Learn more about the book here: www.cato.org/books/fighting-freedom-learn

Susan Pendergrass speaks with James Shuls, fellow at the Show-Me Institute and head of the Education Liberty Branch at Florida State University, and Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute about their new book, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. They discuss how the fight for educational freedom long predates modern debates over public schooling, why early advocates viewed schooling as a family and community responsibility, and how today’s school choice expansion connects to America’s founding principles. The conversation covers the history of the common school movement, the roots of residential school assignment, and why educational freedom has always been central to the American story, and more.

Timestamps

00:00 Introduction

02:33 The Genesis of ‘Fighting for the Freedom to Learn’
05:41 Historical Perspectives on School Choice
08:04 The Evolution of Common Schools and Their Impact
10:59 The Role of Religion in Early Education
14:01 The Shift Towards Standardization in Education
16:43 The Need for School Choice in Disadvantaged Areas
19:29 The Historical Context of Property Taxes and School Assignment
22:17 The Recent Surge in School Choice Movements

Transcript

Susan Pendergrass (00:00)
Certainly looking forward to this conversation with two very, very smart people: Dr. Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute and Dr. James Shuls of Florida State University. James, can you first tell us about this new center that you are in charge of at Florida State University? I think it’s innovative and really cool, and I’d like to hear a little bit more about it before we talk about your book.

James Shuls (00:21)
Absolutely. So I’m with the Institute for Governance and Civics, and it was created by the legislature a couple years ago. And while I would like to take credit and say I’m in charge of it, as you sort of said there, Susan, I’m not in charge of the Institute, but I’m one of the branch heads. So the IGC, as we call it, has four branches. We focus on economic liberty, constitutional liberty, conscience liberty, and education liberty. I’m the head of the education liberty branch.
And so part of what we’re doing is outreach to K–12 schools, helping to focus on civics instruction, improving knowledge and preparation for teachers as it relates to civics and governance and those sorts of things. At the same time, we’re writing about issues of educational liberty from a school choice perspective, which is exactly the topic we’re talking about today.

Susan Pendergrass (01:12)
Yeah, so you guys have a book that you just co-edited, Fighting for the Freedom to Learn: Examining America’s Centuries-Old School Choice Movement. How did you come up with this idea, and why did you decide to put this book together?

Neal McCluskey (01:27)
Sure, I’ll go with that. The idea behind the book stems from just about everything I ever do, which is I got angry about something, and I was like, well, somebody ought to do something about this. If you work in school choice advocacy for more than a day or so, you’ll quickly hear that school choice started by people trying to avoid desegregation in the South. And that’s always given as the origin. And even if somebody wants to say, well, you know, Milton Friedman wrote this essay in 1955—and he really wrote it before 1955—we know that that was really just taking advantage, at the very least, of this backlash against desegregation.
And it just drives me nuts. There is a very long, rich history of the idea and practice of school choice. So I thought, you know, somebody ought to do a book on that, and we can hit, sort of semi-chronologically, all the different eras in which this happened and the ebbs and flows. The Cato Institute and the Center for Educational Freedom, which I direct, also had something called the School Choice Timeline—this interactive online timeline that I put together also because I was angry. In particular, I wrote a chapter about the gap where not much was going on in school choice, and I wanted to explain the gap.
But we have lots of chapters—one on how progressives were really into school choice for a while, and how schooling worked before the common-schooling movement, and all sorts of stuff like that. The genesis was aggravation on my part, at least, about always hearing this narrative that school choice stems from efforts to avoid desegregation. And then I said, you know, James Shuls—there’s a guy who probably is angry a lot, too. Maybe he’d like to get in on this.

James Shuls (03:17)
Yeah, that’s right. Susan, I’ve been on the podcast before talking about some of my scholarship related to Virgil Blum. He was a real strong school choice advocate starting in the ’50s, did a ton of work, and gets absolutely no credit. I was angry that Friedman gets all the credit—he wrote this paper in 1955, yada, yada, yada—and then in the 1990s we get school choice programs. It’s like, well, a lot happened in that yada, yada, yada period that we’re not covering.
I had been writing about that when Neal came along with the idea to do the book. Part of what we’re doing as we frame this is saying: looking at school choice today through the current lens we have is the wrong way to do it. We think of school choice today as opting out of the public school system—but that only works to frame it that way if there is a public school system. Before common schools were around, people were still advocating for their kids, still trying to get schools created. So there was lots of stuff that wouldn’t fit the framework we have today.
What we’re saying in this book is these impulses for educational freedom have always existed, and we’re essentially tracing them from colonial times to today.

Neal McCluskey (04:36)
James’s stuff on Blum was also a major reason I thought, here’s a guy who could really contribute to this. I just stumbled on Blum in large part because of what James wrote. I was like, why do people not know about this guy?

Susan Pendergrass (04:41)
We did a whole podcast on it. I’ll tell you what makes me mad is that in the last month or two, tops, there have been articles in The New York Times and The Washington Post talking about low-income families—both in Florida and Arizona—generally Black and brown parents, who are participating in this right-wing conservative movement to kill the public school system because they think they deserve to be able to choose where their kid goes to school.
Even locally in political groups, people say, well, that’s a MAGA person, which means they support charter schools. When those two things get put into a sentence, it really makes my blood boil because I’ve been working in this space a long time. As we’re going to find out more, school choice is not a new thing at all. The latest iteration of it is not a MAGA thing or five years old or a COVID thing. Since at least 1990—at least 35 years—parents and activists like Howard Fuller were saying, hey, this isn’t right. We’re literally assigning kids to the worst schools and not letting them out. We ought to let them out.
Somehow this has become the Republican agenda to kill teacher unions and break up the public school system. Nothing could be further from the truth. That makes me mad. That’s why I’m really glad you guys put this book together. Let’s go back—not to the very beginning of the country—but pre–industrial revolution, pre–John Dewey, before standardized schools, attendance zones, and district lines. What did it look like, say 150 years ago? Did parents decide where their kids went to school, or did you have to go to a certain school because that was the one you helped pay to create? How did it work back in the day?

James Shuls (06:50)
I’ll jump in here because I’m awfully angry about this. Before common schools, there was a wide mixture of different types of schools. You had dame schools, private schools, public schools, and publicly funded private schools.
What you get in Charles Glenn’s chapter, “Emergence of the Common School Ideology,” is an understanding of the movement towards common schools. The impetus behind them was really to separate schooling from the family and the community and to use schools for social change. That’s the difference that comes in here—schooling would be used for social change.

Susan Pendergrass (07:29)
Mm-hmm.

James Shuls (07:35)
—to create and form Americans. Some people look at that and say it’s a good thing, but there are certainly negative side effects as well when you separate the impact of community and families. An interesting element that comes out in this book is that the common school ideology and the public school system that has come in its wake was created to form a certain kind of American citizen.
Then we get into Neal’s chapter, where Neal talks about the sort of gap where things aren’t happening. It’s because these systems were under attack. You see a reemergence in the 1950s—not just because of Brown and segregation—but because you start to have a return to some of these values and a return to trying to connect schooling and the family and the church.
When you look at school choice with this longer arc, rather than looking at the ’50s as your starting point, you see the various impulses that were leading pre–common schools, how common schools helped to squash some of those things, and how we’re starting to come back to a decentralized and pluralistic system.

