If 17 lobbyists cannot get you what you want, then I do not know what can.

At the conclusion of the 2013 legislative session, Missouri senators shut down the tax credit that would have opened up millions more to Saint Louis NorthSide developer Paul McKee.

I would like to take credit for this. But unfortunately, there is no one who can really take credit for this happening. Making a bill become a law can often be a confusing and messy process. In this case, the Distressed Area Land Assemblage Tax Credit (DALATC) was set to expire this year, and there were bills proposed to extend the credit. At the last minute, however, the DALATC extension was tacked on to a different bill, House Bill 698. HB 698 was a hodgepodge type of bill including various tax credit provisions.  Eventually, a senator filibustered the bill so it did not pass. (Show-Me Institute Policy Analyst Patrick Ishmael has more detail about the legislature’s failure on this bill here.)

Is this going to stop or hinder in any way NorthSide development? Of course not. McKee’s project has already received more than $40 million in state tax credits, and the City of Saint Louis has promised close to $400 million more in local incentives. Plus, the project still has potential to tap up to $20 million in credits from the state before the DALATC expires later this year.

There is no doubt that McKee wanted access to the $45 million more that extending this tax credit would have opened up. But the project will just have to “make do” with the $440 million in government assistance it will receive.

The 97th Missouri General Assembly did nothing about school choice. However, the legislature was not completely inactive regarding education issues. On the topic of teacher tenure reform, for instance, the legislative body looked much like Bill Murray’s character in the 1991 film, “What About Bob?”— taking baby steps.

As Dr. Leo Marvin (Richard Dreyfus’ character) tells Bob about baby steps, “It means setting small, reasonable goals for yourself. One day at a time, one tiny step at a time — doable, accomplishable goals.”

Bringing Saint Louis’ tenure laws in line with the rest of the state was a very “doable, accomplishable goal.”

As we have documented, the laws governing teacher tenure were much more restrictive in Saint Louis than they were in the rest of the state. In a presentation at the Show-Me Institute, Saint Louis Public Schools Superintendent Kelvin Adams said it took 100 days to remove a low-performing teacher. Throughout the rest of the state, administrators only have to provide teachers 30 days to improve.

I am glad that the legislature was able to achieve this baby step in the right direction. As a result, ineffective teachers will be removed from Saint Louis classrooms more rapidly. Yet, in the grand scheme of things, this is a very modest improvement, especially when much more could have been accomplished.

Twice, teacher tenure reform bills were defeated on the House floor. In my opinion, the bills simply went too far —replacing the current teacher tenure mandates with new prescriptive mandates for teacher evaluations.

We do not need overly prescribed teacher evaluations any more than we need antiquated tenure laws. What we need are school leaders who actually have the power to lead.

So instead of celebrating true tenure reform, we are left to celebrate the baby step of Saint Louis teacher tenure laws falling in line with the rest of the state. Baby Steps.

Do you like riddles? Here is one for you: What is comprised of 197 members, is active for approximately five months, and is full of inertia? If you answered the Missouri General Assembly regarding education legislation, give yourself a gold star. The state’s legislative body just concluded the general session. In terms of education reform, they achieved very little.

The goal of the legislature should be to improve educational options for Missourians. They could accomplish this with meaningful school choice legislation.

As I noted in my recent essay, “Public Dollars, Private Schools: Examining the Options in Missouri,” greater school choice would be a net positive for Missourians. School choice puts the power back into the hands of the parents and it can save taxpayers money.

This year, however, the topic of school choice was rarely discussed in the House or Senate halls. Few school choice bills were even proposed, and the ones that were rarely received much attention.

A bill that would have fixed many of the problems in the current inter-district school transfer law never even received a hearing in the House Education Committee. The bill would have made it possible for many students to escape failing schools.

A bill that would have made it possible for students to enroll in a virtual course from another district or charter school never made it out of either the House or the Senate.

Even a bill targeted at helping autistic children failed to gain traction for most of the legislative session. It was finally folded into a conference committee substitute at the 11th hour. If the governor signs Bryce’s Law, it will establish a small, targeted scholarship program for students with special needs on the autistic spectrum.

It took eight years of continually pushing for Bryce’s Law to be passed — a small, targeted school choice program.

So here is another riddle: When will the legislature realize that all students could benefit from increased educational options? That riddle is truly puzzling.

