings tax produces such negative effects, how would cities replace the lost revenue if they were removed? One option is to reorder tax priorities. Wall notes that, on average, property taxes account for about 17 times as much in revenue as income taxes in cities across the country. In sharp contrast, Saint Louis and Kansas City rely more heavily on taxing income. In Saint Louis, the earnings tax revenue is more than twice that from property taxes; in Kansas City it is a little over 1.5 times as big.

The evidence in Wall’s study and in previous research lends credence to the view that shifting priorities from taxing income to taxing property may be the answer to reversing the negative economic effects of the earnings tax on Missouri’s major cities.

R. W. Hafer is the distinguished research professor of economics and finance at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville and a research fellow at the Show-Me Institute.

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This is interesting because Pi raised its wages voluntarily. It didn’t need the government to mandate a hike in pay, it chose to do it because it made sense from a business perspective. That is how it is supposed to be. In fact, that is what businesses do. They pay their workers a competitive rate commensurate with the value that these employees generate for the business. If they pay their employees too little, other businesses can offer these workers a higher rate and they will leave. Sommers mentioned his workers moving to another business because it offered a 25-cent increase in hourly wages (at 4:30). This is the market working.

Take what happened in North Dakota as an example. Because businesses were so desperate for workers, even fast food establishments had to significantly increase what they would pay their employees. For example, Taco John’s, a local area fast food restaurant, had to offer new employees $15 an hour salaries in order to get them to work there.

I want to help the poor do better, but there are betters options available than raising the minimum wage, like the Earned Income Tax Credit. This would ensure the benefits would go to the people who really need them, the working poor.

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Today, the Show-Me Institute is releasing a new policy study on the effectiveness of tax credits: “Tax Credits as a Tool of State Economic Development Policy.” This study, by Howard J. Wall, director of the Institute for the Study of Economics and the Environment at Lindenwood University, reviews academic studies of tax credit programs in other states and discusses some of the broad arguments made in favor of tax credits.

One of the most striking findings in Wall’s study is the following: “State tax credits do not tend to lead to higher levels of employment for local residents, nor, by extension, do they lead to higher levels of employment for state residents.”

Consider the academic evidence:

• In a 2009 Michigan study, the authors found that tax credits were associated with a decline in employment.

• Some academics say that tax credits would be effective if used in distressed areas. However, an Ohio study found that tax credits generally are not awarded in distressed areas – a pattern that I suspect exists here in Missouri. Just look at The Chase Park Plaza, a luxury hotel and recipient of a great deal of tax credit money.

• In fact, tax credits may be awarded to companies that would have expanded anyway. A Georgia study found that 75 percent of tax credits were awarded to companies that would have hired more workers without receiving tax credits.

• There have been three prominent surveys of tax credit research in recent years. None of the surveys concluded that tax credits are an across-the-board, effective tool. In fact, one concluded that legislators should abandon tax credits altogether.

Most academic research on tax credit programs across the U.S. has shown that tax credits don’t work. Why do some legislators think that the situation in Missouri is any different?

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The impact of earnings taxes has been studied before, in multiple ways. In 2006, University of Missouri–Columbia economist Joseph Haslag compared 101 cities, 24 of which had an earnings tax. In his analysis, Haslag found support for the idea that a city earnings tax encourages businesses and people to locate outside the city, in the suburbs or the county. In 2010, two Saint Louis University economics professors, Lisa Gladson and Jack Strauss, studied 179 metro areas and examined the effect of an earnings tax on growth between 1969 and 2007. They determined that an earnings tax did not affect overall metro area growth, although it should be noted that this result is not contrary to Haslag’s study, which looked at the distribution of income within a metro area rather than at overall regional growth.

Wall’s essay, “New Evidence on the Effects of City Earnings Taxes on Growth,” builds on these two prior studies. He focuses, however, on population and payroll employment rather than on income — a novel approach that can shed light on another important question about the impact of earnings taxes. Wall wants to know whether an earnings tax affects how many people move in or out of a city, and whether that tax affects employment.

Wall compared more than 1,000 cities with populations higher than 25,000, controlling for a number of important factors. He found that an earnings tax does indeed have a significant negative impact on population growth, as well as on employment growth. For every percentage-point increase in an earnings tax, the population growth rate is reduced by an average 3.04 percentage points, and the employment growth rate drops by 2.32 percentage points. As Wall points out, this means that, in the absence of an earnings tax, the population in Saint Louis city could have contracted by only 10 percent between 1990 and 2000, instead of by 13 percent — retaining almost 14,000 additional residents. Given the recent bad news about the continuing population contraction in Saint Louis city during the last 10 years, this is a great time for residents and lawmakers to sit up and take notice at what may be a significant contributing factor to the decline.

The essay also shows that the 1-percent earnings tax in Saint Louis and Kansas City is associated with 1.65 additional percentage points of population growth — not for the cities themselves, but for their surrounding suburbs. This bolsters Haslag’s 2006 finding, and further demonstrates an important point: The unintended consequences of an earnings tax tend to be felt in the long term. Businesses and individuals won’t necessarily haul up and move right when a 1-percent earnings tax is first implemented. Over time, however, the influence of such a tax makes new businesses marginally more likely to locate outside the city, and has a subtle influence on where people choose to live when they find themselves making such a choice.

Wall’s findings contain important insights that should be heeded by earnings tax supporters. As he points out in his conclusion, many cities successfully make do without an earnings tax. The long-term picture is brighter for such cities, given that they face fewer negative effects of diminished population and employment growth. It is time for public officials in Saint Louis and Kansas City to explore ways of replacing the earnings tax, if they wish to enjoy the associated benefits of increased growth rates in population and employment.

Josh Smith is a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, an independent think tank promoting free-market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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• An op-ed printed in the Kansas City Star.
• Commentary on KWMU 90.7 NPR in St. Louis.
• Debate on KWMU in which Dr. Howard Wall discussed his new essay documenting the economic harm of local earnings taxes.
• Our op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
• I have appeared on the air with Mark Reardon at KMOX, Darla Jaye at KMBZ, and Jamie Allman at 97.1 FM to discuss the issue.
• Further interviews and comments on the earnings tax will be airing today on KMOX, tonight on Fox 2 news, and Sunday morning on the Jaco Report.

I encourage everyone who votes on Tuesday to cast the most informed ballot you can. If Show-Me Institute research helps you decide either way, we are fulfilling our educational mission.

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