It is first worth noting that job creation figures from economic development agencies are often misleading, with creative accounting used to inflate the numbers. And the numbers almost never account for the possibility that these “created” jobs would have happened with or without subsidies. Numerous academic studies have shown that economic development programs rarely work as advocates claim.

But just for the sake of argument, let’s take the numbers at face value. If we divide the jobs created by the incentives provided, the cost amounts to roughly $49,500 in taxpayer money for each job. Is that expense worth it?

Consider this: according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (Table 6), Missouri’s economy added 589,337 jobs in calendar year 2023.* In other words, the ordinary functioning of the state’s economy produced roughly 125 times more jobs than the Department of Economic Development’s incentive programs. The DED’s contribution is a tiny fraction of the state’s overall job creation—and it comes at a substantial cost.

The price tag goes beyond the incentives themselves. The total department budget for salaries is $14.6 million for approximately 202 full time employees, meaning taxpayers not only footed the bill for the incentives but also paid for the administrative costs of distributing them. It’s an expensive way to do something the broader economy already does more effectively.

Perhaps it’s time to rethink the role of the Missouri DED. Those funds could be redirected to areas that deliver tangible benefits to all Missourians, like roads, schools, or public safety. Instead of propping up a costly system that yields meager results, Missouri could invest in the essentials that make the state a better place to live and work.

*NOTE: The BLS statistics I cite offer both gross job gains and gross job losses. I cite only the gross gains. A fair-minded person might suggest a more accurate approach is to calculate net job gains by subtracting gross job losses from gross job gains. I would agree with that in most cases. However, economic development professionals do not make a habit of acknowledging job losses. For example, it is often the practice to count as “new” a job that may have only changed location. Until economic development advocates provide a more rigorous accounting of jobs “created,” using BLS numbers on gross job gains is the best comparison.

The post Missouri Economic Development Incentives Aren’t Worth It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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.

The post Bike Lanes Won’t Create 12,600 Jobs, Either appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Anecdotally, it appears that TIF doesn’t really create jobs. As we’ve written about the H&R Block TIF and the Power & Light District, TIF doesn’t really create jobs. At most it just moves them from elsewhere in the area. Byrne wondered,

If the number of jobs created by TIF, as reported by TIF administrators, is a true economic impact, then the number of reported jobs should have a positive impact on county employment as measured by the BLS.

Anyone familiar with research on TIF (and not everyone cares about the research) will not be surprised by the results. Byrne concludes,

This paper’s results indicate that the number of jobs supported by TIF, as reported by local economic development agencies in Missouri, does not have a significant positive effect on county employment as measured by the BLS. The lack of a positive impact of reported jobs on employment suggests that TIF-supported jobs either come at the expense of other areas in the county or would have located in the county regardless of the existence of Missouri’s TIF districts.

TIF diverts a lot of money from municipalities that would otherwise go to support schools and basic services. Research from all over the country tells us that it does not create jobs, does not spur investment, and does not mitigate blight. It’s time for reform or elimination altogether. 

The post TIF Doesn’t Create Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Why are there a smaller percentage of workers in startups, considering the state is at a new record high level for the number of non-farm jobs? Data suggest that Missouri startups are taking less of that job growth pie than they did before. Since 1995 to 2015, job growth from startups was near 72% of all job growth in the state of Missouri. If we look at this 20-year performance as a “normal” share of job growth from startups, then seeing a startup share at 62.5% should come as a disappointment. Of course, growing shares of workers in large, established firms can also spur growth. However, there are specific advantages that startups bring to a region that can be more difficult for established firms to provide. For example, research has shown that increased prevalence of startups can bring more innovation through increased competition (pp. 2–3) , allow for better adoption of new information, can create new industries (pp. 328–330), and improve labor productivity.  The graph below lists the share of startup job growth of Missouri, its metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs), and non-MSA portion relative to its 20-year average.

