On November 5, voters in Platte County will decide on a new “children’s services fund” tax. The proposed quarter-cent sales tax will fund mental health services for children. We all want to help kids, right? It may at first glance seem to be an easy choice, but Platte County citizens should think twice before supporting this new tax.

Politicizing charity is a dangerous road to go down. So is creating another, obscure taxing district with little oversight. The established children’s services fund in Lafayette County provides a useful case study for those problems. The fund had operated for years with almost no oversight. Those operating it routinely engaged in improper activities, including funding charities that were affiliated with board members and funding a private business that wasn’t a nonprofit. After a whistleblower called attention to these problems, the state auditor investigated and referred the fund to authorities.

If voters pass this tax and create this fund, will some kids benefit? Of course. But entangling philanthropy with politics, creating a new taxing agency with limited oversight, and making charities dependent on government are not the best ways to go about helping kids in Platte County.

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Everyone is for this, right? I mean, who can be against supporting kids?

I’m all for supporting kids. I have three of them. What I don’t support is abusing the political process to turn voluntary charitable giving into mandated taxation and taking the wonderful aims of philanthropy and politicizing them.

The two charitable agencies that gathered these petition signatures and are supporting this tax do great work for kids. Those two agencies, Synergy Services and Beacon Mental Health, are also going to benefit from this tax, and will almost certainly seek grants from it. (Both agencies have received funding from the Jackson or Clay county children’s services funds.) There is nothing wrong with that, but let’s not pretend that these charities have no self-interest in this process.

The county board that will be created to distribute the funds to the various non-profits will likely have very little oversight, and that has been a real issue on boards like this before, especially in Lafayette County. The last thing Platte County—or any county—needs is another minor taxing body with limited oversight.

While I am not a doctor or counselor, I also think it is worth questioning the new assumption that more mental-health therapy is always good. Undoubtedly, many kids need mental-health services and some kids in Platte County would benefit from these expanded programs. But Abigail Shrier’s bestselling book, Bad Therapy, details some of the pitfalls of this approach. From a Commentary review of the book:

“With unprecedented help from mental health experts, we have raised the loneliest, most anxious, depressed, pessimistic, helpless, and fearful generation on record,” Shrier writes. Moreover, “as treatments for anxiety and depression have become more sophisticated and more readily available, adolescent anxiety and depression have ballooned.”

This tax vote may seem like an easy “yes” vote in Platte County. I hope the voters think long and hard about it first.

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Everyone wants to help kids thrive, right? Who could be against a new tax in Platte County to help kids get more mental health services? Well, we are. Politicizing charity and mandating it through law is a dangerous path to take. Platte County citizens would be well served to think twice before going down this road.

There is an ongoing petition drive in Platte County to create the Platte County Children’s Services Fund. If approved by voters, the plan would institute a new sales tax to fund mental health services for children in Platte County. It would create a new board in charge of overseeing the collection and distribution of the funds as grants to eligible children’s charities.

Charity should not be politized, yet that is exactly what this proposal will do in Platte County. Several years ago, the children’s service fund in St. Louis County became a flashpoint in the county executive’s race. The fund was slow to distribute money and had grown to a balance of $78 million. That large balance became a point of contention in the campaign, made worse when questionable activities with the funds led to the firing of the children’s service fund director and an FBI investigation. Even without that level of controversy, charities will still be forced to play politics. Board members of various Platte County charities that might receive funds will have to start taking that into consideration when they decide whom to support in various county political races. One can’t risk backing the wrong horse and putting the charity’s funding in jeopardy. It’s machine politics at its most insidious.

Any future Platte County Children’s Service Fund would be a special taxing district, and the last thing Platte County needs is another obscure taxing entity with little accountability and even less oversight. The children’s service fund in Lafayette County, on the eastern edge of the Kansas City region, provides a useful case study for those problems. The fund had operated for years with almost no oversight. Those operating it routinely engaged in improper activities, including funding charities that were affiliated with board members, funding charitable activities that were not eligible for funds in the first place, and funding a private business that wasn’t a nonprofit. After a whistleblower brought this to light, the state auditor investigated and referred the fund to authorities for possible Medicaid fraud. If you think the future Platte County children’s fund will be immune from these incidents, you should disabuse yourself of that notion.