Susan Pendergrass (08:50)
Certainly the common schools—also called public schools before 1900—were Protestant. They absolutely taught religion. They didn’t stop teaching religion until the Catholics started showing up. Then it was, yeah, maybe we get religion out of schools, right? Because we don’t want Catholicism in a public school. Public schools taught Protestantism; they just didn’t want to teach Catholicism. People think there’s always been separation—no religion in public schools—and that’s not true.

James Shuls (09:16)
That’s a key point in Matthew Lee’s chapter: Catholics turned to private schools. He would say it’s not necessarily school choice because the Catholics were saying you had to go to the Catholic schools—so no choice among Catholic schools. Nevertheless, the Catholic schools came up because the public schools were Protestant. Protestants went in—though not all in. There were some segments, which Neal could talk about, with the Lutherans.
By and large, Protestants supported the common school movement. Then there was a movement to secularize public schools. Again, that’s part of what happens in the 1950s with the return of Protestants starting to support school choice—because their capture of the public school system had been weakened and there were no longer Protestant schools.

Neal McCluskey (10:10)
Just as a pitch for the book: there’s so much good history in here that we won’t be able to talk about. You definitely want to get the book. It’s worth noting that for much of our early history—colonial period, early republican period, even into the common-schooling period—there wasn’t a separation people would recognize if you say, well, this is a public school and this is a private school. There were schools. There was education.
Government was sometimes involved in assisting private schools. Going back to British traditions, someone would provide—usually from the proceeds of owning land—funds to help maintain a school. In America, land was the one thing in superabundance, so that wasn’t as profitable. Governments would sometimes say, look, you’re running a school here; we’ll give you a little money to do it. There was often cooperation between government and schools.
The first voucher program that we’ve at least been able to catalog was in 1802 in Pennsylvania—specifically in Philadelphia. So this is not new. Go back more than two centuries and you had people like Paine and John Stuart Mill talking about helping people to consume education by funding parents so they can choose, not by funding schools.
Even as we have common schools, they were extremely localized. Think of the one-room schoolhouse—it was also the meeting house and often the church—serving pretty homogeneous communities. Even within what eventually became common schooling, there was a lot of differentiation where people could get the schooling they wanted. It’s only as progressives consolidate control that we move far away from that community-level, very small schooling.

Susan Pendergrass (12:13)
I thought it was so odd that Maine and Vermont have had town tuitioning of high schools for a couple hundred years. Where the town didn’t want to build a high school, they just paid tuition for their high school students to go to a different school the student picked. In some cases it’s a boarding school, even overseas. They were challenged in the Supreme Court within the last couple of years, even though those programs have existed for hundreds of years.
All of a sudden, people who don’t like the voucher idea went after Maine for town tuitioning, even though that program has been in place for so long.

James Shuls (12:53)
That radical right-wing bastion in Maine.

Susan Pendergrass (12:55)
—decided at a town meeting to do it. I think as you get into the earlier or middle part of the last century, you start building up this industrial education complex: we’re going to be the great equalizer; everyone’s going to have the same kind of school; 20 kids and a chalkboard and teacher; separate kids by age, not ability; common standards; and we’re going to be in charge of it.
Anyone who disagrees with what’s being taught there is seen as a radical who wants to break the system and doesn’t understand the importance of it. That’s what I feel has been happening lately, where any parent—my own experience: I homeschooled one of my kids and was considered a radical because why wouldn’t I accept that the public school to which he was assigned would be best for him? The idea that uniformity is what we need.
I still think there are a lot of people within the public education establishment who say uniformity is the key. We are clearly seeing a backlash, but the uniformity principle—maybe 75 years, maybe the 1950s—would you say?

Neal McCluskey (14:15)
It depends. In the early republican period, people like Benjamin Rush said we need schooling for everybody to make them into good citizens—into “republican machines,” his term. Horace Mann certainly wants to standardize people. Not because of Catholics at the beginning—they hadn’t come in at great numbers—but because he saw people coming in from the countryside.
New England industrialized first—relatively poor farming area, but lots of rivers to run factories. These early factories with big water wheels. Mann saw parents coming from the countryside and thought they were all idiots. He thought we needed to take their kids away from them and standardize them. So we started it even at the very beginning.
It gets even more standardized as more immigrants arrive and people get scared of them. One overarching theme of the history of school choice: it’s about people who do not fit into whatever mold the elites decide. Catholics didn’t fit the Protestant mold. In my research, Germans were most disturbing for people because they spoke German—people said, they really need to speak English. We have a thread of fear of Germans going back to colonial Pennsylvania.
The chapter on African Americans is particularly powerful: it talks about a system that never wanted to incorporate them. They needed freedom to get the education people were denying them. That’s the big theme—people who don’t want to be standardized or who are refused help need school choice to get something out of education.

Susan Pendergrass (16:13)
I’ll only say that’s true today. It’s ironic that the kids with the least options—the most disadvantaged kids in the worst schools—are the ones people openly talk about denying options to. Even in Missouri, when public school choice is considered, some of the lowest-performing districts say, okay, but not us. We can’t let kids out of our district because we’re one of the worst in the state and everyone will leave and take money.
They want to draw a line and say, whatever unfortunate child got assigned to this school, we cannot let them leave. That’s flipped on its head. That child needs choices as much as every other kid. They say, no, we have to lock those kids in and strap them to the deck of a Titanic. Why do you think that is, James?

James Shuls (17:07)
I’d say Ron Matus’s chapter on the progressive movement toward school choice is terrific for the points you’re making. There was a tremendous progressive move for school choice in the ’70s and ’80s that culminated in the early voucher programs.
They were making exactly the cases you’re making: we should not assign students to failing schools; school choice was progressive in that it allowed disadvantaged students to opt out and get the type of school that would meet their needs, and to bring competition into the marketplace. The progressives were making the case for school choice exactly because the most disadvantaged students needed it the most.
That’s why the recent idea that school choice is a MAGA movement is off. The progressives got there first, as Ron and others explain.

Susan Pendergrass (18:12)
One last thing. I have a hard time articulating to folks who believe there’s an ironclad connection between property taxes and school assignment that goes back to the beginning of time and must continue until the end of time: if you pay property taxes here, your kid goes to school here; if you don’t, your child doesn’t get to go to school there. I don’t want any kids coming into my kid’s school if their parents didn’t pay property taxes.
I think that is particularly strong in Missouri. In St. Louis County we have dozens of school districts within one county. People feel very strongly—even supporters of school choice—about this property tax/school assignment idea. They can’t get past it. What would you say to that? You lived in St. Louis, James; what do you say?

