Until the last city council meeting, roll carts were banned in Columbia due to a poorly constructed public referendum on the issue. Thankfully, the council has changed those rules and now can restore sanity to the current system by instituting roll carts at some point in the (hopefully near) future.

The current, byzantine system of using only city-authorized trash bags taken by hand to the curb for personal collection by city employees is as outdated as a police call box. In addition to changing this rule, Columbia should strongly consider privatizing the entire trash system and using roll carts and automated collection trucks. This will, of course, be opposed by those who view local government as a job program first and foremost. From a Columbia Missourian story (emphasis added):

Although privatizing trash collection would relieve the city of its issues, the waste division claims it would eliminate city jobs, involve a difficult transition and likely not improve residents’ fees or quality of service.

City governments exist to serve the public in the most efficient way possible, not to put as many people as possible on the public payroll. My beloved Uncle Leo, who was a Chicago precinct captain for many years, would have hated privatization and roll carts. The jobs were what mattered to Leo and the Chicago machine. But trash privatization and the automated roll cart system (yes, you do have to roll it out once a week, as I do) is the system that best serves Missouri communities. Columbia has taken a key step to get there. Here’s hoping it keeps going forward.

The post Columbia Repeals Ban on Trash Roll Carts, Repeal of Ban on Dancing and Proms Is Next appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

It’s an issue we don’t talk a great deal about, but it’s one that we’ve had a clear and long-standing stance on. Back in 2012, my colleague Michael Rathbone wrote about the problems with a proposal that would have further limited vertical integration of alcohol distribution in the state, and in 2013, my colleague David Stokes testified on the matter before the Missouri Legislature. It was logical, then, that we would have a stance on litigation that the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit ruled on yesterday, and for which we submitted an amicus brief in collaboration with the Washington Legal Foundation in 2018.

The case, Missouri Broadcasters Association v. Dorothy Taylor, centered on a very specific aspect of Missouri’s three-tier law that prevents producers and distributors from providing certain advertising materials to retailers. Although there are many policy problems with the three-tier law, the First Amendment issue here is particularly egregious. Even though commercial speech has historically been subject to greater regulation, courts are generally reticent to impose or enforce content restrictions and burdens on commercial speakers. And as our amicus brief notes, these content impositions are substantial:

In § 311.070.1, Missouri prohibits alcohol manufacturers and distributors from “directly or indirectly, loan[ing], giv[ing] away or furnish[ing] equipment, money, credit or property of any kind” to “retail dealers.” Mo. Rev. Stat. § 311.070.1. This blanket ban prohibits manufacturers and distributors from giving any advertising-related support to retailers. In § 311.070.4(10), however, Missouri allows manufacturers and distributors to advertise on behalf of retailers, so long as the advertisement (1) excludes any mention of retail price, (2) lists “two or more unaffiliated retailers,” (3) does so only once, and (4) displays the retailers’ names inconspicuously. Mo. Rev. Stat. 4 § 311.070.4(10). But this “exception” is just an unconstitutional condition on exercising First Amendment rights.

And yesterday, the court of appeals agreed. Readers can find the ruling and our full amicus brief attached at the bottom of this page. We may have more to say on this matter in the future, but for now, suffice it to say that we are pleased with this outcome and hope that policymakers will, separately, consider doing more to dismantle Missouri’s antiquated alcohol regulatory regime in the future.

The post Raise a Toast: Missouri Three-Tier Speech Prohibition Struck Down appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The idea sounded good to me—so off we went to get the ingredients. But to no avail. You see, the North Carolina state government controls the entire liquor industry in the state. Alcohol can only be purchased at the state-run Bureau of Alcoholic Beverage Control (ABC) stores. Their inventory and prices are decided by the state and, not surprisingly, inventory is minimal and prices are high. There’s certainly no Velvet Falernum, and thus no Best Mojitos Ever in North Carolina.

Recently, it seems “privatize” and “for-profit” have become code words for evil and greedy. But the private sector does many things quite well. My daughter’s Denver neighborhood has multiple boutique liquor stores that would absolutely have Velvet Falernum. Consumer demand is met by commercial supply. In North Carolina, purchasing liquor is similar to getting a driver’s license—strictly on the government’s terms. Do we really want more government control and fewer private markets?

Would the Fourth of July have been better with the Best Mojitos Ever? If you spend it in North Carolina, you’ll never know.

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1.       Remove alcohol level restrictions on malt liquor.

2.       Remove restrictions on the type of alcohol that can be sold at microbreweries and repeal some local taxing authority on such breweries.