It seems the St. Louis Post-Dispatch thinks business tax cuts amount to corporate welfare. That is NOT corporate welfare. Corporate welfare is the government giving subsidies, grants, loopholes, and other forms of preferential treatment to specific businesses. The Export-Import Bank is an example of corporate welfare.  At the state level, various instances of Tax Increment Financing (TIF) count as corporate welfare. However, letting a person or business keep more of what he/she/it earns is not corporate welfare.

That is not how the Post-Dispatch sees it. They believe that all money is the government’s money and that we should be grateful for the few cents they leave us.

The substance of the Post-Dispatch’s argument against business tax cuts? They claim there is little evidence to support the assertion that cutting business taxes will result in increased economic activity. Except this study by Jens Arnold found that corporate income taxes were one of the most economically harmful taxes a country can impose. And this study by the Tax Foundation analyzed the economic literature and found that corporate income taxes are the most harmful to growth.

Even one of the articles they cite to support their position states, in regards to start-ups creating jobs, “their decision to create a new job would be based on whether the long-term cost of that new job would be offset by higher revenues and profits.” Well . . . if a company has more money after taxes (because their taxes go down), what will happen to their profits? They will increase.

Tax cuts aren’t everything, and even if House Bill 253 becomes law, it alone will not cause our state’s economy to go gangbusters. However, tax rates DO matter, and no amount of screeching from the Post-Dispatch will change that.

The Missouri Legislature passed Senate Bill 330 last week. I hope the governor signs it (I cannot see a reason for a veto). SB 330 makes several small but worthwhile changes to state licensing rules. Generally speaking, the legislation expands the practice areas of certain jobs, allowing them to do things they were previously prevented from doing. Nurses, dental assistants, and counselors now all have slightly expanded practice areas and slightly reduced regulatory control of their jobs. This is a good thing. Furthermore, there are now a few more ways to become licensed as a hearing instrument specialist in Missouri. This is also a good thing.

What is a VERY good thing is that we appear to be moving in the right direction on the larger issue in Missouri. To the best of my knowledge, we have not passed wholesale licensing requirements for a new occupation in Missouri for a few years. (I may be overlooking some, but I do not think so.) Last year, due to prompting by court rulings, the state significantly reduced the licensing burdens to open a moving company in our state. This year, we passed SB 330, with its entirely positive changes. At the state level, we have leaders such as Missouri Rep. Eric Burlison (R-Dist. 133) who care about the personal and economic harms when government makes choices that markets and customers should be making.

At the local level, we still see an expansion of licensing abuses, from street performer auditions and valet parking licenses in Saint Louis to totally bogus HVAC rules in Saint Louis County. But at the state level, we are doing the right thing. Remember, occupational licensing of most occupations benefits current practitioners at the expense of future competitors and the public. We need less of it in Missouri.

The proposed Missouri Medicaid expansion has reached the end of the line, at least for this year. When Missouri Gov. Jay Nixon announced he would pursue the expansion after last November’s election, I expressed my substantial reservations about both the cost and effectiveness of the program. And I repeated those reservations on television, on the radio, in print, before audiences, before the Missouri Legislature and on our blog again, and again, and again . . .

Suffice to say, I think that Missouri not expanding a broken Medicaid program is a victory for Missouri taxpayers. Kudos to the legislature for its steadfast opposition to the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and support for reforms that will actually help to make Missourians healthier. Unfortunately, the ACA just isn’t that vehicle.

The Missouri Legislature has embarrassed itself once again on the tax credit issue, and this year’s failure to protect taxpayers from out-of-control tax credit spending was particularly excruciating. After the House and Senate conferenced and produced a suboptimal, but passable, tax credit compromise last Thursday, the legislation fell to a filibuster in the Senate on Friday — the last day of the session. The bill had both good and bad elements to it, capping and eliminating some credits (the good) while creating and extending others (the bad). In the net, it would have been an important first round of tax credit reform, albeit a small step.

But even that couldn’t get through the legislature. Like a college sophomore starting an essay the night before it’s due, the legislature produced tax credit legislation at the latest possible moment with the smallest margin for error available. In school, you don’t get a passing grade for “I started late and my computer crashed!” or “My dog ate my homework!” You don’t get an “A” for “effort.” You get an “F” for “failure.”