James Shuls (19:13)
We didn’t write the book through this specific lens, but if you read closely you see this: the system evolved over time. You had a radically decentralized system. Horace Mann and the common school movement advocated for state structures and more organization. Over time it evolved to the system we have today.
From the founding, the idea of residential assignment where local property taxes only follow the kids—and the high level of state and federal regulation—was not anyone’s early vision. It’s not the system most people would advocate if they could design it from scratch. We get wedded to the structures we have.
What we have to do is step back and ask, is this the way it should be? I think the answer is no. We shouldn’t have systems that restrict resources to small local communities and assign students, because we get the problems we all see: high-poverty districts with struggling schools and students assigned to terrible schools with little opportunity for the types of coursework and experiences that lead to success. The system we have isn’t inherently good just because it’s the system we have.

Neal McCluskey (20:57)
We probably needed a chapter on the history of taxation to answer this directly. My suspicion is that for a lot of our history we didn’t have a lot of income tax or other taxes, and drawing on the English tradition, we probably funded things at the community level with property taxes—very local and democratically controlled.
It’s not until the industrial era, with consolidation, that communities stopped running their own schools. My guess is that’s the history of a lot of this property-tax and local-tax funding. But things have obviously changed.
My colleague Colleen Hroncich always points out: it might have made sense to have local public schools when nobody had a car and most people walked places. You couldn’t travel 10 or 20 miles every morning to drop your kid off. That doesn’t make sense now—we have modern transportation—so we don’t have to be shackled to the school a mile or two away.

Susan Pendergrass (22:04)
See you next time. I also think that starting in the 1950s—partly because of Brown v. Board—states and then the federal government started tinkering with the distribution of tax dollars to districts to give more money to poorer districts and less to wealthier districts. That’s been going on with funding formulas. I’m not sure any of them have had an impact on poor kids or reducing achievement gaps, but they thought that moving levers at the state and federal level would get a different outcome.
In my opinion, wealthier districts with higher property tax bases and more local funding aren’t really impacted by those. Now they say, you can move kids around—but not from us—because we’re not part of that system where you move money around. We’re happy with what we’ve got. If you can afford to live here, fine; but they want to be left out of it.

James Shuls (23:10)
Sorry to interrupt you. I wanted to weigh in on that last point, because—reason to listen to the podcast and get the book—this is not in the book, but Virgil Blum had some correspondence with Milton Friedman back in the ’50s and ’60s. They weren’t closely associated; they were operating in different circles. But Blum sent Friedman something he had written and asked for feedback. Friedman responded.
One thing he said was, when it comes to the voucher idea, he thought it should start at the higher education level, not K–12. Then he said it should be at the level where the taxation or the money is supplied. So in K–12, that probably means vouchers should come from the local community, not from the state or the federal government.
So to your point: we had a system that relied more on local tax dollars, and Friedman was saying the vouchers should be local. But we’ve shifted over time to a system that provides a lot more money from the state and federal government than it used to. If you look across the country, every school choice program is a state system—very rarely do you have a district creating a voucher system. It almost always comes at the state level. Even Friedman was wrong from time to time.

Susan Pendergrass (24:44)
On that note, I know you have a chapter on this, but what about this explosion of school choice? Now it feels unstoppable. We have more than a dozen states with universal-ish programs. At least five states have truly universal school choice systems. Why now? Why has it picked up steam so fast after barely making progress through the ’90s and early 2000s?

Neal McCluskey (25:17)
Jason Bedrick has a particular take on it—which I think is probably right—but I think it has deeper roots. Generally, the idea is people are unhappy and increasingly unhappy with how they’re being served by public schools.
My theory—and I think a lot of people hold this—is that COVID made people realize that in a public school system, if a powerful minority or majority wants X and you want Y, someone loses. Many parents who wanted in-person school—generally well-heeled and used to getting what they want—suddenly couldn’t get it. They realized the system didn’t work for them even if they liked it in theory.
Anecdotally, in rich places like Montclair, New Jersey, people were at each other’s throats because many wanted mutually exclusive things. Then you had ideological battles over vaccination and mask requirements. Many say that virtual school let parents see what their kids were learning, and they didn’t like it—books like Gender Queer, how African American history is taught, etc. We haven’t shown concretely that anger was because of peeking into the classroom via Zoom, but it certainly coincided. People were angry.
Jason argues that, yes, people were unhappy, but it wasn’t really COVID; it was the strategy of reaching out to red-state parents in environments where you could get school choice, saying: public schools are teaching stuff you don’t like; you don’t want your kids trapped in that. All the big school-choice gains were in red states—the red-state strategy worked. Now the future is moving into purple and blue states. I think that’s right too, but the underlying driver is people realizing one system can’t fit everyone.

James Shuls (28:32)
I’ll weigh in here too. Friedman made the free-market case for school choice in the ’50s, and that case continued to today—choice, competition, rising tides lift boats. You also had the progressive case in the ’70s and ’80s—students shouldn’t be trapped in failing schools; create programs to help the most disadvantaged. Those arguments kept creating small, targeted programs, but not a wider audience.
A third element—cultural, right-leaning values—added a new coalition. It layered on top of the free-market and progressive cases. I wouldn’t say the movement is completely going to the right; it’s making arguments that appeal to those individuals.
If you go to a rural Missouri voter and say “choice and competition,” with one local public high school and one elementary school, that doesn’t land. If you say the most disadvantaged students in St. Louis and Kansas City need choice, the rural voter may not care. But if you weigh in on some conservative values, you reach a new audience. Maybe that’s part of what’s happened.

Susan Pendergrass (30:24)
Just a bigger tent. It’s clear we’ve only scratched the surface of your book—this is only a 30-minute podcast and there’s so much more in there. A lot of it is so intriguing—going back to the history of this country and realizing the system we have now is relatively new compared to the various systems we’ve had.
Parents don’t really care what the name is on the outside of the school. They care about how their kids come home at the end of the day—how much they appear to be learning. They want them challenged; they want them safe. That’s universal. Whatever system gets them there, they don’t care what it’s called or what it looks like. If they thought they’d get it out of a uniform system and now they don’t…
There’s so much in this book. You picked a lot of great authors—12 leading education scholars. When will folks be able to buy this book and read it themselves, and where?

Neal McCluskey (31:37)
It comes out November 11th. I think it’s available online—online bookstores everywhere—as well as the Cato website, Cato.org.

Susan Pendergrass (31:43)
And can folks reach out to you guys if they have any comments or questions?

Neal McCluskey (31:53)
As long as it’s nice stuff, they can reach out to me.

Susan Pendergrass (31:55)
I can’t promise them.

James Shuls (31:55)
The nice stuff can reach out to me; the negative comments go to Neal.

Susan Pendergrass (32:00)
Well, it’s great. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about it. It’s a fantastic book, and I highly recommend folks get it and read it themselves.

James Shuls (32:09)
Thank you.

Neal McCluskey (32:09)
Great, thanks.

Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post The Long Fight for Educational Freedom with Neal McCluskey and James Shuls appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Susan Pendergrass speaks with Andy Smarick, senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, about a recent U.S. Supreme Court case that could reshape the debate over faith-based charter schools. They explore the constitutional questions at the heart of the case, including the tension between the Establishment Clause and the Free Exercise Clause, and why a 4–4 split leaves the door open for future challenges. The conversation covers the potential role of religious organizations in public education, the importance of accountability in school choice programs, recent legal battles in Missouri and Wyoming, and how shifting public opinion may change the K–12 landscape in the years ahead.

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Timestamps

00:00 Introduction to Charter Schools and Supreme Court Case
02:40 Constitutional Implications of Faith-Based Charter Schools
05:37 State vs. Federal Authority in Education
08:18 The Role of Accountability in School Choice
11:12 Recent Legal Developments in Education Funding
13:53 The Future of Faith-Based Charter Schools
16:47 The Rise of School Choice and Its Implications
19:34 Conclusion: The Evolving Landscape of Education

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Produced by Show-Me Opportunity

The post Faith-Based Charter Schools and the Future of School Choice with Andy Smarick appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

I am not a lawyer, so I am going to keep this all very simple. As one legal blog explained it:

Under the Chevron doctrine, if Congress had not directly addressed the question at the center of a dispute, a court was required to uphold the agency’s interpretation of the statute as long as it was reasonable.

This obviously puts a great deal of power into the hands of regulatory agencies. All they had to do in interpreting federal rules for regulatory purposes was not be insanely crazy, and courts would be required to defer to the agency’s judgement. These were glorious days for regulators. Unlike, say, now.

If you believe, like I do, that regulatory powers have expanded too far, then overturning Chevron was a strong move for individual liberty and is something to be celebrated.

But it is a federal case. We have our own regulatory issues in Missouri. That is why legislation has been introduced to apply these same changes to Missouri laws. As the summary of Senate Bill (SB) 221 explains:

This act modifies the standard for review for a state agency’s interpretation of statutes, rules, regulations, and other subregulatory documents. Specifically, a court or administrative hearing officer shall interpret the meaning and effect of such statutes, rules, regulations, and documents de novo, rather than de novo upon motion by a party if the action only involves the agency’s application of the law to the facts and does not involve administrative discretion. Further, after applying customary tools of interpretation, the court or officer shall exercise any remaining doubt in favor of a reasonable interpretation that limits agency power and maximizes individual liberty. [emphasis mine]

Right now, a state agency is suing a woman in St. Louis for practicing dentistry without a license. The question is whether installing tooth jewelry should require a dental license (which is, obviously, not easy to get). If Missouri’s Chevron legislation passes, the regulators in this instance would have to act more strictly under the law as written by the legislature and rely less on various interpretations of that law by the Missouri Dental Board, which, believe it or not, may be a bit biased. If this case goes to court, the judges will no longer have to just assume the dental board is correct.

I don’t know whether the person in question is practicing dentistry or not. I do know that a Missouri where the courts don’t automatically assume the regulatory agency is always correct is a freer Missouri, and that is something I want.

The post The Chevron Debate Comes to Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For purposes of comparison, e-commerce now makes up over 15 percent of total sales in the United States. For municipalities around Missouri, 15 percent is a lot of sales not to tax. While many cities and counties have already adopted use taxes in recent years, there are many more proposing new use taxes on the April 2 ballot. The list includes Pleasant Hill, Centralia, Hallsville, Cool Valley, and the constant requesters in Raymore, Northwoods, and Velda City. (Feel free to notify me of others.)

It is a central tenet of tax policy that a tax base should be as broad as possible. The more expansive the tax base, the lower the rate that must be imposed to fund the functions of government. Raymore, for example, estimates it will receive $1.8 million per year from the proposed use tax. (It should be noted that Raymore has asked its citizens to approve a use tax in 2021 and 2022, both of which were rejected by voters. Raymore is a perfect example of why we need HB 2058 to pass, but I digress.)

Raymore has stated that it intends to use the use tax revenues for police, public works, highway maintenance, and park maintenance. Those are all reasonable uses, of course, but use taxes should not be approved simply to grow municipal government revenues. The use tax could be approved by voters to responsibly expand the tax base and equalize the competition between online and physical stores, but cities should also offset the increased taxes by lowering other, more harmful taxes. Imposing a use tax in a revenue-neutral manner is not a new idea. It is exactly how the Missouri Legislature addressed this issue with the state’s new use tax law in 2021.

The simplest way for these cities to offset the revenue increases from the use tax would be to lower city property taxes slightly. That would lead to a wider tax base, fairer competition between businesses, and lower tax rates for all taxpayers. Raymore’s property tax rate of 1.2447 per $100 of assessed value is very high compared to other cities that don’t have a fire department. (Raymore is served by an independent fire district.) Lowering that rate would be a good way to offset, at least in part, the new tax increases. Reducing the various municipal utility tax rates—especially for cities with already low property taxes—could also be a good exchange.

The imposition of a use tax in these cities could be a positive policy change. It could also be an easy way for politicians to just raise taxes one more time. By having city officials pledge to enact offsetting revenue reductions, these Missouri municipalities can reap the public benefits while curtailing the tax impact on residents and businesses. That is a plan that I think most taxpayers and voters could support. Without such a commitment, though, the use tax is just another tax increase.

The post Use Taxes on the Ballot Again in Missouri appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the April 23, 1960, editorial “Twin Principles,” the paper declared, “There cannot be any real question that payment of tax funds directly or indirectly to support private church schools would violate the principle of separation between church and state.”

Responding via a letter to the editor five days later, James Bick, the president of Citizens for Educational Freedom, noted the error in this claim. He wrote:

When tax-provided educational benefits are given to all children for the non-religious elements of their education there is no violation of the separation of Church and state principle. Aid is given to the parent and child. The parent has the freedom to expend his benefits at the school of his choice. This is the principle under which tuition grants were made under the “G.I. Bill.” The United States Supreme Court used the same principle in deciding the Everson vs. Board of Education Case (1947) concerning school bus transportation.

It took more than 40 years, but the U.S. Supreme Court used exactly the logic laid out by Bick when deciding the Ohio voucher case of Zelman v. Simmons-Harris. There is no violation of the separation of church and state when parents are provided the opportunity to choose their children’s school, even if it is a religious school.

In a recent Post-Dispatch article, you’ll find another mistake. The reporters writing the article label the MoScholars program a “voucher.” Undoubtedly, they know this is the language used by those who stand against school choice. A voucher implies that the state is giving direct aid, in the form of a voucher, to pay for private school. This is not the way the MoScholars program works. It is supported by donations, and those making the donations are then eligible for a state tax credit. These donations provide education savings accounts to parents who may choose to use them at private schools—but parents can also use the money for a variety of other purposes, such as tutoring, online classes, or special education services, to name a few.

To find out more about the MoScholars program and how you can make a tax credit donation or apply for a scholarship, visit the Missouri State Treasurer’s website.