3.       Allow beer companies to lease coolers to retail stores.

4.       Allow all beer sellers to sell growlers.

5.       Make it harder for the state to reject applications for liquor licenses.

6.       Allow for special permits for out-of-state manufacturers at festivals.

As we’ve written before, Missouri (along with all other states) have byzantine liquor laws dating back to prohibition. While public attitudes toward the responsible consumption of wine, beer, and other spirits has steadily become more permissive, Missouri and other states have only slowly updated their rules over the years (Alabama got rid of its last dry county on Super Tuesday). And most of changes SB919 presents, like allowing the sale of growlers, are common sense. As we pointed out in testimony over this issue,

“Beer in containers larger than growlers is available for sale at retailers. Growlers are legal, and are sold at breweries and brew pubs. SB 919 would only allow a product that is legal to be sold in a quantity that is legal in a place that already sells the same product in much larger quantities.”

The only opposition to the bill is related to allowing beer companies to lease coolers to retail stores. Smaller producers fear that this will put them at a competitive disadvantage against large brewers. However, competition in the beer and spirits industry is intense, and there is little reason to fear monopolization of the market from cooler-leasing any more than we fear it in the consumer goods industry at large, where buying shelf space at local stores is a common practice.

Missouri’s alcohol laws are convoluted and antiquated. Alcohol regulations should have both a legitimate public purpose and, once enacted, a track record of success in achieving that purpose. If they do not, bills like SB919 may be a step forward for consumers in the state. Should provisions in the bill, such as cooler leasing, become problematic, Missouri can always revisit policy to correct clear and present market issues. 

The post Missouri Moves One Step Closer to Liberalizing Liquor Laws appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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That data indicate that driving is still king, and unlikely to be dethroned any time soon. In 2014, 79% of commuters in Saint Louis City either drove alone or carpooled to get to work. In Saint Louis County, that number was more than 90%. In the Kansas City area, almost 90% of commuters drove alone or carpooled. As for public transportation use, the numbers remain quite modest. Saint Louis City had 10% of its commuters use transit, but in Saint Louis County and Jackson County that number was less than 3%.

If we consider what the numbers in terms of long-term trends, our writing from last year on this subject remain relevant:

Transit’s share of commutes in Missouri and its major cities has slowly decreased over the last few decades; a lower percentage use transit now than in 1990. Taking 2000 as our baseline year, the nadir of public transportation use in the United States as a whole, 1.49 percent of Missourians used transit for their commutes. After 13 years and well over a billion dollars of investments, transit’s share of commuters has remained essentially flat.

Nothing has happened to refute those observations. In fact, from 2013 to 2014 transit commuters as a percentage of all commuters decreased in Saint Louis City, Saint Louis County, Jackson County, and Clay County, as the chart below demonstrates:

All of the recent changes have been small and may be within the margin of error. This means we cannot say that transit is definitely drawing a lower percentage of riders than they did last year. But we can say that the Census Bureau’s 2014 data, much like data from previous years, show no evidence of either a rapid rise in the preference for transit or a rapid decrease in preference for driving in Missouri’s largest cities. 

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In his article, Ingraham calls for raising alcohol taxes, stating: “Higher taxes make alcohol more expensive. More expensive alcohol makes people drink less of it. And when people are drinking less, they’re less likely to suffer costly health problems or do stupid things like drive drunk.”

If Ingraham’s ultimate objective is to make people drink less alcohol, why not just ban it? Wouldn’t prohibition really reduce the health problems associated with alcohol consumption? However, we’ve already tried Prohibition, and it didn’t work out too well. So Ingraham’s alternative is to raise taxes to cut down on consumption. Except, there are problems with that approach as well. Increase taxes too much and people will resort to smuggling. It’s happening in New York with cigarettes. What’s to say it wouldn’t happen with alcohol?

Both Ingraham and I want to cut down on drunk driving. Thankfully, drunk driving is already on the decline. Since 1986, alcohol-related fatalities have seen a 54 percent decline! Why solve a problem that is already fixing itself?

There are negative side effects to raising alcohol taxes as well. Because of our low taxes on alcohol, cigarettes, and gasoline, commuters from out of state make it a point to purchase these products in Missouri. If we raise taxes on alcohol we are removing an incentive for people to shop in Missouri. If less people shop here, Missouri businesses will suffer and the state will see less tax revenue. How will that help anybody?