From the graph, we observe that Missouri currently runs below its 20-year average by more than 9 percentage points. Unfortunately, this statewide drop comes from underperformance in nearly every population center; with strongest losses coming from Kansas City, Joplin, and Saint Joseph. 

Interestingly, two of those three MSAs include areas in both Missouri and Kansas, a state that improved its tax climate by lowering individual income taxes by 30% for its residents and eliminating income taxes for personal businesses. The Saint Louis metro area shares a border with Illinois, a state suffering from population loss and which hiked corporate income taxe levels from 2011 to 2015 to more than 3 percentage points above Missouri’s.  A look at the Kansas side of the KC Area shows that it also underperformed its long-run growth, albeit by a smaller margin. In the Saint Joseph area, the Kansas side is currently exceeding its long-run trend and is seeing exceptional growth. There is good news however; the Missouri side of the Saint Louis area is outperforming the Illinois side.

What factors entice entrepreneurs to move or start their business in a new area? Could it be overall migration flows, or how cheap it is in an area to start and grow a business? Part 3 of my “Entrepreneurship in Missouri” will review a study published by the Brookings Institution that may shed some light on reasons as to why entrepreneurship is falling. 

The post Entrepreneurship in Missouri, Part 2: Where Is the Job Growth? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to Missouri’s Department of Revenue, in 2015 H&R Block reported 2,211”new jobs” created at their Kansas City World Headquarters as a result of their TIF deal. A reasonable person might conclude that this means that there are 2,211 new jobs in addition to those that already existed, and those new jobs are the result of the taxpayer-subsidized construction. That does not appear to be the case. An April story in The Kansas City Star reports,

A year ago at this time, the company reported 90 staff cuts, mostly at its Kansas City headquarters, a result of business being down early in that year’s tax season. It had 2,200 full-time employees at the end of tax season a year ago. This round of layoffs leaves it with 1,735 full-time employees.

Block doesn’t have 2,211 “new jobs,” it has (or rather, had) 2,200 total jobs. It also claims to have retained none of the 1,493 jobs it projected it would retain. How these jobs are counted is a mystery. According to a Missouri Department of Economic Development official, the job numbers are, “self defined and self reported.” The Department of Revenue does not audit the claims. We don’t know how Block came up with their numbers. 

We looked around for other ways to measure job growth. HOK, the group that designed the Block building, report on their website that,

H&R Block’s headquarters consolidates 1,600 employees from six locations into a 17-story high-rise in downtown Kansas City.

From about 2006 through 2016 Block went from 1,600 employees to 1,735; a net gain of 135 “new jobs.” It’s likely that modest job growth would have happened without the shiny new building. Remember, taxpayers are forgoing 23 years of tax revenue, “covering 95 percent of the H&R Block headquarters project’s $308 million cost.”

That’s a lot of money to spend for a net gain of 135 jobs. Defenders of the Block deal may respond that the country has undergone a Great Recession and online tax filings have likely impacted Block’s business performance. This only underscores the reason why municipalities—led by elected officials who may have no background in investing—should not be betting taxpayer dollars in speculative developments.

Ten years after making a huge commitment of public funds, Kansas City is left with an underutilized building housing a business with anemic job growth. There are rumors that H&R Block may soon be sold to another company that could move it out of the city altogether, as happened with other subsidized companies Applebees and Freightquote. That is not an economic development track record of which anyone should be proud.

The post Counting Economic Development Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Developers often win over politicians and the public by promising that TIF will help "create" a certain number of new jobs. But those projects often miss the mark, and at times by a wide margin.

Last month, the Missouri Department of Revenue released its annual report for all TIF projects in Missouri. The numbers were stark.

Among the 504 TIF districts across the state, developers estimated that 266,261 new jobs would be created. In fact, 89,485 were realized. That's 33 percent of the projection.

The annual report that Steve cites is here. Pages 258 and 259 show that now that the Power & Light District’s KC Live project is completed, only 1,003 of the projected 2,034 jobs have been realized. The reality, however, could be much worse than that.