Missouri’s heavy use of tax credits encourages government to pick winners and losers in our economy, leading to rampant abuse, distorted economic priorities, and tightening budgetary realities. It’s maddening that practically nothing has gotten done on tax credits that have sapped the state’s coffers in recent years — and whose consequences led to more than $400 million in economic development tax credit issuances in fiscal year 2012 alone. Let’s be blunt here: the legislative dysfunction on the tax credit issue is an unmitigated state disgrace. This year I was hopeful that the legislature had finally gotten past its dark tax credit days, whose depths were deeply plumbed with 2011’s Aerotropolis boondoggle.

But apparently not. As someone who takes notes on the floor debates in the state House and Senate, I cannot tell you how many times I heard a legislator say “I don’t agree with tax credits, but . . .,” and then go on to explain why their pet tax credit needed to be extended or created. (This is especially common in the House.) Bona fide tax credit reform supporters and opponents can disagree civilly, but I have little tolerance or patience for policymakers who are all hat and no cattle on this issue — happy to carve out special tax credits for their special groups as they blithely gore other credits. That’s the worst kind of hypocrisy. Sen. Jolie Justus, a tax credit supporter, was right on Friday to criticize such behavior from the floor of the Senate, and I’ve independently noted the same sort of behavior Justus observed.

The legislative intransigence on tax credits is stomach churning. Coupled with the governor’s leadership void on basically every issue, the legislature’s inaction on tax credit reform is a shameful low note of the session. Taxpayers deserve better than this shabby treatment.

The Kansas City Business Journal recently published an article about the effort to tear down Kansas City International Airport (MCI) and rebuild it as a single terminal. In the piece, Austin Alonzo relies on Mark Perryman, the COO of Landrum & Brown Inc., “a Cincinnati airport consulting firm that helped the Kansas City Aviation Department develop the single-terminal proposal.” As expected, the firm that earns money building new airports thinks that Kansas City should build a new airport. According to Perryman, at least one business picked up and left Cincinnati, Ohio, and moved to Charlotte, N.C., because the latter had a new airport.

Perryman said that declining traffic and air service out of Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport (Code: CVG) and recent upgrades at Charlotte/Douglas International Airport (Code: CLT) played a role in Chiquita’s relocation in 2011, which took several hundred white-collar jobs with it.

Aside from relying on Perryman, Alonzo quoted some leaders of economic development groups, who, as can be expected, support building a new airport. But not all is well at Cincinnati’s airport since its $500 million renovation in 1994. According to the Manhattan Institute of New York’s City Journal:

You can see those extra charges reflected in the sky-high fares at Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky International Airport, a Delta hub and winner of the top spot in Forbes’s 2009 list of “rip-off airports.” Last year, an average ticket out of the airport cost $526, compared with $372 in nearby Dayton, Ohio, and $387 in Indianapolis. International flights averaged $1,408, 36 percent more than the national average. Is the airport really a reason to relocate to the area, as businesses often claim? The Cincinnati Business Courier found that three-quarters of the Cincinnati firms it surveyed were flying employees out of the Dayton airport, more than an hour away by car. “Unless you’re suffering from delusion, you realize that the Cincinnati airport is now really in Dayton,” aviation expert Darryl Jenkins told the Cincinnati Enquirer. Similarly, a 2006 study found that nearly one-fifth of local fliers drove to other airports to avoid the hub’s high prices. Delta is now reducing flights from Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky, and passenger traffic at the airport is down 65 percent since 2005.

So there you have it. The cost of building a new airport has contributed to making travel to and from there more expensive, so travelers seek other venues in neighboring cities. A new airport does not attract business, as proponents claim — quite the opposite. (Proponents of building a new terminal at MCI already complain about losing market share to neighboring airports. This would only make it worse.) Remember, Chiquita left Cincinnati seven years after their airport renovation and partly because of reduced air service.

Now Cincinnati airport consultants want to do to Kansas City what has been done to Cincinnati.

No thanks.

Last night, I conducted an experiment to test the impact of the Common Core State Standards. When my kids were asleep, I placed a copy of the standards under their pillows. I was hopeful that they would be “college- and career-ready” when they woke up, but to my dismay, they had not learned anything from the standards.

You might not be too surprised about the results of my experiment because you know, as do I, that standards do not teach kids; parents and teachers teach kids. That is part of the reason that state and national standards have had very little effect in improving student achievement.

For standards to have any effect, they have to change the behavior of teachers. The only way to accomplish that is with heavy-handed government coercion and intrusion into school systems through test-based accountability. These accountability systems restrict the freedom of local schools and teachers to effectively meet the needs of their unique students.

