Then there’s Kansas City. The regional transit authority eliminated fares in 2020, but it did not go exactly as local leaders had hoped.

“We just never found a sustainable funding source to replace the $10 million a year out of the fare box,” said Eric Bunch, a city councilman in Kansas City, Mo., and a board member of the Kansas City Area Transportation Authority.

Rose also included perspectives from urban transit researchers, who note that reducing fares is less critical than improving service speed, frequency, and reliability.

For KCUR’s audience, Rose’s framing may have come as a surprise. While the station occasionally raised funding concerns, it largely avoided discussing how fare elimination could affect service.

In late 2019, a KCUR piece quoted then-Councilwoman Kathryn Shields, who lead the council’s finance committee, as pointing out that no one was addressing how to offset losses at the farebox. Instead, KCUR’s early coverage framed zero fare as a breakthrough, not a policy gamble — quoting advocates and then-KCATA leader Robbie Makinen extensively while declining to examine the underlying “research” he invoked.

None of the KCUR reporting during the debate seriously contended with the service impact of zero fare. None sought out urban transit researchers, as Rose did. None considered the so-called research that Makinen cited in support of the policy. KCUR’s framing heavily favored advocates—including an exceedingly fawning piece on Makinen himself—and did not interrogate claimed benefits.

In May, 2021, KCUR quoted Makinen as saying, “When [zero fare] started, everyone said it wouldn’t work, I believe we’ve proved them wrong.” His confidence was premature.

Early in the debate, research, ridership surveys, and national reporting—some of which I cited in a January 2020 Kansas City Star column—already pointed to the risks of fare-free transit.

KCUR’s most direct acknowledgment of fare-free drawbacks came belatedly, in 2022, when it reprinted a story from The Beacon on unreliable service and long waits faced by bus riders. KCUR’s own reporters only asked, “Should Kansas City Keep Buses Free?” in 2023 when the damage was evident.

Back in that December 2019 piece, KCUR quoted then-Councilman Kevin McManus as saying, “When we take the fareboxes away, nobody wants to be on this council putting them back.” Six years later, six of the 13 council members who voted to remove fares in 2019 voted to reinstate them in 2025.

KCUR deserves credit for eventually publishing more substantive fare-free coverage. But had this level of scrutiny come earlier—before the rise in operator assaults, service cuts, and staffing concerns—the public conversation might have been far more informed. Policymakers might have avoided their embarrassing reversals. And the harmful impact to those who depend on public transit might have been reduced, or avoided altogether.

The post KCUR Finally Confronts the Reality of Fare-Free Transit appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Phase 1: Build the Kansas City Streetcar and make it free to ride.

Phase 2: Spend $25,000 to wrap a streetcar in a Barbie theme:

Kansas City, Missouri, unveiled a Barbie-themed streetcar, dubbed the “Dream Streetcar” earlier this month. The streetcar is decked out in familiar bubblegum-pink wrapping and even rewrites the city’s name as “Kensas City.” A lucky passenger can even choose a seat decked out to resemble characters from the recent Barbie film, like “Stereotypical Barbie, President Barbie, Cowboy Ken, and even Allan.”

Oh, and the whole thing cost taxpayers $25,000.

According to records obtained by KCUR, Kansas City’s NPR affiliate, the hefty public spending is due to the fact that the Dream Streetcar is not actually a sponsored ad for the blockbuster Barbie movie that premiered in July. Instead, it’s a project by the Kansas City Streetcar Authority (KCSA) to increase ridership, even though the streetcar is free to ride.

Phase 3: . . . Profit?

I’m of course kidding about “profit” even being a consideration here—this is government after all—but it is off-putting to see precious taxpayer resources being spent so frivolously. Ridership numbers on the streetcar have no bearing on anything except maybe the egos of city officials. Hit the link, too, for quotes from yours truly and Show-Me Institute alumnus Patrick Tuohey, now at the Better Cities Project.

The post Welcome to “Kensas City”: Barbie-Themed Streetcar Wrap Costs Taxpayers $25,000 appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Nationally, there are several indicators that learning remotely works for a lot of families. The number of homeschooled students doubled this year. An NPR/Ipsos poll found that nearly 30 percent of families were considering sticking with virtual learning next year. Another tracking poll found that 45 percent of parents want a virtual and in-person hybrid approach next year.