The post Wrong Then, Wrong Now—the Post-Dispatch and School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Use taxes in Missouri are simply sales taxes on goods delivered to your home from out-of-state sellers. Local governments have been authorized to collect use taxes for a long time—predating the internet, even—but they have not been widely adopted. Collecting sales taxes on a family’s Sears catalog purchases in St. Louis was a lot of work for little revenue. The internet has changed that. The Supreme Court decision in the “Wayfair” case, changes to state legislation in 2021, and, most obviously, the tremendous increase in e-commerce during the pandemic, have all combined to greatly increase the need or desire (depending on your point of view) for governments to tax online sales.

For purposes of comparison, e-commerce now makes up over 14% of total sales in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. For cities in St. Louis County, 14% is a lot of sales not to tax. To address that, several St. Louis County municipalities (Chesterfield, Town and County, Fenton, Maryland Heights, Velda City, Flordell Hills, and Northwoods) have placed a use tax on the April 4, 2023, ballot. In many of these municipalities, use taxes have been proposed and failed previously. However, a lot has changed in e-commerce in recent years, and it may be time for voters to revisit the issue. (Although for cities like Chesterfield and Fenton, where voters rejected the use tax less than a year ago, asking again in the manner of a spurned yet persistent suiter is unseemly.)

Expanding the tax base with a use tax, if done in conjunction with a reduction of other, more harmful taxes, could be a beneficial change for cities in St. Louis County. But let’s be clear: if there is no corresponding reduction in other taxes, this is a tax increase on residents.

Flordell Hills is a particularly intriguing decision. I’m curious to see if voters will trust city government with more tax money after two city officials were recently convicted of stealing over $600,000 in city funds—a substantial portion of the annual budget. Fool me once . . .

It is a central tenet of tax policy that a tax base should be as broad as possible. The more expansive the tax base, the lower the rate that must be imposed to fund the functions of government. Exact use-tax revenue amounts are hard to predict, but Maryland Heights, to give one example, previously estimated it would receive about $2 million per year if a use tax is enacted. The use tax could be approved by voters to responsibly expand the tax base and equalize the competition between online and physical stores, but it should not be approved simply to grow municipal government revenues. Imposing a use tax in a revenue-neutral manner is not new idea. It is exactly how the Missouri legislature addressed this issue with the state’s new use tax law in 2021.

For the cities in St. Louis County proposing to impose their own use taxes, the simplest way for them to offset the revenue increases from the use tax would be to lower their property taxes in a revenue-neutral manner. That would lead to a wider tax base, fairer competition between businesses, and lower rates for taxpayers. Other options for various cities if the use tax is approved include eliminating more harmful taxes or fees. Reducing the local utility tax rate would be another good exchange for cities that do not levy property taxes, such as Chesterfield.

The imposition of a use tax in these St. Louis County cities could be a positive policy change. It could also be an easy way for politicians to just raise taxes one more time. By having various city officials pledge to enact offsetting revenue reductions that embrace the positive aspects of the use tax, these municipalities can amplify the public benefits while curtailing the tax impact on residents and businesses. That is a plan I think most taxpayers and voters could support. Without such a commitment, though, the use tax is just another tax increase.

The post St. Louis County Municipal Use Taxes Should Expand the Tax Base, Not the Size of Government appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Due to its great location, the neighborhood is undergoing gentrification as new, wealthier homeowners move in, leading to property value increases and higher taxes on long-term residents. In order to combat this, the neighborhood organization proposed turning the entire neighborhood into a Chapter 353 abatement plan designed to refund a percentage of property taxes to current residents based on their incomes.

I genuinely understand the desire for people to stay in their neighborhoods and not be taxed out by rising property values. But I think this enormous neighborhood abatement plan is a very bad idea. If it were copied throughout Missouri, it would lead to increased reliance on sales and income taxes (that is a bad thing), an increase in the abuse of abatements as certain people get special deals and other people pay higher rates, and a general increase in the involvement of government in the simple act of owning a home, since a government body has to vote on plans like this. Make no mistake: if this practice becomes common everyone, on average, is going to end up paying higher property taxes.

An article in support of this plan states that it is only available to current residents. That is deeply troubling (emphasis added):

These benefits accrue only to existing West Side residents. New people coming in would not receive any of the benefits, so the plan would not produce further gentrification.

There is a name for this type of tax policy. It’s called “welcome stranger.” That simply means that new property owners pay higher tax rates for comparable properties than current owners. The U.S. Supreme Court ruled against it in 1990, but I strongly suspect that the lawyers behind this Westside 353 plan crafted the plan to try to avoid legal challenges. Even if that is the case, is this good public policy? Absolutely not. This is going in the entirely wrong direction. We need to end tax abatements and other tax subsidies throughout Missouri so that the tax base is broader for everyone—and rates thereby lower—to fund the government services we want.

I had hoped the mayor of Kansas City would veto this bill, but he did not. I now expect the lawyers who drew this plan up to start passing out business cards at every neighborhood meeting in Missouri where there is a colorable claim for using Chapter 353. The short-term gain for the Westside community may produce long-term harms for Missouri.   ­

The post Kansas City Westside Community Goes All-in on Abatements appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Well, buried at the end of an uneventful year for U.S. Supreme Court Rulings is a little case called West Virginia v. EPA. In 2015, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) under the Obama administration wanted to comprehensively regulate “greenhouse gases” at American power plants under the Clean Air Act, so it adopted what it called the “Clean Power Plan rule.” The rule put pressure on dirtier coal power plants to shutter and promoted alternative energy plants. The problem with that is the Clean Air Act had only ever been used to enable the regulation and oversight of individual power-generating facilities; Congress had not authorized the EPA to unilaterally reorganize all power-generating capacity of the United States at the grid level.

After seven years of legislative wrangling, constant litigation, and a couple of presidential administrations, the Supreme Court affirmed that the EPA had indeed exceeded its mandate under the Clean Air Act. The court found that when a “major question” like nationwide energy generation is to be decided, Congress must render its decision directly or clearly authorize an agency to act on its behalf, consistent with the law. Here, Congress had not spoken directly or made such a clear delegation to the EPA to give it such expansive powers, and because it had not, the EPA’s dramatic rulemaking was invalid.

To be clear, the court’s ruling doesn’t suggest that the federal government can’t regulate “greenhouse gases,” but it does make clear that if the federal government is going to regulate them, Congress needs to clearly authorize it. That’s a win for small and accountable government; this ruling preserves the constitutional norms of our republican form of government. Each of the three branches is constrained by the Constitution; new laws must be passed through Congress, not by bureaucratic fiat.

How do you stop out-of-control regulations like this? Ideally, by requiring some form of legislative action for them to continue. Regulatory reform is a dense and oftentimes boring policy area, but if I were to suggest one change consistent with state and federal constitutional divisions of power, I think it’d be appropriate for every regulation enacted by an agency to come with a sunset date. The sunset provision would wipe the regulation clean if not adopted and passed into law by Congress or a legislature. That way, every regulation would eventually have to get an up or down vote by the people’s representatives, or else disappear.