Using data provided by Kansas City's Regulated Industries Division, we sought to see if there was any citywide increase in either liquor licenses issued to businesses or the liquor cards issued to individuals who work in bars and restaurants. The chart below shows that since the Power & Light District opened in 2008, these numbers have been flat.

If KC Live created jobs as the TIF report suggests, yet citywide employee liquor cards remained flat, it means that the TIF didn’t so much create jobs as just move them from elsewhere in the city such as Westport or just outside the TIF area.

Yet the financial costs to the city and other taxing jurisdictions for this storefront shuffling are very real. In addition to the cost of foregone tax revenue, the city must pay about $15 million each year to cover the underperforming investment through 2040. 

The question that responsible policymakers must consider is not merely how to move jobs and residents downtown, but at what cost? The city has shown that it can drive property development downtown by paying for it. That's hardly impressive. But it cannot show that there is any real net economic benefit citywide. Without that, we're just throwing good money after bad.

The post TIFs Fail to Meet Expectations appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Proponents of a new $311 million hotel claim that the project will create construction jobs. At a recent hearing before the City Council, developer Mike Burke said [begins at 46:35], 

Let me talk a little bit about jobs. During the course of construction, which is about 27 months, there are about 1,300 jobs on the site.

Let's be clear about this: there won't be 1,300 jobs for 27 months. If someone were to ask Mr. Burke about this directly, he would probably walk it back immediately. Some jobs, such as heavy digging and foundation, may exist for a few months at the start. Those will transition to other, different jobs once the structure is being raised, and then finally there will be the finishing jobs once the hotel is ready for its final touches. 

Moreover, even the time spent building the hotel won't result in new jobs. The hotel will be just be a new project for those workers who already have jobs. This is why the economic impact statistics for projects such as hotels, stadiums, and airports are so suspect. Proponents want to pretend that without the project in question, people wouldnt be working or traveling or staying in hotels. As my colleague Joe Miller wrote last month regarding a proposed riverfront stadium in St. Louis:

In fact, a paper from an economist at the University of Missouri studied the impact of the Edwards Jones Dome and the Kiel Center (now the Scottrade Center) in Saint Louis specifically. The author found:

By econometrically modeling construction employment during the 1970’s, 1980’s and 1990’s, it was found that there was no more nor no less construction employment within the St. Louis MSA during the time the Kiel Center and the Trans World Dome [Edward Jones Dome] were being constructed…

…instead of creating new construction jobs, jobs were shifted from projects that would otherwise have been undertaken, resulting in no net new job creation in the construction industry.

The author concluded:

These results, coupled with the more extensive analysis given in the article on construction employment, suggest that the net impact of stadium construction on construction employment and worker incomes is zero.

The post Will Building the Convention Hotel Create Jobs? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post $150 Million Incentive Package. 8,600 Jobs Paying $75,000 Each. State Income Tax of ~6%, Repaying the State … $39 Million? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The report is a great example of ridiculous government claims. I took the time to add up all the “jobs created” claims for each of the various subsidies on pages 6 and 7. The report claims that the work of the SLDC and its various subsidies (TIF, etc.) will result in 18,198 new jobs. If I added in their “jobs retained” or “construction job” claims, it would be even higher.

Let me give you an idea of how completely bogus these claims are. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, the entire Saint Louis metropolitan region only added 13,500 jobs in the year from July 2012 to July 2013. That is ALL job creation in our entire 2.5 million-person metro area. Yet the SLDC is claiming its actions in 2013, which only reflect subsidized jobs within the city of Saint Louis, will create more than 18,000 jobs. (To be clear, they are not claiming all the jobs came in 2013 or just within one year.)

These stats bring to mind the comments of economist Dick Netzer when presented with preposterous claims of success by economic development officials (p. 134):

“Who needs oil wells, when a state can be another Kuwait just by increasing the budget of a tiny agency?”