Missouri families who prefer virtual learning have the option of enrolling in the Missouri Course Access and Virtual School Program. But their assigned public school district has to cover their cost. It’s not surprising, therefore, that several school districts in the St. Louis region are going to continue their virtual programs for students who want them. One local superintendent was quoted as saying that extending virtual learning programs will “prevent” students from leaving for the statewide program. Not exactly—parents can still choose either. In fact, a poll of Missouri parents in December found that nearly a quarter graded their children’s remote learning experience as a “D” or an “F.” Regardless, districts are apparently feeling a little heat from the competition.

As the dust settles from the great COVID education disruption, we will discover more about how the experience affected families and learning. I suspect that traditional public school districts will be forced to recognize that the power shift from school administrators to parents is not going to reverse itself any time soon.

The post Some St. Louis School Districts Are Responding to Parents appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

According to enrollment counts taken this fall, there are about 6,000 fewer kindergartners enrolled in Missouri public schools this year than there were last year and about 9,000 fewer pre-kindergartners. That’s a ten-percent drop for kindergarten and a 30-percent drop for pre-K. Where have they gone? According to a recent article, the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) is “exploring” whether they are being homeschooled, have switched to a private school, or just didn’t enroll. It’s important to figure out where these children are, who is footing the bill for their education this year, and whether they’re likely to ever be public school students.

Similar to what has been reported across dozens of states, public school enrollment across all grades in Missouri is down. There are almost 25,000 students missing this year, and most of them are the youngest kids. It’s not surprising that in a year when districts are changing how and where they’re delivering education, sometimes multiple times, frustrated parents are attempting to take control and make their own calls about their children’s education. According to a national analysis by NPR, parents are passing on public school pre-K and kindergarten this year because they just don’t think virtual instruction is right for very young children. Equally, even if in-person learning is offered, they didn’t like the idea of their little ones starting school in the “weird” environment of masks and social distancing. As a result, they’re choosing to either homeschool, find a private school, or get together with friends and neighbors to create their own “micro school.”

It’s important to ask: If these children are beginning their elementary school experience somewhere else, then what is the likelihood that they will return to their assigned public school once things return to normal? Doesn’t it seem likely that some percentage of these parents will make their choice permanent?

In addition to having a better understanding of how and where Missouri students are receiving education this year, we also need to know where these children are because they come (or go) with dollars attached. The state of Missouri allocates roughly $6,500 for each public-school student, with additions for low-income students, students with disabilities, and students who are learning English as a second language. This is known as the “state adequacy target,” as it is the amount considered “adequate” to provide a high-quality education. What amount is adequate to educate students who aren’t even enrolled?

Enrollment counts and attendance rates, which are used to determine state funding, are probably a little crazy this year. But districts have an out. Missouri law allows districts to use the highest of the last two years’ enrollment numbers. And this year only, they can assume an attendance rate of 94 percent. There are countless stories about the difficulty of taking attendance this year, but the assumption that the attendance is actually 94 percent is ridiculous. In terms of the bottom line, the state could potentially spend over $100 million per year for the next two years on 15,000 students who were never enrolled in a public school. To reiterate, children who were never public-school students may be counted as such and funded as such until the 2022–23 school year.

While the state of Missouri will be sending millions of dollars to districts for students they never educated, parents are scrambling to figure out education solutions that work for their families and, in many cases, how to pay for them. They deserve a little relief. One free option for parents would be to enroll in the Missouri virtual program, MOCAP, which should be seamless this year and not require district permission. Equally, all parents, regardless of their income, should be able to create learning pods with neighbors and friends, and they should be able to access a portion of their state education funding to do so. Finally, some states, such as Oklahoma, are helping parents who are struggling financially cover private school tuition. Missouri should do the same.

One outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic is that State education funds are being misdirected to districts for thousands of students who were never enrolled, while parents are paying out of pocket for their children’s education. It’s time for bold action to help every Missouri student access an education environment that works for them and their family, not just the ones who can afford to pay for it on their own.

The post Where Are the Kindergartners? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A voucher would be . . . taking public money and pouring it into a non-public entity. But pre-K doesn’t work like that and this tax doesn’t work like that. It’s not a voucher. What we are doing with pre-K instead of pouring money into [schools] from the public trough is we’re pouring more money into all of the [schools].