I can sympathize with Ingraham’s efforts to curb the more negative effects of heavy alcohol consumption, but the biggest problem, drunk driving, is becoming less of one over time. Coupled with the fact that increased alcohol taxes can hurt Missouri businesses, we should leave tax rates alone and focus on other ways to improve public health and safety.

The post Alcohol Tax Rates Are Low . . . and They Should Stay That Way appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Over the weekend, I visited a whiskey distillery, StilL 630, in downtown Saint Louis. The owner and operator of the company talked about why he chose to set up in the city. Missouri’s reasonable alcohol regulations were one factor that made his business possible. In Missouri, unlike many other states, a brewer or distiller of any size can produce, sell, and distribute their own product.

The ability of a company to sell and distribute its own product seems like common sense, but that right is under attack in neighboring states. For example, just last Friday, Kentucky enacted a law that bans breweries from distributing their own products. This law, which legally protects three-tiered beer sales, was a blatant attempt to protect independent alcohol distributors and may force companies like Anheuser-Busch to sell its Kentucky distributors. Missouri has flirted with these types of regulations in the last couple years. As Director of Development (and former Policy Analyst) David Stokes wrote in 2013 regarding SB 412:

I recognize that the rules for alcohol distribution have been in place for a long time, but that is not a justification in 2013 for new rules that prevent a maker of alcohol from simply having an ownership interest in a distributor of alcohol. . . . I can imagine no market failure or public good problem that this proposed law would address. The point here seems to be the preservation of existing distributorships and the limiting of competition. . . . Simply put, the government should not mandate the use of a middleman.

Missouri’s reasonable alcohol regulations promote small-business creation, helps large companies operate efficiently, and can ultimately benefit the consumer. Missouri should hold onto that advantage and resist any temptation to move in the direction of Kentucky’s legally enforced three-tiered system.

The post Low Alcohol Regulations Benefit Missouri Business appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Unfortunately, the most recent commuting data on the national and Missouri levels show no such nascent transformation. In fact, on the national level a higher percentage (73.6 percent) of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than they did in 2010. Transit usage has shown some increase, but only from 7.9 percent to 8.1 percent of commuters. Given the increasing resources going to transit agencies nationally, along with high fuel prices and an anemic economic recovery, a 0.2 percent increase in commuting mode share for transit is unimpressive.

In Missouri, the story is much the same. At the state level, a slightly smaller percentage of commuters drove alone to work in 2013 than in 2010, but it only fell less than 0.1 percent (to 81.66 percent of commuters). Public transportation did increase its modal share, but only by 0.06 percent (from 1.56 percent to 1.62 percent of commuters). In Missouri as a whole and every major Missouri city other than Saint Louis, more commuters walk to work than use public transportation.

A longer time horizon makes the situation look even worse. Transit’s share of commutes in Missouri and its major cities has slowly decreased over the last few decades; a lower percentage use transit now than in 1990. Taking 2000 as our baseline year, the nadir of public transportation use in the United States as a whole, 1.49 percent of Missourians used transit for their commutes. After 13 years and well over a billion dollars of investments, transit’s share of commuters has remained essentially flat. The same is true of Kansas City and Saint Louis.

While total transit usage may be increasing in aggregate, in Missouri and virtually everywhere else in the country, driving alone is still the undisputed king of commuting. As for public transportation, Missouri spends more than $400 million per year on average on transit, but less than 2 percent of the population use it to get to work.

It may be time to reconsider both the idea that transit usage is sweeping America and that increasing resources to transit (without some serious rethinking of how the money is spent) will propel a transportation revolution.

The post Missouri Commuting Habits: Public Transportation on the Ascendency? appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Nurse practitioners are one type of “advanced practice registered nurses” (APRNs) who have national certification and post-graduate education. Their training well equips them to deal with primary care concerns, which generally includes most basic health issues. Indeed, numerous studies have found that nurse practitioners provide similar quality of care as physicians.

Unfortunately, Missourians are not able to take full advantage of nurse practitioners. Missouri has more limitations than most other states. A recent report named Missouri the 44th most restrictive state for nurse practitioners. Seventeen states and the District of Columbia allow APRNs to practice without any physician oversight. Missouri, however, requires an APRN to work with a physician in a “collaborative practice arrangement.”

Collaborative practice arrangements exist on the theory that physician oversight is necessary to ensure quality care. However, the data has not shown that to be true. In fact, many studies show that even when nurse practitioners work independently, their patients do just as well as if doctors had treated them.