If Platte County voters pass the new tax and create a children’s service fund, will some kids benefit? Of course some will. But citizens need to consider all the possible effects of this endeavor. Creating a new taxing agency with no oversight, entangling philanthropy with politics, and making charities dependent on government largesse is not a recipe for making life better in Platte County. Let’s allow these charities do what they were intended to do—help kids—without the heavy hand of government involvement.

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One of those effects—severe real estate blight—is immediately obvious to any tourist. Abandoned warehouses line the riverfront and entire neighborhoods in north St. Louis are decaying.   

But two unlikely allies are trying to solve the problem by philanthropic means.

The St. Louis Post Dispatch reports on an effort by a new organization, the St. Louis Blight Authority, to address the blight crisis by demolishing vacant and abandoned homes:

Tech billionaire Jack Dorsey, a St. Louis native and co-founder and CEO of both Square Inc. and Twitter, along with Detroit native Bill Pulte, whose grandfather founded national homebuilder Pulte Homes, were paying for the demolitions — $500,000 for a pilot program to completely clear more than 130 lots in a four-block area of the northwest St. Louis neighborhood hard hit by abandonment and vacancy.

However, the Post-Dispatch article explains the initial pilot phase will only knock down 30 structures. It’s a good first step, but it will make trivial progress toward solving the problem. St. Louis has 7,000 vacant buildings and more than 12,000 vacant lots.

The blight crisis will not solve itself, and Missouri’s major cities already use economic development programs that haven’t been shown to improve the situation. Could private resources, invested in an ambitious project, successfully remove blight in St. Louis? And is the St. Louis Blight Authority the entity to usher in success?

From the Post-Dispatch: “Dorsey and Pulte hope to inspire other philanthropists to contribute to the effort and perhaps expand it to other city neighborhoods.”

With the price tag for total blight removal estimated at $70 million, inspiration won’t cover the bill. But it’s a place to start.   

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Senate Bill 196 creates a fund to allow private donors to help defray the costs of building a 144-mile long hiking and biking trail, which runs east–west south of the Katy Trail. The bill was needed because, while the trail is a priority for policymakers, current state funding isn’t enough to acquire and construct the trail.

This is good news for Missourians and, in particular, outdoor-recreation enthusiasts. It’s also good news for liberty-minded folks who favor funding infrastructure and other public goods privately (and voluntarily). Should negotiations between the current landowner (a railroad) and the state go well, and should enough money be raised, Missouri could have one of the longer continuous trails around.   

While this isn’t the first privately-funded trail project in the state (there are some very nice private biking trails and parks, especially this one in Springfield), it is exciting to see the infrastructure in place to make such a large-scale project happen. Congratulations to policymakers for doing what makes entirely too much sense: creating the opportunity for enthusiasts to give to projects they’re passionate about.

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In a blog post on the organization’s website, the Imagination Library announced that to date they have distributed 92,919,139 books and are currently distributing them at a rate of over 1 million books per month. One million a month! Incredible.

So how does she do it? The Imagination Library partners with local organizations and provides all of the necessary administrative support as long as local funders can be recruited to help cover the cost of buying books (about $25 per child per year). With that, any child in the geographic area that the local partners identify can get a monthly shipment of age-appropriate books for free.

The roaring success of the Imagination Library is a story of America’s vibrant civil society, that diverse patchwork of individuals, families, nonprofits, religious organizations, and social organizations that shape our communities and contribute to our well-being. A vibrant society is one that leverages the civil society and celebrates and cooperates with the charitable work of folks like Dolly Parton.

One of the reasons I support school choice is because it involves partnership with the civil society (nonprofit charter school management operators and religious organizations operating schools that could educate voucher-receiving students are just two examples) to help children. This cooperation ties us together and helps us work with each other to help other members of our community.