The mayor seems to think that money raised through a three-eighths percent sales tax is not the “public trough.” But his is a distinction without a difference; a program does not need to spend particular tax dollars in order to be considered a voucher.

It’s true, however, that many voucher programs use education dollars. National Public Radio, in an explainer piece on vouchers, said only that they are state dollars taken from “what the state would have otherwise spent to educate” children. Ed Choice, an organization that supports education vouchers, described vouchers as coming from “funds typically spent by a school district.”

Regardless of the tax source, vouchers are simply public dollars made available to families to offset the costs of the school they choose for their children, essentially functioning like a scholarship. Those public dollars can be raised from property taxes as in the case with local school funding, income taxes as in the case of federal programs, or sales taxes as in the case with the Mayor’s pre-K program. But they are all voucher programs.

It is understandable why the Mayor, in pitching his program to the education establishment, wants to avoid the term. Vouchers, and programs like it, have become toxic among public school bureaucracies since it would break their monopoly on public dollars for education. This is the main reason the public school districts in Kansas City oppose the Mayor’s proposal, but giving parents the power to choose which program is best for their kids is the strongest aspect of his plan.

Mayor James should be congratulated for recognizing and answering the demand for more and greater parental involvement in their children’s education. School choice is the trend in Kansas City and, despite its other significant shortcomings, his pre-K voucher program at least respects that.

The post Yes, the Mayor’s Pre-K Program Is a Voucher appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Teacher compensation is an important policy discussion. Yet, too often the mere suggestion of change is met with hostility by teachers. As a former teacher myself, I understand that there is safety in salary schedules along with uncertainty about what they might be replaced with. Indeed, one retired teacher took to the newspaper’s pages to make this point. Although she didn’t argue specifically for salary schedules, it was clear that she was averse to change. But many people are examining how we pay teachers, and they often reach the same conclusion I reached—we need to change how we do business. But what should that change look like?

On July 27, a National Public Radio station in Michigan ran a story called, “Are we thinking about teacher pay all wrong?” The piece described Washington, D.C.’s merit-based pay system. As the piece notes, “There are two parts to the D.C. pay system: an annual bonus of up to $25,000 after one year of being rated ‘highly effective,’ and an increase in base salary of up to $27,000 for teachers who are rated ‘highly effective’ two or more years in a row.” Rigorous evaluation has shown that D.C.’s system, which is a combination of pay reform and a new teacher evaluation process, has improved the teacher workforce and led to an increase in student achievement.

There is of course still debate as to whether the D.C. model could be effectively implemented in other cities, let alone in rural parts of Missouri. Nevertheless, Missouri students and teachers would benefit from a critical examination of our teacher pay policies.

Unfortunately, too many teachers (like the one who wrote a response to me) and their union representatives seem unwilling to have a serious discussion on this important matter. One teacher in the NPR story suggested that we “need to offer starting teachers an apprentice pay for 5 years at $55,000. If they are effective after 5 years, bump them up to $75,000. If they are highly effective pay them $100,000.” Such a structure simply is not economically feasible. The response from David Hecker, of the American Federation of Teachers of Michigan, was equally unsatisfying. He first suggested that “starting pay should be comparable to other professions,” but went on to ask, “Should the senior teacher get more for experience, or the younger teacher who needs to make a decent living so they can be attracted to and stay in the field? That should never be the trade off.” His answer displays a fundamental lack of economic understanding. Of course there is a trade-off! There is always a trade-off.

We should not continue to pay teachers solely based on years of experience and extra degrees, especially when those things are not closely related to student outcomes. But in any case, if we are going to have a fruitful conversation, teachers need to come to the table with thoughtful suggestions. Maybe then we could create a system that truly fosters excellence and rewards teachers for the hard work they do.

The post Reconsidering Teacher Pay appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

However, one line of criticism has irked me. The headline of this story encapsulates it well: “Indiana’s School Choice Program Often Underserves Special Needs Students.”

It is true that a smaller percentage of voucher-using students in Indiana are identified as having special needs. It is also true that the maximum voucher amount in the state is $4,800.