Let me repeat this. This city’s economic development arm (which is now combined with the county, but these stats are city-only) is claiming that the projects they are subsidizing in 2013 will produce almost 5,000 more jobs than the compilers of economic data at the BLS say were created in our entire region by all types of job growth during approximately the same period. (I recognize there is some gross vs. net difference here, but the claims are so entirely out of whack that it does not really matter. I’ll explain further in comments if anyone wants me to.)

A state audit found that the Missouri Quality Jobs Program has claimed to generate almost 27,000 jobs, but in fact had generated slightly more than 7,000. This is the same basic thing. These numbers from the SLDC should be taken with the same grains of salt (and subsidized salt, at that).

The idea that governments should be empowered to take other people’s money to support government-sanctioned, targeted business investments is absurd. Their evidence of government success is, too often, simply made up.

The post St. Louis Development Corporation Just Making Stuff Up appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Texas Gov. Rick Perry is at it again.

Next week, he’ll travel to Missouri to tout Texas’ low taxes, less regulation and high job creation rate.

Starting today, a 30-second television advertisement is running in the St. Louis, Springfield and Columbia-Jefferson City markets in Missouri. The ads feature small and immigrant business owners and women talking about what Texas offers, such as no state income tax. [Emphasis mine.]

And when it comes to job growth, he’ll have plenty to discuss.

While in Missouri, Perry plans to meet with employers, business leaders and the Missouri Chamber of Commerce to talk about things like Texas being a top job producer. Texas added 19,900 jobs in July, ranking No. 5 nationally, but it created 293,000 jobs in the last 12 months, more than any other state.

Now, you can love it or hate it, but to derisively call visits like this “poaching” is like calling the best looking guy in the room a girlfriend poacher: it’s an excuse for failure. Of course we lost, they’ll say. Texas is poaching. And there’s no mystery about what Perry’s objective is on his trip — it’s to get Missouri’s businesses.

But if we all know the score, the question is, will Missouri just let Texas take our businesses and jobs without a fight? Missouri entrepreneurs may have come here with the Show-Me State, but that doesn’t mean they’ll be leaving with it at the end of this economic dance. Is Missouri just going to sit there and take it as Texas continues to walk off with the state’s wealth?

The post Blitz: Gov. Rick Perry To Visit Missouri And Run Ads Promoting Texas’ Business Climate appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It is perhaps the best known of all of Mark Twain’s quotes – “There are lies, damned lies, and statistics.” It would be hard to find a better illustration of that line than the misuse of unemployment statistics in Twain’s home state of Missouri.

After peaking at 9.6 percent in July of 2009, Missouri’s unemployment rate fell three full percentage points—to 6.6 percent—at the end of 2012. That compares to a 1.7 percentage point decrease in the national unemployment rate.

To hear Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon talk, you might think that Missouri’s economy is booming. “Missouri families and businesses are reaping the benefits as our economy continues to grow,” Nixon said in early June, citing 44 consecutive months in which the state’s unemployment rate has been at or below the national average. “In every corner of our state, businesses large and small are deciding to invest and expand.” Though Missouri’s unemployment has ticked back to 6.8 percent, it remains below the national average of 7.6 percent.

But Missouri is not blazing a path for other states to follow. To the contrary, it ranks near the bottom of all states in job creation. In this regard, the Show-Me State serves as a textbook example of the fallacy of thinking that a large drop in the unemployment rate must be synonymous with a corresponding increase in business activity and employment.

From 2010 through 2012, total employment in Missouri grew a trifling 1.8 percent, compared to 4.1 percent for the nation as a whole. Thus, Missouri considerably underperformed the rest of the nation in job growth—even as it seemingly excelled in dealing with the scourge of high unemployment.

You will not find any stories in Missouri newspapers trumpeting the state’s economic performance. Whatever the governor might say, most Missourians are well aware of the state’s inability to keep pace with its neighbors in business and job creation. In the past three calendar years, Missouri ranked dead last among Midwestern states (counting Missouri and the neighboring states of Kansas, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Tennessee, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Oklahoma) in growth of both employment and GDP.