Regardless, the Supreme Court’s finding in West Virginia is an important one that hopefully will remind lawmakers that they alone should be making “the law”—and that they can, and should, be held accountable for both the laws they pass directly and any regulations that descend from the statutes they enact.

The post Supreme Court Reins in Federal Bureaucracy in EPA Case appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

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Similarly to the Trinity Lutheran Church case in Missouri and the Espinoza case in Montana, the court held that allowing students to take their public dollars to a religious school of their choice does not establish an official state religion any more than using a Pell grant at a religious university does. The ruling does not require states to fund school choice. But, if they have a school choice program, they may not exclude religious schools from participating.

Beginning this fall, qualified Missouri families can apply for an Empowerment Scholarship Account (ESA) to be used to pay for, among other things, tuition at a private school. Five of the six approved Education Assistance Organizations (EAOs) that will be disbursing the scholarships are religious. The latest Supreme Court ruling should put to bed any questions as to whether anyone should take issue with that.

The post A SCOTUS Victory for Private School Choice appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

For purposes of comparison, e-commerce now makes up over 12% of total sales in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. For cities and counties in Missouri, 12% is a lot of sales not to tax. To address that, at least four counties and dozens of cities have placed use taxes on the April 5, 2022, ballot. Expanding the tax base with a use tax, if done in conjunction with a reduction of other, more harmful taxes, could be a beneficial change. But let’s be clear: if there is no corresponding reduction in other taxes, this is a tax increase on residents.

It is a central tenet of tax policy that a tax base should be as broad as possible. The more expansive the tax base, the lower the rate that must be imposed to fund the functions of government. Exact use tax revenue amounts are hard to predict, but the revenues for each city will not be insignificant. Local governments have received federal COVID-relief and stimulus funds, home values have risen substantially, and tax collections during the pandemic were not down as much as initially feared. As a result, many of these cities and counties do not need this new tax revenue to meet vital needs. The use tax could be approved by voters to responsibly expand the tax base and equalize the competition between online and physical stores, but it should not be approved simply to grow government revenues. Imposing a use tax in a revenue-neutral manner is not a new idea. It is exactly how the Missouri Legislature addressed this issue with the state’s new use tax law in 2021. St. Francois County officials have publicly stated they will lower their county property tax if the use tax is approved.

For cities and counties in Missouri proposing to impose their own use taxes, the simplest way for them to offset the revenue increases from the use tax would be to lower their property taxes in a revenue-neutral manner. Other options for various local governments if the use taxes are approved include eliminating more harmful taxes, such as the paradoxical local sales tax for economic development. Reducing the local utility tax rates would be another good exchange for cities that do not levy property taxes.

The imposition of a use tax for these Missouri cities and counties could be a positive policy change. It could also be an easy way for politicians to just raise taxes one more time. By having various city officials pledge to enact offsetting revenue reductions, local officials can amplify the public benefits while curtailing the tax impact on residents and businesses. That is a plan I think most taxpayers and voters could support. Without such a commitment, though, the use tax is just another tax increase.

The post Missouri Use Taxes Should Expand the Tax Base, Not the Size of Government appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Thanks to recent changes in state and federal law, local use taxes have become topical in Missouri. Many Missouri cities and counties have them on the ballot on April 5.

With offsetting rate cuts, use taxes are a positive policy change for Missouri. Without them, they are just another tax increase.

Missouri Use Taxes Should Expand the Tax Base, Not the Size of Government

Use taxes in Missouri are simply sales taxes on goods delivered to your home from out-of-state sellers. Local governments have been authorized to collect use taxes for a long time—predating the internet, even—but they have not been widely adopted. Collecting sales taxes on Sears catalog purchases was a lot of work for little revenue. The internet has changed that. The recent Supreme Court decision in the “Wayfair” case, changes to state legislation, and, most obviously, the tremendous increase in e-commerce during the pandemic have all combined to greatly increase the need or desire for governments to tax online sales.

For purposes of comparison, e-commerce now makes up over 12% of total sales in the United States according to the U.S. Department of Commerce. For cities and counties in Missouri, 12% is a lot of sales not to tax. To address that, at least four counties and dozens of cities have placed use taxes on the April 5, 2022, ballot. Expanding the tax base with a use tax, if done in conjunction with a reduction of other, more harmful taxes, could be a beneficial change. But let’s be clear: if there is no corresponding reduction in other taxes, this is a tax increase on residents.

It is a central tenet of tax policy that a tax base should be as broad as possible. The more expansive the tax base, the lower the rate that must be imposed to fund the functions of government. Exact use tax revenue amounts are hard to predict, but the revenues for each city will not be insignificant. Local governments have received federal COVID-relief and stimulus funds, home values have risen substantially, and tax collections during the pandemic were not down as much as initially feared. As a result, many of these cities and counties do not need this new tax revenue to meet vital needs. The use tax could be approved by voters to responsibly expand the tax base and equalize the competition between online and physical stores, but it should not be approved simply to grow government revenues. Imposing a use tax in a revenue-neutral manner is not a new idea. It is exactly how the Missouri Legislature addressed this issue with the state’s new use tax law in 2021. St. Francois County officials have publicly stated they will lower their county property tax if the use tax is approved.

For cities and counties in Missouri proposing to impose their own use taxes, the simplest way for them to offset the revenue increases from the use tax would be to lower their property taxes in a revenue-neutral manner. Other options for various local governments if the use taxes are approved include eliminating more harmful taxes, such as the paradoxical local sales tax for economic development. Reducing the local utility tax rates would be another good exchange for cities that do not levy property taxes.

The imposition of a use tax for these Missouri cities and counties could be a positive policy change. It could also be an easy way for politicians to just raise taxes one more time. By having various city officials pledge to enact offsetting revenue reductions, local officials can amplify the public benefits while curtailing the tax impact on residents and businesses. That is a plan I think most taxpayers and voters could support. Without such a commitment, though, the use tax is just another tax increase.

The post Missourians to Vote on New Use Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

My colleagues and I have been writing about the online sales tax issue for years and have submitted testimony on the topic five times this year alone. The purpose of the tax is help level the playing field between online retailers and brick and mortar stores, but as Institute researchers have repeatedly emphasized, any effort to expand the state’s sales tax base should be done in such a way that it doesn’t raise the cumulative tax burden on Missourians. In other words, the bill should be revenue neutral. This legislation delivers in that regard.

SBs 153 & 97 offset the tax increases that will come with collecting online sales taxes from out-of-state retailers with future income tax reductions. Once fully implemented, after hitting various revenue targets over a period of years, Missouri’s top income tax rate will fall incrementally from 5.4 percent to 4.8 percent. This is a good move. It shifts the state government’s revenue reliance away from the economically destructive income tax and is paid for without raising other tax rates.

Additionally, SBs 153 & 97 include a host of other positive tax-related reforms that go beyond Wayfair. A few highlights include tax-increment financing reform, special taxing district reform, and a non-refundable earned-income tax credit. Components of each of these major reforms have been included in the Show-Me Institute’s Blueprint for Missouri over the past few years and represent significant improvements over our state’s status quo.