That $4,800 number was reached because opponents of vouchers argued that the program should not be able to access local property tax dollars or federal dollars for low-income students or students with special needs. The voucher is derived only from the funding that the state allocates to educate children. What’s more, it also leaves behind 10% of state funding so that traditional public schools have money for fixed costs like debt service and capital upgrades, because opponents also argued that even if students leave, traditional public schools still have to keep the lights on, the building heated, and the parking lot paved.

So opponents constrain the funding amount to a level that can barely pay to educate a student with zero special needs in an already efficient school and then complain when schools don’t take on harder (and more expensive to educate) children.

It’s heads we win, tails you lose. If you actually get the money you need to meet the needs of students with special needs, you are sucking the system dry. If you don’t, and thus don’t serve those kids, you’re discriminating. School choice programs can’t win.

We should be realistic about the tradeoffs in the design of school choice programs. Limiting the amount of money that follows each child will shape who gets served and who doesn’t. If you want voucher programs to serve more students with special needs, send more money with them. If you don’t want to send that money, how is it fair to cry “discrimination” when students aren’t served?

The post School Choice Criticism: Heads We Win, Tails You Lose appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In a recent interview on Missouri Viewpoints, Cox said

I’m a bit of a skeptic on how much difference it makes to have a great economic development department. People move where housing is affordable; where life is good—livable communities. And by livable I mean low cost of living, good traffic, a place where you can raise your family from before you have children to the point where you have children and move later.

This may be disheartening to policy wonks and anyone working in the economic development field, but Cox is not alone. In 2014, economist Enrico Moretti gave an interview to National Public Radio where he said the same thing about cities that had become innovation centers:

"[Interviewer] This is the unsettling part of your book: How do cities replicate these innovative job clusters?

"[Moretti] It's very tough, because if you look historically where the innovation clusters are located, almost none of them [were] created by some deliberate, explicit policy. It's really hard to engineer an innovation cluster. We talk about Seattle, but if you look at a lot of the clusters, they were all born in very random, often serendipitous, ways. So it's really hard for policymakers to engineer from scratch."

This is important because Kansas City leaders are already on the record talking about how they want to build a city for the future. But how likely is it that city officials will be able to legislate into reality an as-yet-imaginary Kansas City technology district. The takeaway from Cox’s research is that policymakers ought to understand Kansas City’s strengths and build on them rather than just imitate what other cities are doing.

The post What Can City Leaders Do To Grow A City? Not Much appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

All I could think was, here we go again.

If you’ve followed education policy for any length of time this routine looks familiar. Researchers or policymakers visit some other country that performs better than we do on international assessments and then come back with the secret sauce that makes them do so well. The recommendations are so anodyne that that anyone with a passing knowledge of the education system will probably agree with them. The policy flavor of the month (national education standards, universal pre-K, etc.) is usually highlighted. Rinse and repeat.

For a while we were told to emulate Shanghai—until we learned that Shanghai systematically excludes disadvantaged students from its testing pool to juice its scores. Then it was Finland, at least until Finland’s scores dropped precipitously on the very test that ushered in its rise to prominence.

Here is the problem with this approach, and why it never actually yields the information we’re looking for: it violates the basic precepts of research design. If you want to know if a certain policy affects an outcome, you develop a hypothesis and test it. You follow children that are subject to the policy and children that aren’t—doing your best to make sure all other aspects of the two groups’ educational environments are identical—and you see what happens. If the children who were subject to the policy do better than those who weren’t, then you have reason to believe that the policy caused the improvement.

“Do what the best schools do” research does the exact opposite of that. It sees a result it likes and then tries to work backwards to the cause without isolating other variables that might also explain the outcome. That is not how science works. Are there places, for example, that do the very things that Finland or Shanghai or any of these other countries do that don’t meet with success?  Are there countries meeting with success that don’t do these things? As I’ve written before, the Netherlands is a very high-performing country that is marked by an incredible degree of school choice. So why does a universal voucher system always seem to be missing from the list of recommendations? In short, we have no idea whether the policies these folks advocate are really behind these countries’ successes.

I don’t want to say there’s nothing we can learn from other states or other countries about how to improve education here at home. However, if we are going to make claims that one policy or another causes a particular outcome, we need to back those claims up with research done the proper way. 