Dolly Parton is more than a pretty face and a talented singer. She, and the organization that she founded, are part of the fabric of our country.

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“Funds raised from our Fourth Annual Soiree will fund the gap between public dollars and the true cost of educating every SLLIS student,” reads the invitation for an upcoming fundraiser for the St. Louis Language Immersions Schools.

Because SLLIS is a charter school, it does not receive the same amount of public dollars as a traditional public school. In 2011, on average, Missouri charter schools received $3,800 less than traditional public schools.

“Missouri’s charter public schools are living up to their end of the bargain and demonstrating the ability to provide a high quality education. It’s time to move past ‘stepchild’ funding and ensure every public school in Missouri receives equitable funding,” Missouri Public Charter Schools Association Executive Director Doug Thaman wrote in the Missouri Times.

While some argue that charters are able to fill the gap in funding through fundraising, a recent report found that charitable donations do not eliminate the funding gap between charters and traditional public schools.

Buckets of Water into the Ocean: Non-Public Revenue in Public Charter and Traditional Public Schools found that revenue from nonpublic sources (non-public food service, investment revenue, philanthropic fundraising, etc.) totaled almost 6.4 billion for traditional public schools and nearly 400 million for charter schools in the 15 states included in the study.

Interestingly, the authors found that traditional public schools receive most of their non-public revenues from selling meals to their students and investment profits. Charter schools receive most of their non-public revenue through philanthropy. Still, charitable donations do not make up the difference—adding as little as $74 (New Jersey) and as high as $1320 (Hawaii) to total per pupil revenue.

The findings of this report may change the conversation in Missouri as revisions to the way schools are funded are considered. One of the authors of the study, Arkansas Professor Patrick Wolf said:

If students in public charter schools are to receive funding on a par with students in traditional, district-run, public schools, it will have to come from more equitable public school funding laws.  Saying that charitable donations can make up the funding gap between district-run and charter schools is like saying that throwing buckets of water into the ocean will change the tide.

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There is, of course, another (and better) way to fund this trolley, and the Kansas City Star’s Lewis Diuguid articulates it quite clearly: private funding.

So instead of heaping more taxes on those folks, Mayor Sly James and the City Council should begin an all-out, metrowide streetcar fundraising drive. Fundraisers helped build other great bricks-and-mortar things for the city.

The Central Library downtown is a wonderful example. So is the addition to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

People contributed to the construction of the Kauffman Center and the World War I Museum. Corporations metrowide, foundations and individuals could do the same for streetcars.

Private fundraising for ostensibly public projects is not a new idea, and as Diuguid highlights, that is especially true for Kansas City.

The city’s proposal already contemplates user fees and advertising to supplement the public financing component. Shouldn’t the Kansas City Council take the next step and explore the possibility of philanthropy and private investment, and work to remove the public component? And if there is neither a private nor philanthropic interest in building the streetcar, doesn’t that say something about the merits of the project?

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However, if the state is going to spend more on higher education, then it is going to have to take it from taxpayers. Taking is the opposite of giving. The state is not learning anything from charitable donors if it uses tax revenue, its primary source of funding, to increase spending on higher education. Spending other people’s money is not charity.

Let’s give credit where it is due; the editorial nicely honors those who have donated money toward the cause of helping others. For instance, it praises the generosity of folks like the late Lorene Thompson Brooks, who donated $4 million toward the “need-based scholarship program Corps of Opportunity and two athletic scholarships.” And it (rightfully) lauds the donors who gave $14.4 million in donations towards a university’s capital campaign – $4.4 million more than the hoped-for $10 million. I cannot help but wonder if these individuals would have been able to be so charitable if the state had taken more of their money.

The argument that the state should mimic the example of private donors, taken to its logical conclusion, undermines real charity. When the state spends more, taxpayers have less money to donate.

Let’s hope the state remains an environment of less taking and more giving.

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