The bill signing represents just the beginning of what will be a long road toward Wayfair implementation. Online sales taxes aren’t slated to begin being collected until Jan. 1, 2023, while the other parts of the more than 200-page bill will go into effect later this summer. In the coming months, I’ll cover the many questions our state and local governments are facing regarding the online sales tax topic. But for today, I’m glad that after years of talk and no action, the governor and legislature finally delivered on this front for Missouri taxpayers.

The post Online Sales Taxes Bill Finalized appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

A recent analysis by the Fordham Institute of state civics and U.S. history standards granted Missouri C’s in both. Once again, Missouri holds firm to its spot in the middle of the pack. Overly broad language and incoherent organization are two of the reasons cited for our mediocrity. The recommendations for improving the standards include:

• Reorganizing the American government course so that it is chronological rather than in “strands” or themes
• Including specific examples, such as Supreme Court cases or acts of Congress, wherever possible
• Providing deeper and more specific guidance for teachers

Making sure that our students leave school with a solid grasp of the history of this nation and what it means to be a citizen are two of the more important roles of our public education system. Missouri needs solid and coherent standards, along with assessments that are well aligned to those standards. We need a better framework for schools and districts to graduate students ready to join civil society as knowledgeable citizens.

The post A Rising Tide of Mediocrity appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

One such topic is the internet sales tax. Ever since the Supreme Court handed down its Wayfair decision, states across the country have been adjusting their laws to allow for the collection of internet sales taxes from businesses that don’t have a physical presence in the state. The issue has gained some traction in Missouri over the past few years, but the legislature has yet to act.

Before using the internet sales tax as a new stream of revenue, here are a few things policymakers should consider:

• Revenue Neutral – Raising taxes on Missourians during a once-in-a-generation pandemic should be a non-starter. To ensure the overall tax burden of Missourians stays the same, the internet sales tax should have a mechanism to make it revenue neutral in perpetuity. To balance the increased sales tax, the legislature should agree to lower another tax (corporate, income, sales, etc.) at a rate corresponding to the projections for internet sales tax collections.
• Accountable – If the legislature wants another source of revenue, it should include measures that ensure the funds are collected accountably. Instead of simply adding to the billions collected each year in sales and use taxes, these new funds should be tracked separately. Doing so would allow Missourians the opportunity to track how much money is being raised as a result of the legislation, and also help ensure the move remains revenue neutral by seeing how other taxes will be adjusted each year accordingly.
• Transparent – In such trying economic times, it is more important than ever that taxpayers know where their tax dollars are being spent. Any government that wants to begin collecting a new tax should be required to regularly publish its transaction data. My colleagues have been writing about the need for checkbook transparency for years, and any effort to raise taxes should include this policy as a precondition.

In the coming months, discussions about Wayfair will likely begin again, and supporters of small, responsible government need to pay attention. Collecting an internet sales tax can be done in a responsible way, but under no circumstances should the budgetary problems of today be used to justify raising taxes on Missourians for years to come.

The post Now Is Not the Time for Higher Taxes appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

The ruling finally puts to rest whether states can discriminate against religious schools in state-funded scholarship programs. Until now, states have relied upon constitutional amendments—born from an idea conceived by Congressman James Blaine nearly 150 years ago—to prevent any public money from going to religious schools. These so-called “Blaine Amendments” were primarily about discriminating against Catholic schools at a time when the Protestant majority was concerned about Catholic immigration. But no more.

And if you don’t think parents want to be able to find the school that’s best for their children, then you haven’t met Kathy Espinoza. Her years-long fight for her children went all the way to the Supreme Court of the United States. Now it’s settled. But just because the legal question is settled doesn’t mean there isn’t still much work to be done. States still need to act, and lawmakers should recognize that parents want and deserve school choice, regardless of school type.

It’s likely that there will be a lot of unhappy parents this fall as districts begin to release their reopening plans. Missouri has over 25,000 available private school seats; some are in religious schools, and some are in secular schools. This ruling means the Missouri Legislature could let parents access these seats by creating scholarship programs that would allow families to choose the best education for them. As of today, lawmakers are out of excuses.

The post SCOTUS Delivers Key School Choice Victory appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Well, you could try the hidden ball trick. Indiana’s Trine University softball team played this old ruse to perfection in advancing to the 2019 Women’s College World Series.

In a surprise pick-off move, Trine pitcher Kate Saupe turned and fired a bullet to second base. But the ball got away from the infielder and rolled into the outfield. So it seemed. Actually, the ball never left the pitcher’s glove. When the runner tried to advance, Saupe tagged her for the game-winning out.

In promoting the idea of a cost-free expansion of Missouri’s Medicaid program, the Missouri Budget Project, the Missouri Hospital Association, and others are using a similar (and equally spectacular) misdirection play to gain public support for a policy initiative that would be neither cheap nor free.

At $10.9 billion, Medicaid already accounts for 39.6 percent of Missouri’s 2019 budget. That’s more than education, prisons, public safety, or roads. It’s the most for any service funded in part or total by Missouri taxpayers.

So how can Missouri boost the number of Medicaid participants from 850,000 to more than a million people—and save money? It can’t. If we increase Medicaid enrollment more than quarter, there has to be a similar increase in costs—something on the order of $2 billion a year.

The hidden ball here is to treat the federal contribution in this joint state-federal program as “free money” —a manna-from-the-heavens gift from Uncle Sam to the Show-Me State. But the money is not free. Like the residents of other states, Missourians are on the hook for federal Medicaid obligations, no less than state Medicaid obligations. They pay the final bill either way—through state and federal taxes.

Under the Affordable Care Act, the federal government set out to expand Medicaid to include people earning up to 138 percent of federally defined poverty level.

As originally written, this legislation would have required states to comply with the planned expansion of Medicaid or face the loss of all federal matching funds, split roughly on a $3-to-$2 basis between the federal government and the states. The Supreme Court struck down that part of the law in 2012. The Obama administration then agreed to a $9-to-$1 split in favor of the states if they opted to participate in the expansion. What had been a “gun to the head” (as Chief Justice John Roberts wrote) suddenly became a mouth-watering carrot.

Kansas recently became the 37th state to opt into Medicaid expansion. If Missouri were to follow suit, it would still need to put up 10 percent of the cost. Citing a Washington University study, Medicaid expansionists think they have found a way to make even that cost disappear. But this is just one more example of cost-shifting as opposed to cost reduction.

According to the study, Missouri could re-enroll existing recipients currently classified as permanently and total disabled (PTD) based on income, rather than disability. That would trigger the new $9-to-$1 federal match—meaning more federal funds for the same people.

But there is a problem: This maneuver appears to be against the law. So the federal Office of Inspector General said in a recent audit of New York State when it tried to do same thing.

Over the last two decades, Medicaid has been a rapidly rising cost at both the state and national levels. But it remains a deeply troubled program that is not succeeding in its basic mission of providing ready access to high-quality healthcare for low-income families and individuals.