So why the disconnect between the good numbers on unemployment and the bad numbers on GDP growth and employment? The answer lies in a far-from-vibrant workforce. This goes beyond the fact (and it is a fact) that job growth in Missouri has failed to keep pace with population growth. Over the past three years, tens of thousands of Missourians have quietly exited the labor market. And that has had the effect of lowering the state’s unemployment rate.

In the Bureau of Labor Statistics way of calculating unemployment, able-bodied people without jobs are not counted as unemployed if they have stopped looking for work. What the BLS calls the “labor force” is the sum of total employment and total unemployment, and people who are eligible for employment but do not seek it are neither fish nor fowl—neither employed, nor unemployed.

From July 2009 to April 2013, the number of unemployed people in Missouri fell by 96,000. But the number of employed people rose by only 26,000—which means that some 70,000 people (the difference between the two numbers) dropped off the grid—in neither working nor actively seeking work.

Who are these dropouts? I can easily think of a dozen of them in my own circle of friends and family members. They include non-working sons and daughters of affluent parents who have discovered they, too, qualify for food stamps and other forms of welfare, extended by the government or their own parents. They include doctors, lawyers, and other business or professional people who have retired or quit working earlier than they might otherwise have done—as a result of the combination of unhappiness at their former jobs and seeing no possibility of finding other, better employment.

In the previously mentioned time period, the labor force participation rate in Missouri (the labor force divided by the labor-eligible population) fell from 66.6 percent to 64.0 percent—a drop of 2.6 percentage points. That compares with a 2.2 percentage point drop in the participation rate nationally over the same time.

The disappearance of 2.6 percent of the workforce is no small thing. Without it, Missouri’s unemployment rate, instead of falling three points, would have increased 0.7 points to 10.3 percent.

The Show-Me State did not, in any real sense, add jobs to bring down what counts officially as the unemployment rate. Rather, it shed workers. And that is nothing to cheer about. It is a sorry reflection on the large number of people who have given up hope of finding a job.

Andrew Wilson is the resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post False Pride: Missouri’s Governor Shouldn’t Be Boasting About “Low” Unemployment appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Kansas City feels Saint Louis’ pain. Like Saint Louis, Kansas City has undertaken a series of urban redevelopment plans of its own that, again, have focused on attracting the “hip” class to the city center, oftentimes with significant tax incentives. And as has become commonplace, the hip have come, but the jobs have not.

A report released […] by the Brookings Institution said that in 2010 just 16.9 percent of the area’s jobs were in the core, defined as within three miles of Kansas City’s downtown. That’s down from 20.5 percent in 2000.

Dragged down by the Great Recession, the raw number of jobs in the central core also shrank from 180,000 in 2000 to 140,000 in 2010, according to the study.

For areas between 3 and 10 miles from the city center, the number of jobs also dropped. But between 10 and 35 miles from the central business district? As in Saint Louis, the total number of jobs rose — and in Kansas City’s case, they rose significantly.

The chart below, created by the Kansas City Star, tells the decade-long tale.

Indeed, all of the regions in Kansas City were buffeted by the Great Recession. Notably, the 10- to 35-mile band was still shy of its intra-decade high as of 2010. But the downtown Kansas City job figures tell a pretty unambiguous tale: jobs have been falling in Kansas City’s central core. Like Saint Louis, population in downtown Kansas City rose over the decade, but . . . (emphasis mine)

. . . new residents hadn’t translated directly to job creation in the core by the time the Brookings information was compiled.

Since then, “we’re seeing some small businesses locate in the Crossroads and the like, but they don’t employ that many,” said Jeff Pinkerton, economist at the Mid-America Regional Council. “And we haven’t had any major employer move downtown recently.

“The fact is that jobs follow rooftops, and housing is growing in the suburbs.”