It is not that we should not have standards, it is that one set of standards centrally imposed does more harm than good. Absent state or national standards, there would still be rigorous content standards for students. As Neal McCluskey of the Cato Institute writes, “standards are ubiquitous in free markets.”

Proponents of state or national standards might say “math is math, it shouldn’t matter where you learn it.” That is true in the sense that 2 + 2 always equals 4. But it is not true in the sense that we have discovered the exact right sequence or method of teaching math. On this, there is considerable disagreement.

In a free market, schools would still have standards; officials would just have more latitude to choose the standards for their school. Parents would also have more options in a free market to choose the school that they believe is the best fit for them. Choice is the best method of accountability.

McCluskey sums up the argument very well: “Only a free market can produce the mix of high standards, accountability, and flexibility that is essential to achieving optimal educational outcomes.”

We need to stop trying to standardize education and start trying to personalize education.

Columbia and Kansas City have been busy planning airport expansions and hoping to attract new service to their cities. A new study by the MIT International Center for Air Transportation suggests this might not be such a great idea.

The headline? The near future of all air service is looking grim. Airlines continue to consolidate service at their largest hubs, consolidate with each other, and will continue further reductions at small community airports.

Columbia has felt this decline over the past several months, and the final Frontier Airlines flight from Columbia took off for Orlando, Fla., on Monday. Columbia is not alone. Data in the MIT study shows that Missouri airports, along with almost every other airport in the country, have lost service over the past five years.

This data shows us that the fate of air travel is not dependent on how shiny your airport is. Airlines have shifted away from capacity expansion because it was not a profitable strategy. They will continue to seek ways to maximize profits; unfortunately, small- and medium-sized airports are disproportionally affected in the process.

This past weekend, I was featured prominently in a story by Elisa Crouch of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch about the Common Core State Standards.

Crouch summarized my position on content standards like this: “Shuls of the Show-Me Institute would prefer parents and schools to set their own standards, rather than states.” She also quoted me as saying, “Ultimately, there’s absolutely no evidence that content standards improve education.” Both of these are true, but they deserve a little more explanation. In this post, I will address the evidence on content standards.

Proponents of national standards often point to some of the top-performing countries and note that they have national standards. These proponents often fail to point out that some countries that perform better than us do not have national standards and many who perform worse than us do have national standards. We could just as easily point to those countries at the bottom and say, “look, national standards don’t work.”

Even at the state level, the evidence that rigorous standards improve student achievement is very weak. The Fordham Institute, one of the biggest supporters of the Common Core, has issued grades for state standards for some time now. Using these grades, the Brookings Institution examined the correlation between the rigor of each state’s standards and performance on the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP). The authors concluded that there is no relationship between standards and performance. Moreover, they predict that the Common Core will have very little impact on student achievement:

What effect will the Common Core have on national achievement? The analysis presented here suggests very little impact. The quality of the Common Core standards is currently being hotly debated, but the quality of past curriculum standards has been unrelated to achievement. The rigor of performance standards — how high the bar is set for proficiency — has also been unrelated to achievement.

Believing that rigorous standards will increase student achievement may be a fine theory, but it simply has not panned out in practice. There are several reasons for this, which I will address in my next post. I will also explain why I think parents and schools could do a better job of setting standards than the government.

With the passage of the “Broad-Based Tax Relief Act of 2013,” opponents of tax cuts are wasting no time blasting it. One of their chief claims is that if tax rates are so important to economic growth, then Missouri should be booming because of our already (supposedly) low tax rates.

Does Missouri really have low tax rates? The truth is, it kind of depends. Missouri has higher tax rates than its neighbors in some areas and lower rates in others. This matters because not all taxes have an equal impact on a state’s economic growth. Income taxes harm an economy more than a sales tax does. Thus, all other things being equal, a 7 percent sales tax rate would be less damaging to a state’s economy than a 7 percent top income tax rate. Missouri has a higher individual income tax rate than most of its neighbors. On the other hand, its state  sales tax rate is lower than most of its neighbors.

Tax cuts are not everything. With Missouri’s income tax rates higher than most of its neighbors, there is a real need for it to stay competitive. Missouri cannot afford to do nothing. The “Broad-Based Tax Relief Act of 2013″ is not perfect, but it is a step in the right direction, and contrary to what its opponents say, it is necessary.