These restrictions limit the amount of care nurse practitioners can provide in Missouri. Physicians can only collaborate with three APRNs, and the doctor must regularly review a portion of the APRN’s charts — even if she has been practicing for years. The arrangements also curtail when the nurse practitioner can provide care, as the physician must be immediately available via electronic communication. Until recently, collaborating physicians also had to be within 50 miles of rural APRNs. While legislation this year loosened that requirement, collaborative practice arrangements still prevent nurses from practicing to the full extent of their training.

Nurse practitioners provide high-quality care, which makes expanding their role in Missouri obvious. The main issue for many in rural areas is having access to any care. It is not a question of doctors versus nurses, but health care versus no care. Additionally, nurse practitioners tend to move to states where there are fewer limitations. If Missouri continues to over-regulate its nurse practitioners, many rural Missourians will not have health care.

One-fifth of Missourians live in rural areas without sufficient access to primary care providers, but a solution is available. The collaborative practice arrangement rules for nurse practitioners are not protecting Missourians; instead, they are preventing affordable health care. Whether it is a mother with a sick child or a 60-year-old man seeking care, nurse practitioners are competent providers. Missouri should consider eliminating the unnecessary restrictions that help keep access to quality care from more than a million Missourians.

Caitlin Hartsell, J.D., M.P.H., was a research assistant at the Show-Me Institute, which promotes market solutions for Missouri public policy.

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That said, I just cannot believe that the latest attempts to preserve the three-tiered alcohol system by further tightening the regulations will be productive. Missouri Senate Bill 412, SB 365, and House Bill 759 will involve the government further in the alcohol industry, and I do not think that is necessary. Look, we can all agree that there should be some government regulation of the alcohol industry: age limits, DWI laws, basic liquor licenses. However, I think that preventing a producer from having even a small interest in a distributor goes way too far, as do the rest of these proposed legislative changes. Producers should be able to, more or less, have the same freedom to get their product in front of final consumers as any other business. As the title suggests, the government should not mandate the use of a middleman.

All that said, I have no doubt that most producers will still continue to use distributors in this industry. The distributors have the contacts, the relationships, the networks, and the equipment to get the product to the market. However, the choice to use a distributor should be a voluntary activity as part of a free-market economy, not a government mandate.

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This is not the first time I have written about the state subsidizing the wine industry. My first (self-given) award-winning post dealt with the Missouri Wine & Grape Board. Now, I am training my attention on the Wine Producers and Grape Growers Tax Credit. In fiscal year 2012, the state issued more than $100,000 in these credits and wine producers are worried that lawmakers will cut the program due to state revenue shortages.

I am all for a flourishing wine industry in the state. I love going to Hermann for Oktoberfest. However, I do not think a tax credit is necessary for wineries to succeed. Mount Pleasant Winery, St. James Winery, and Stone Hill Winery are among the largest wineries in the state. Mount Pleasant reopened in 1966, St. James was founded in 1970, and Stone Hill has been in the hands of its current owners since 1965. The Wine and Grape Tax Credit was created in 1999. These wineries managed to stay in business for decades without the assistance of this tax credit. Going even further back, Missouri had the second-largest wine industry in the country before Prohibition.

I truly want the wine industry in Missouri to succeed yet I do not want the government to subsidize it. Let wine consumers support our wine industry, not taxpayers.

The post Missouri Shall Cut No Tax Credit Before Its Time appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Homebrewers primed themselves Tuesday for a potential legal battle while seeking to ensure that the hundreds of gallons they brewed for this weekend’s St. Louis Brewers Heritage Festival won’t go to waste.

Dozens of amateur brewers were stunned by a decision Monday from the city’s Excise Division that will keep homebrewed beer out of this year’s festival, which runs Friday through Sunday at the Ballpark Village site downtown. Homebrewers do not possess licenses to sell beer, so serving their beers at a festival that people pay to attend would violate a city statute, Excise Commissioner Robert Kraiberg determined.

According to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch’s report, homebrewers had been sharing their brews at the Festival since 2008, and yet this year was the first time public officials ruled against the homebrewers. Homebrews have been served without apparent problems for years, and yet now is the time for the government to step in?

The law should not be prohibiting these sorts of community exhibitions by homebrewers, but if that is how the law is being interpreted and used, it needs to be amended post haste. The timing of the ruling —days before the event and after the beer had long been brewed for it — is no doubt frustrating to the brewers, but the (drinking age) community is hurt because they have fewer choices at an event where choice is paramount.

Baffling, really. Maybe the city ran out of food trucks to regulate?