As has been explained before, “the hip crowd” does not typically have much in the way of jobs coattails. Unfortunately, it seems, Saint Louis and Kansas City know this all too well.

The post Part Five: The Smallness Of The Potentially ‘Hip’ Core appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Greg Glassman is a true entrepreneur. He is the CEO and founder of Crossfit, a rapidly growing fitness program (of which I am a huge fan). This week I heard him speak at a conference about the development of his business.

If I could recite his whole speech for you I would, but here is my takeaway: Glassman uses freedom to grow the Crossfit movement. Standardization works for some businesses, such as McDonalds, but Glassman realized that Crossfit would touch more lives if he allowed affiliates to use his fitness program and run their businesses how they chose.

None of the Crossfit methods are protected, and affiliates only pay to use the Crossfit name. There are no requirements to use a certain brand of equipment, to operate specific hours, or to run the gyms in any specific way.

Because of this, Glassman has enabled thousands of Crossfit gyms to open in the past few years. Glassman gives all of his affiliates an equal opportunity to survive and thrive on their own. This is important. Entrepreneurs like Greg Glassman create jobs, not the government.

Missouri, please learn from Glassman’s success. Show-Me Institute analysts have written about the importance of treating businesses fairly and allowing them to grow or fail on their own. Business growth means more job creation, less unemployment, and happier Missourians. Entrepreneurial growth such as Glassman’s means all the above plus more individual and economic freedom for all. Isn’t this what all of us want?

The post Crossfit Creates Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In his State of the State address on Tuesday evening (Jan. 17), Gov. Nixon mentioned jobs no fewer than 39 times.

By way of comparison, former U.S. President Ronald Reagan mentioned jobs only six times in his first State of the Union address in 1982 — when the U.S. economy was reeling from the effects of a downturn of comparable magnitude to the 2008-2009 recession.

In his 1983 State of the Union, Reagan mentioned jobs eight times, and then just five times each in his 1984 and 1985 addresses — delivered in the midst of the most robust economic recovery of the post-World War II era, a two-year span in which the United States added 7.3 million new jobs.

So perhaps the governor (and the current occupant of the White House) could take a less-is-more cue from the late president in thinking and talking about job creation.

There is much to be learned from the sparingly few remarks that Ronald Reagan made about jobs in his State of the Union speeches.

With unemployment at 9 percent and headed to a peak of 10.8 percent, Reagan spoke in his first State of the Union of the need to unleash the private sector through lower tax rates and reduced federal spending: “Raising taxes will slow economic growth, reduce production, and destroy future jobs. So, I will not ask you to try to balance the budget on the backs of the American taxpayers.”

In 1983, he noted that “We’re witnessing an upsurge in productivity and impressive evidence that American industry will once again become competitive in markets at home and abroad, ensuring more jobs and better incomes for the nation’s work force.”

In 1984, as the economy was beginning to boom, Reagan delivered one of the most quoted lines of his presidency: “The problems we’re overcoming are not the heritage of one person, party, or even one generation. It’s just the tendency of government to grow, for practices and programs to become the nearest thing to eternal life we’ll ever see on this earth.”

In his fourth State of the Union — delivered February 6, 1985 — Reagan reiterated the principal themes from his earlier addresses, saying, “Every dollar the federal government does not take from us, every decision it does not make for us will make our economy stronger, our lives more abundant, our future more free.”

In contrast to Reagan’s extraordinary success in boosting employment following a major downturn, employment in Missouri continues to lag about 150,000 jobs behind where it was before the onset of the 2008-09 recession.

To his credit, Gov. Nixon did talk about the need for balancing the state budget, holding the line on taxes and “making government smaller, smarter and more efficient” — worthy goals, all of them. Without giving specifics, he also spoke of the need for “comprehensive tax credit reform.”
Unlike the late President Reagan, however, Gov. Nixon speaks of the private sector as if it were a willing but slow student — putting himself (and government) front and center in the role of providing much needed direction and encouragement to the dim-witted pupil.