The post Not This Again appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In Kansas City, it’s full steam ahead for a bad idea that is getting worse. A year ago the Star reported on the city’s plan to redevelop the Linwood Shopping Center near 31st Street and Prospect Avenue. The new development is to include a Sun Fresh Market and was originally expected to cost the city just over $11 million. Last week the Star reported the project would cost $15 million. That’s more than a 35% increase in the cost of redevelopment over one year for a project that hasn’t even started and that few really think will do a bit of good.  And recall that this is all to build a grocery store in a place where the previous grocery store failed for lack of business!

Wait—its gets worse. Not only are costs ballooning, but The Business Journal reports that the funds generated by the TIF won’t come close to covering the expense of redeveloping the store. Rob Roberts reported that the $14.9 million bond will be repaid by a TIF only expected to generate $8.5 million over 23 years.

Where will the rest of the money come from? The city employees Roberts interviewed suggested that the city could just request a super TIF to redirect more taxes from the project to the bond payments. But that’s a false distinction; either way, the money to cover the loss is coming from city coffers.

In short, it appears that city leaders are planning to lose money investing in an already-failed venture in order to pursue a policy that has no evidence backing its effectiveness. 

The post Kansas City’s Food Desert Folly appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The post Are Property Taxes for Education Fair? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

On Thursday, American Public Media broadcast a story on NPR suggesting that millennials aren't that different from previous generations at all. 

The post Millennials Moving Out appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

There are currently no figures available for how many Missouri students opted out, but the Wall Street Journal reported that 20 percent of students opted out of New York state tests this year.

A recently released survey showed that despite lobbying from an eclectic group of advocacy organizations (including Tea Party Republicans, Black Lives Matter activists, and teachers’ unions), 59 percent of Americans are opposed to parents deciding whether or not their child takes a standardized test. At the same time, the 2015 Education Next poll indicated that a large number of Americans do not believe state governments do a very good job of measuring what students learn in math and reading.

So while Americans may want to know how students are doing at the state and national level, state governments may want to rethink how they hold schools accountable.

NPR Education highlighted four alternatives to standardized testing that were featured in Anya Kamenetz’s book, Why Our Schools Are Obsessed with Standardized Testing, but You Don’t Have to Be, as follows:

(1)   Sample. Instead of every student taking a test, only a small, representative group does. This alternative wouldn’t require changing anything about the testing process or the actual test itself, but it would give many kids a break from testing year after year.

(2)   Stealth assessment. Students are tested throughout the year using low-stakes evaluations such as quizzes. The data shows which skills students have mastered at a particular moment as opposed to measuring all students in all skills at the same point in the year.

(3)   Multiple measures. This is just what it sounds like. School districts are evaluated using graduation rates, discipline, demographic information, teacher created assessments, and post-graduation outcomes. 

(4)   Social and emotional skills surveys. Studies show that students can be evaluated using nonacademic measures. Some districts are using measures like hope, for example, as a way to evaluate their students’ high school and college potential. In 2014, 64 percent of Rockwood students reported feeling hopeful.

(5)   Inspections. This type of policy places an emphasis on student assessments, as well as presentations, performances, and reports. In the United Kingdom, for example, inspectors observe lessons, evaluate work, and interview students and staff members.

What should Missouri’s public school accountability system look like? Is it really necessary to test all students every year? Are there better measures than just reading and math proficiency? These are tough questions, but taking a long look at alternatives to standardized testing might provide answers.

The post Opt Out? Or Opt In to Other Accountability Measures appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Is such an out-migration happening? Let’s dig into the numbers.

One frequently hyperlinked story comes from Sam Zeff of KCUR.  (A transcript can be found here.)  Unfortunately, it only offers two real data points. First:

“With just six weeks to go before classes begin, there are about 700 open jobs in Kansas, double, Wilson says, the number they usually have this close to school.”

The problem with this statistic? It has no context. On Monday, The New York Times dedicated its front page  to a story on states all across the country struggling to recruit and retain teachers. As author Motoko Rich points out:

“In California, the number of people entering teacher preparation programs dropped by more than 55 percent from 2008 to 2012, according to the California Commission on Teacher Credentialing. Nationally, the drop was 30 percent from 2010 to 2014, according to federal data. Alternative programs like Teach for America, which will place about 4,000 teachers in schools across the country this fall, have also experienced recruitment problems.”