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But anytime you give the government power to license something, it invites the opportunity for abuse. In St. John, a suburb of St. Louis, a restaurant entrepreneur will have to wait a few more weeks to know whether he can sell alcohol at his restaurant, because one councilmember does not want him to have a liquor license. Now, this may not be that big of a deal, because it appears he will get the license at the next meeting, but it is still a delay in his business plans.

A worse abuse of power was also featured in a Post-Dispatch article yesterday: A liquor license inspector has been charged with bribery. He attempted to force a prospective bar owner to pay him off and give him a job in order for the owner to get the license. Thankfully, the bar owner was able to obtain the license anyway (evidence that it is not all that hard to get a liquor license here), but this is further evidence of the inevitable abuses that come from government control.

I pointed out a moment ago that it is not all that hard to get a liquor license here. Well, that’s not true if you live in the city of St. Louis’ 20th Ward, where the local alderman decided (several years ago) that he does not want any more bars or liquor stores. If you have to have a liquor license process (and we’ll realistically have one whether we like it or not), it needs to be a public, evenhanded process, not reliant on whether or not one elected official approves it.

There are abuses in Kansas City, too. The Pitch has a story on the liquor licenses being suspended in restaurants that have been caught allowing smoking. This is terrible, and most aptly demonstrates the title of this post. If you have a law banning smoking in public establishments, the punishment should be a fine, not the suspension of an unrelated item. At the bottom of the Pitch article, you see examples of suspending liquor licenses for acts that at least relate to alcohol (one of which is actually important enough to warrant some type of punishment).

I won’t get into the dispute over liquor licenses and violence at the clubs in downtown St. Louis. This post is long enough. One good thing about our liquor laws is Missouri is that we generally (with exceptions like the 20th Ward) don’t have numerical restrictions on total licenses in an area, which is usually the worst part of any licensing system. But any system can and will be abused. The most important change we need to liquor laws in Missouri is to eliminate the ability for one individual to block a potential license all on their own — be it an inspector or an elected official. Requiring that all applicants get a vote of the full legislative body could be a good start.

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The first, and most obvious, problem is that the physician supply has not kept up. That is one of the many reasons why the United States is being inundated with foreign-trained physicians. As another post showed, the number of U.S. physicians is inadequate for our country’s needs now. The most reliable resources indicate that there may be a shortfall of 150,000 by the year 2025. If the economics of health care followed the simple model described above, then the supply curve would shift in the undesired direction. In that case the price of health care would become even greater than the dollar figures mentioned in the current political debate.

But there is more. The demand for health care has increased much more than expected. A look at the Congressional Research Service’s demographic charts shows that there are many more older people in this country. The United States is in the midst of a profound demographic change, and has had an overall aging of its population; this has been characterized by the increased proportion of persons aged 65 and older in our population. In general, as people get older, they use more health care. The result may be a shift of both the supply and demand curves. Using that old economics diagram, the resulting equilibrium will be higher and much more costly.

However, some argue that physicians are more than just the suppliers of health care. Those people feel that physicians may be a part of the problem themselves and some physicians may stimulate overuse of the heath care system. In the recent past, President Barack Obama spoke to the American Medical Association about this issue, and implied that physician behavior may be one of the factors driving up costs. He suggested that some doctors create a demand for services, and their intervention has contributed to the problems of the health care market. The difficulty with that argument is in separating issues that relate to demand from the physician role as the gatekeeper to health care system. Physicians are often the means that patients use to initiate access the health care system. However, the health care demand exists in and of itself; it is an independent factor. All that physicians do is show they care for patients by responding to the existing demand.

If physicians are not the cause of the problem, is physician supply a factor of concern? It is important to be aware that some believe an increase in physician supply does not translate into better care. In fact, as counter-intuitive as it may seem, some recent reports indicate that patients’ satisfaction with care, and patients’ perceptions of access, are no better in high physician supply regions than in low physician supply regions. With that understanding, many argue that more physicians may not result in better care for patients. People who follow that argument believe that what we need is improved efficiency, not more doctors, to produce a more cost-effective result. (See: Skinner et al, “The Elusive Connection Between Health Care Spending and Quality.” Health Affairs 28, w119–w123, 2009.)

Could it be that what we need is both more doctors and more efficiency? In some countries with different health care systems, demographic predictions of this variety have resulted in significant changes in hospital design and physician education. The demographic details for our country present a pretty strong argument showing that there will not be enough physicians for your care when you get older. At the same time, every one could use more efficiency. How will the combined House and Senate bills respond to these issues?

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