Missouri Rep. Tim Jones (R- Dist. 89), who serves as majority floor leader, made a similar mistake in the Republican response to the governor’s address.

“A true leader fights for every job, every time,” Jones said.

If that were the case, we still would be “fighting” to preserve jobs in the buggy-whip industry.

The fact is, at both the state and national levels, jobs are continually created and destroyed and politicians and government leaders have no way of knowing from where the jobs of the future will be coming.

The real key to our future prosperity is freedom — the right of every individual to control his own labor and property. People are able to find their own way when freed from the shackles of overreaching and overbearing government.

Andrew B. Wilson is a resident fellow and senior writer at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

The post The Less-Is-Better Approach to Talking about Jobs appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

With the state legislature meeting in a special session this
week, lawmakers from both parties are prepared to argue in favoring
of extending $360 million in proposed tax credits to support the
creation of a “Midwest China hub” or “Aerotropolis” at Lambert-St.
Louis International Airport. Based on previous comments, some of
them will admit to a large degree of skepticism about the possibility
that Lambert will evolve into a major cargo hub, but they will go on
to say it is still worth taking a shot at making it happen — given a
huge potential payoff in jobs and increased economic activity.

And on Thursday evening, President Barack Obama will no
doubt echo some of the same sentiments when he addresses a joint
session of Congress on the subject of job creation. We can’t afford to
stand around and “do nothing,” he or his supporters will suggest.
But there is nothing in the history of our state or nation that
suggests government intervention in the marketplace is an effective
tool for job creation. Indeed, when governments use taxpayers’
money in trying to pick economic winners and losers, they almost
invariably pick losers and compound failure.

Milton Friedman, the great economist, observed that people
have every incentive to economize and to get as much value as they
can for each dollar they spend when they are shopping for
themselves, but they are far more likely to be careless or wasteful
when they are spending someone else’s money for the benefit of
others. This is the case when you use an expense account to pay for
someone else’s lunch.

It is also the case when politicians or lawmakers pretend to have the
needed knowledge and expertise to channel a large sum of taxpayers’ money
to selected businesses or industries on the theory that these politically favored
and politically-dependent enterprises will do a bang-up job of
promoting the public good.

Politicians often argue that even one job created through tax credits or
subsidies is better than none. But this ignores the opportunity cost of
expending large amounts of taxpayers’ dollars for little economic benefit. If
the government takes a million dollars to create one job, that’s a million
dollars that could have gone to more efficient and productive ventures in the
private sector — creating stronger and better jobs for more people.

If Missouri lawmakers have some $360 million to spare and want to
put it to good use, they should return the money to all of the citizens of this
state through tax cuts or refunds. As Friedman pointed out, they will know
how to get the most bang for the buck.

The federal government should heed the same advice when it comes
to making a choice between expanded public works or reducing taxation,
leaving people free to choose how to spend a greater share of their own
income.

Andrew B. Wilson is a fellow at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market
solutions for Missouri Public Policy.

The post The Job-Killing Effect of the ‘Do Something’ Mentality appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Puzder argued before an engaged crowd that the current regulatory burden and financial uncertainty brought about by recent federal healthcare legislation are precisely the things standing between entrepreneurs across the country and the creation of jobs. Puzder put it quite clearly: Reduce regulations, and watch unemployment fall.

The post Job Creation: How it Really Works and Why the Government Doesn’t Understand It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Tax Breaks and Job Creation appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Hardee’s CEO: Payroll tax break not enough to spur hiring or investment appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Video clips at Ustream

The post Watch Live Tonight — Job Creation: How It Really Works and Why the Government Doesn’t Understand It appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

You’ll want to hear what he has to say. Reservations are required, so be sure to RSVP for the St. Louis event here.

The post Speakers Series on Economic Policy: Hardee’s CEO Talks Jobs! appeared first on Show-Me Institute.