This is a macro-trend in education right now, not just an issue for Kansas. To wit, the Times story focuses on California, where voters dramatically raised taxes via Prop 30 at roughly the same time Kansas was cutting them. They’re struggling just as much, if not more.

The second bit of hard evidence from the KCUR story is even more underwhelming:

“Data from the Missouri Department of Elementary and Secondary Education suggest there is indeed a migration of teachers from Kansas to Missouri. In 2011 before huge tax cuts were enacted, only 85 applications for Missouri teaching licenses were filed with a Kansas address. In the next three years, as school budgets were slashed, applications doubled.”

That would be around 170 teachers total, and only 85 more than normal.  For a little perspective, Kansas has 41,243 teachers, so those 85 teachers represent 0.2% of Kansas’s teaching force. I’m not sure “migration” is the right word for that.

Probably the second most cited resource is this AP report that found 3,720 Kansas teachers leaving either Kansas or the profession entirely last school year, compared to an unnamed date in the recent past when only 2,150 left.  

Again, context: Using the numbers above, 3,720 teachers make up roughly 9 percent of Kansas’s teaching force. According to the National Center for Education Statistics, 8 percent of teachers leave the profession nationally every year, and an additional 8 percent move to different schools.  That means Kansas’s numbers are right in line with, or possibly even better than, national averages.

Kansas has not been immune to national trends affecting the number of people becoming or remaining teachers, but I see little justification for Kansas-specific alarm. I know it doesn’t fit the preferred narrative, but the truth often doesn’t.

The post Is there evidence of a “teacher exodus” from Kansas? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

City manager Troy Schulte said the city will spend $950,000 to buy the existing strip mall and parking lot from its current owners, then another $11,050,000 to demolish the empty grocery store that now sits on the site. The city will borrow the money for the project, then repay the loans with projected taxes generated by the development and a special one-cent sales tax collected at its stores.

The city will lease the property to Sun Fresh for $10 a year, but will not provide any subsidies for operating the store.

That last sentence made me laugh: The city will spend $12 million to buy and build the place and charge the tenant $10 a year—but there won’t be any operational subsidies, as if rent isn’t an operational cost.

The problem is that the people who make a living running grocery stores by investing their own money do not think this is a good idea. If they did, the original grocery store might not have remained vacant for 10 years and the proposed grocery store wouldn’t need such a steep subsidy. Taxpayers are underwriting it because it is not a good idea.

Even the Kansas City Star editorial board is skeptical, offering, “The project is a financial gamble for taxpayers.” They concluded, “History shows that a lone project can’t really lift up an entire community. It takes a much bigger effort to do that.” This is true, according to an NPR story last year:

“The presumption is, if you build a store, people are going to come,” says Stephen Matthews, professor in the departments of sociology, anthropology and demography at Penn State University. To check that notion, he and colleagues from the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine recently surveyed residents of one low-income community in Philadelphia before and after the opening of a glistening new supermarket brimming with fresh produce.

What they’re finding, Matthews says, is a bit surprising: “We don’t find any difference at all. … We see no effect of the store on fruit and vegetable consumption.”

It really isn’t surprising. If there was a demand for fruits and vegetables, someone would be providing them. But the demand isn’t there, even when shiny new stores are built.

Once again, Kansas City leaders are embarking on an expensive and ill-considered campaign using public dollars that does not address the real underlying problems. When it fails, the city and its residents will be no better off than before, just poorer. And the infrastructure, crime, and education issues that really need to be addressed will be that much worse.

The post Kansas City Embarks on New Bad Idea appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

But is government’s use of taxpayer dollars more successful than people making their own decisions?

Economist Enrico Moretti was interviewed on NPR’s Here and Now about his book, The New Geography of Jobs. He was asked about how successfully innovative regions are created and replicated [segment begins at 8:27]:

“[Interviewer] This is the unsettling part of your book: How do cities replicate these innovative job clusters?

“[Moretti] It’s very tough, because if you look historically where the innovation clusters are located, almost none of them [were] created by some deliberate, explicit policy. It’s really hard to engineer an innovation cluster. We talk about Seattle, but if you look at a lot of the clusters, they were all born in very random, often serendipitous, ways. So it’s really hard for policy makers to engineer from scratch.”