When it comes to promoting needed change in healthcare, using feel-good, sleight-of-hand accounting to promote a false idea of something-for-nothing benefits is a step backward, not forward.

The post The Myth of “Free” Medicaid Expansion appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Surely, it would be a giant shock to discover your memory was gone.

To be cut adrift from your own past is, literally, to lose your own life in the midst of living it. Suddenly, you have no friends, no background, no identity. You have lost any sense of meaning and purpose of the life you once led. And how can you even begin to think about the future if you don’t know your own past?

But what if we as nation were to wake up one day in the same condition—destitute of any knowledge or understanding who we are as a people and what was going on at different stages in the long and eventful history of our country?

If not yet there, we may be fast approaching that state.

“We’ve been raising several generations of young Americans who are, by and large, historically illiterate,” says David McCullough, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for history. As someone who has lectured at scores of colleges and universities across the country, he adds, “I know how much these young people – even at the most esteemed institutions of higher learning—don’t know. It’s shocking.”

By way of example, he tells the story of being approached by a college sophomore at a top Midwestern University who told him, “Until I heard your talk this morning, I never realized the original colonies are all on the East Coast.” “McCullough thought, “What have we been doing so wrong that this obviously bright young woman would get this far and not know that?”

In The Nation’s Report Card: U.S. History 2010, the U.S. Department of Education found that only 12 percent of high school seniors performed well enough to be rated “proficient” in their knowledge of the rudiments of U.S. history. To put that another way, 88 percent of high school seniors flunked the minimum proficiency rating, and only two percent correctly answered a question about the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown vs. Board of Education.

When speaking in different forums about the dangers of historical illiteracy, McCullough puts “gratitude” high on his list of the many “benefits to history.” “Every day, we’re all enjoying freedoms and aspects of life that we would never have had if it weren’t for those who figure importantly in history.” And again he says: “I think that America has come further in giving opportunity to the best that’s in human nature than any other country ever in history.”

Yes, we ought to be grateful. At the same time, we ought to be keenly aware of the great danger to the good life that we are living posed by collectivist thinking – the kind of thinking that is the deadly enemy of individual liberty and the idea that people should be free to lead their own lives as they choose as long as they don’t impose upon the same freedoms of other people.

Metaphorically speaking, no country—not even the United States—is an island, entire in itself. In order to understand our own history, we also have to understand world history and how other people have coped in dealing with some of the same problems that we have faced in our own country.

Today, most Americans under the age of 40 are unaware of the millions upon millions of people murdered or starved to death by communist regimes around the world over the past century. They just have no idea.

Why? At both the high school and university levels, the true history of Marxist-inspired socialism isn’t being taught—or, if it is, it is being taught in a sanitized fashion to glosses over the enormous crimes against humanity committed by Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Pol Pot, and other communist leaders.

In the hands of gifted historians like David McCullough—the author of best-selling books on Harry Truman, John Adams, and the Wright Brothers—stories of historical figures and important events tell us more about ourselves than we guessed possible.

In both our schools and our homes, we need to upgrade the teaching (and learning) of history. It really should be an eye-opening experience—something that makes us more aware of who we are and what we are capable of doing as a people and a nation.

The post The End of History as We (No Longer) Know It : A New Year’s Day Reflection appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

In the June 2018 South Dakota vs Wayfair decision, the U.S. Supreme Court overturned what was essentially a “physical presence” rule for requiring a seller to collect a sales  tax in the United States. That means states can now impose a sales tax collection responsibility on internet retailers even if they don’t have property or employees in the state.

Some assume large companies will be most affected by this change, but many big companies have a physical presence in the states they do business, so they already collect and remit sales taxes. For example, Amazon has a warehouse in Missouri and collects taxes on its sales in the state accordingly. This means that those likely to be most affected by a new collection responsibility are smaller Internet retailers based outside of Missouri.

In the Wayfair majority opinion, Justice Kennedy claimed the physical presence rule “has prevented market participants from competing on an even playing field.” This may be true, but policymakers should consider how a tax increase could affect Missourians. Internet sales taxes aren’t paid by retailers; they’ll be paid by Missouri taxpayers. The costs of “evening the playing field” through tax policy have to be paid by someone, and it’s almost always consumers that have to pick up the bill. This could add to an already-high sales tax burden for Missourians.

A bill introduced last year that would have implemented an Internet sales tax made some progress in the legislature, but the legislative session ended before any real action could be taken.  It’s a good bet that this issue will come up again in 2020. Missourians interested in tax policy should monitor the debate closely, as a new law implementing an Internet sales tax could have big ramifications for our state.

The post Hoping for the Best with the Internet Sales Tax appeared first on Show-Me Institute.

Parents of children with special needs face especially daunting challenges. Upon finding out that they will be raising a child with a disability, they must immediately learn as much as they can about their child’s condition. As the child approaches school age, the parents have to think about so much more than just a classroom and a teacher. It’s not surprising, therefore, that parents of students with disabilities have a particular need for more options regarding their child’s education.

Fortunately, four years ago the Missouri legislature recognized this need and passed Bryce’s Law, named for Rep. Dwight Scharnhorst’s grandson, who was born with severe autism. Bryce’s Law allows parents of children with autism, Down Syndrome, and several other disabilities to seek scholarships through certain scholarship-granting organizations to attend private schools.

Unfortunately, the legislative process resulted in a final bill that was materially different than the one Scharnhorst proposed. The final version of the law was structured in such a way that not a single child has received a scholarship. In fact, not even one of the contemplated scholarship-granting organizations has even materialized. Imagine the hundreds or thousands of children who have missed out on scholarships because elected officials in Jefferson City failed to draft an effective means for providing those scholarships.

The law will be up for renewal in 2019. Isn’t it time for the state of Missouri to put real funding behind Bryce’s Law and ensure it is a functioning program that can help Missouri students with special needs?

There were concerns in the past with “public” funding going to “private” (often religious) schools, but the recent Supreme Court decision in Trinity Lutheran v. Comer, from right in our back yard in Columbia, would seem to permit such funding so long as it was generally available to religious and nonreligious schools alike and that religious schools were neither favored nor disfavored in the application process.

If directly funding Bryce’s Law is a bridge too far, allowing the contributions to scholarship-granting organizations to be tax credits instead of tax deductions (as Rep. Scharnhorst had originally intended) is also a possibility. In that case, it would be the contributions of private citizens rather than money from the public treasury that would fund the scholarships. The state of Missouri already offers a raft of pro-social tax credits for everything from child advocacy and crisis pregnancy centers to food pantries to youth development and crime prevention programs. Scholarships for students with special needs are an equally worthy cause.

Note that families don’t have to attend private schools. If they are being well served by their assigned public school, they can stay there. If, however, that public school is not meeting their child’s needs, they would have a chance to give another school a try.

There is a bitter irony to having a law on the books that could do so much for children with special needs, but cannot deliver the promised benefits because it fails to provide a viable funding mechanism. The time is ripe for the Missouri Legislature to fix its past mistakes and put Bryce’s Law to work for the families it was intended to help.

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