There is no magic formula known to bureaucrats or politicians about which companies and industries will be successful in the future. But they use public resources time and again chasing that white rabbit of jobs and growth. And unfortunately, the impact of taxing many businesses to subsidize a few is more often than not a recipe for destroying jobs, or at least keeping them away.

A better investment, as Show-Me has argued for years, is for government’s action to be broad and neutral: keep taxes low for everyone, maintain infrastructure, deliver necessary city services, and ensure quality education. Maybe those aren’t as appealing as large edifices named after politicians, but they are more successful.

The post How to Attract Jobs, or at Least Not Repel Them appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

And with more than a quarter of Spaniards out of work, more people than ever before have been crisscrossing the city with their violins and voices, for extra cash. People squeeze giant accordions onto the metro, and roll amplifiers on carts across cobblestones.

The street performers are a tourist attraction. But Madrid’s mayor, Ana Botella, says the clamor has reached its limit.

If this sounds like an idea that could only gain traction in a country known for fascist leadership, consider that Saint Louis did the exact same thing until recently. The Show-Me Institute has highlighted efforts to reform occupational licensing for things such as performers and valet parking.

It might be in the city’s best interest to regulate the activity to provide for passable sidewalks and streets, and to protect Madrid’s tourism industry. However, one such group of performers, called the Potato Omelette Band, objected to the requirement and secretly videotaped its audition, which contained lyrics critical of the city effort:

“Oh, my poor Madrid, my city. They are kicking out musicians and artists, and replacing them with police,” the song goes. “There is no jury better than the hat — the hat you put on the floor to collect donations.”

Indeed. While Americans debate whether government ought to act on an issue or whether it even has the power to act, musicians in Madrid remind us of the simple truth that nothing is better suited to solve problems than free people operating in a free market.

The post There Is No Jury Better Than The Hat appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Economists of all stripes recognize the impacts that imposing such a wage on these employers would have. Most notably, it would reduce the number of jobs available for entry-level, unskilled workers. Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, a left-leaning think tank that labor unions partly fund, noted on NPR’s Marketplace, “I’m sure you would see a lot of jobs lost.” Even a liberal economist agrees: Raising wages above that which market forces determine is a recipe for job loss.

How do Baker and others of similar views assuage their conscience at this prospect? When a hypothetical job loss of 20 to 30 percent was suggested, Baker responded that the remaining workers would “take home twice as much pay. They’re still way better off.” However, at the higher, artificial wage, fast-food employers will sensibly opt to keep the most productive workers. For the rest, well, they’ll just have to find employment elsewhere or be driven to rely on government assistance.

This episode and liberal support for it recalls an argument that economist John Stuart Mill made almost 150 years ago. Mill staunchly supported the rise of Unionism in England. Mill viewed union workers as the best representatives of the “upright and public spirited working man.” Mill argued that by excluding the “ignorant and untrained” part of the working class, unions benefited society. He believed that “We do them [the unskilled masses] no wrong by intrenching ourselves behind a barrier, to exclude those who competition would bring down our wages, without more than momentarily raising theirs.” Unions, in other words, would drive the unskilled and poor to the wall, reducing their numbers. And with a smaller labor force, there would be no downward pressure on wages overall.

Haven’t we learned anything over the past 150 years? Mill was just as wrong then as supporters of raising the minimum wage or mandating living wages are today. If everyone agrees that imposing wages that exceed those based on mutually beneficial decisions of workers and employers alike leads to increased unemployment for those who need work the most — the poor and the unskilled — how can responsible civic leaders call for further increases in the minimum wage?

The post I’ll Gladly Cost You Your Job On Tuesday For My Pay Raise Today appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Moody’s Investors Service has changed the rating outlook to negative from stable on nine state and local governments, including the State of Missouri, and two state housing finance agency programs, in conjunction with an updated analysis of which Aaa-rated issuers have indirect linkages to the federal government.

KBIA, Columbia’s NPR affiliate, had a very interesting story this weekend that more closely examined Moody’s decision. In a story that quotes Show-Me’s own Joe Haslag, the reason for the change in outlook is pretty clear: Medicaid. Indeed, the Medicaid expansion under the Affordable Care Act will cost Missouri (us) nearly $3 billion over the next decade, and that does not include the cost to the federal government (again, also us.) How will we pay for all of this spending? Those plans do not appear to be forthcoming, unless “rack up a bunch of debt” constitutes a plan these days.

And increasingly, Missouri legislators are getting more vocal about their concerns regarding Medicaid:

“We’re faced right now with making a pretty darn big decision on Medicaid, and that is if we’re going to basically hitch our wagon a lot tighter to the federal government,” said Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Kurt Schaefer, R-Columbia. “What does that mean for long-term economic stability for the state of Missouri?

“It appears to me that what got us the negative outlook, we are simply going to double down on that now if we do Medicaid expansion,” Schaeffer [sic] added.

Schaefer and Moody’s are correct in questioning the financial position of the state in the context of potentially massive new state spending that is heavily reliant on federal dollars. We should all be so concerned.

The post Prospect Of Medicaid Expansion Appears To Have Turned Missouri’s Credit Outlook Negative appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

This provides the perfect narrative for what some might consider to be very compelling and policy-minded journalism: A tragedy has occurred and a cell phone was involved. Shouldn’t there be a law against that?

Consider this line from the New York Times’ series of articles on the subject: “With virtually every American owning a cellphone, distracted driving has become a threat on the nation’s roads.” Indeed, in September 2009, the newspaper wrote that it was time to crack down, saying that “…texting at the wheel is a national hazard that calls for a firm federal response.”

This weekend, I heard an interview on National Public Radio with Matt Richtel, the author of several Times articles regarding the dangers of cell phone use while driving, discussing whether he considered himself to be an advocate. Richtel provided the standard journalist line, saying that he just thinks it is important to ask tough questions.

Well, here are two more.

1. Traffic fatalities, crashes, accidents, etc. have declined dramatically. If driving is safer than ever, why is there such concern?

The argument I hear again and again (most recently when I sat in on Donnybrook) is that banning cell phones while driving is about safety. However, Missourinet reports that this year, traffic fatalities are headed for a 62-year low. The same trend is seen on the national level. Fatality, injury, and crash rates have all declined substantially since 1990.

If fatalities, crashes, and injuries are down, then I hardly think that we are experiencing a “national hazard” that warrants an outright ban on cell phone use while driving. Of course, there have been accidents where cell phones were clearly the cause. However, with traffic accidents and fatalities down during the same time period that cell phones became popular, cell phone use is clearly not as dangerous as some fear.

And, even if an action comes with a small amount of risk, that does not mean we should pass a law to ban it. In fact, driving with children in the car may be more distracting than those pesky cell phones. Should we ban driving with children? Are we in the midst of a national driving-with-children epidemic?

2. How could this possibly be enforced? And, do we really want to create another vague reason to stop and question citizens?

How on earth could a ban on cell phone use be enforced? Would a police officer be able to pull you over if you look down briefly while driving? How could the officer discern whether you are talking on a hands-free phone or merely singing along to the radio?

The New York Times should know better than to advocate for additional vague ways for police to stop and question individuals. After all, the Times did an excellent study of a “stop, question, and frisk” policing policy. The newspaper found that after a drastic decline in violent crimes in New York City, the number of stops the police made increased dramatically.

Knowing that police officers can sometimes abuse their ability to stop, question, search, and detain individuals, why would anyone advocate for more vague reasons to stop and question people? Driving dangerously is already illegal. What more do cell phone ban advocates need?

Indeed, the last thing I want to see after the passage of federal legislation that allows for the indefinite detention of U.S. citizens on U.S. soil is another vague reason that police can use to stop and search citizens.

The solution is not to ban cell phones.

I do not condone texting while driving. I also am not a fan of eating while driving, or letting your adorable pet distract you while driving. Though it would make an excellent point and is legal, I do not recommend that you hold a banana to your ear and pretend to talk to it while driving.

I was in a nearly fatal car accident when my family first moved to Michigan. The culprit? Ice. Should driving in Michigan be banned from October through April? Obviously not. Instead, I support independent groups working to inform drivers about dangerous winter driving conditions. Similarly, efforts to educate drivers about the dangers of distracted driving may end up saving lives.

But an outright ban? It is an overreaction to a tragedy.

The post What’s Next? Indefinite Detention Of People Who Text And Drive? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.