Tax incentives for film producers might not be such a good idea after all. The Post-Dispatch reports that two directors complained about St. Louis after filming their movie:

They said the state of Missouri had offered the best tax incentives for the story, which was set in a nameless Midwestern city, but that the weather was too hot, rental-property owners were greedy and the local crew was inexperienced.

Even after that bad experience, the Joplin Globe now urges lawmakers to keep expanding tax breaks:

Movies are a multibillion-dollar business. Missouri and Kansas think they can get a chunk of the action. It is worth a try. Let the cameras roll!

It’s true there’s a lot of money in movie-making, but it’s not fair to give tax incentives to huge industries while small businesses struggle under full tax burdens. Lowering taxes for everybody would be more equitable. And if you don’t play favorites, you don’t have to worry about bad press after people who don’t really want to be in Missouri come just for the tax "opportunities."

No, this is not a post about football.

The University of Missouri–Columbia has won approval to drop the hyphen from its name, in all but its most official communications.

This name change follows a series of identity crises suffered among Missouri universities. The University of Missouri–Rolla recently changed its name to Missouri University of Science and Technology; Southwest Missouri State University is now Missouri State University; and Central Missouri State University is now the University of Central Missouri.

OK, good — I’m glad that we’ve got that all cleared up now.

This name change bothers me. Yes, Mizzou, we all realize that you’re the flagship school of the University of Missouri system, but do you really have to change your name to prove it? UM–Columbia fears that the hyphen gives it the appearance of being a “regional” school.

Yes, in the same way the University of California–Berkeley is a “regional” school. Or how about that regional school, the University of Michigan–Ann Arbor. And UNC–Chapel Hill?

Maybe now that the “University of Missouri” has solved its name issue, it can concetrate on competing with those other “regional” schools in the most recent U.S. News and World Report rankings.

I just listened to State Sen. Rupp on KMOX (thanks, Combest), discussing legislation that targets online harassment. The Dardenne Prairie law was drafted in response to the tragic suicide of a teen girl after a woman claiming to be a 16-year-old boy allegedly made hurtful comments to her on the MySpace website.

I agree with Rupp that legislators need to be careful when writing this kind of legislation. An op-ed in the Harvard Crimson explains why the law should be rethought:

The law is also extremely vague. It defines harassment as engaging in a “pattern of conduct” that would cause a reasonable person to suffer “substantial emotional distress.” But what period of time results in the distinction of a “pattern” rather than haphazard nastiness? And what does “substantial” entail for the “average” person? Suicide? A few tears?

However, I think the op-ed might be going too far when it compares what happened in this case with the usual teasing all teens experience at some point. Creating a fake Internet personality for the purpose of humiliating someone isn’t quite the same as merely saying to her face, "You look like a dork." Some online harassment is so pernicious that the law should address it. But we want to be careful not to criminalize every tactless email-writer.

This looks like an interesting report about Missourians’ health insurance coverage and spending on health care. I enjoy learning new statistics (or facts, or numbers — whatever Dave and Justin want to call them) about Missourians’ medical spending. Unfortunately, Families USA has taken what could have been a great opportunity to analyze data and turned it into an opportunity to spread fear and panic about health insurance.

The report details the percentage of income spent on health care for various segments of Missouri’s population. It shows that 1,225,000 Missourians under age 65 are projected to spend more than 10 percent of their pre-tax income on health care, and 341,000 are projected to spend more than 25 percent. The press release concludes that this is a "health care affordability crisis."

I’m not convinced. First, the quality of health care is continually rising. All kinds of new drugs and procedures are available now that didn’t exist in the past. These are often expensive when first introduced, but their cost decreases with time. Some drugs are now so cheap that stores can give them away for free. Health care consumers have more options now than they once did, and treatments that have been around for a while are getting cheaper and cheaper.

Second, looking at percentage of income is the wrong way to go. Once, we were all hunter-gatherers who spent 100 percent of our "income" on food and shelter. Health care wasn’t really available at all. Fast forward through a lot of economic growth, and today we spend larger percentages of our income on human capital investments like health care and education. Likewise, we spend larger percentages of our income on computers than we did 30 years ago. That’s not because computers are becoming more expensive — they’re getting cheaper all the time — but because they used to be so expensive that most people didn’t spend any part of their income that way. Computer spending and health care spending are rising. Computer costs and health care costs are not.

Finally, there’s one obvious way to give people more pre-tax income to spend on stuff other than health care: lower taxes!

The Kansas City Star has an article today (link via Combest), on the small town of Farley in Platte County. There are some classic nuggets in this article. I wonder whether the civic leaders of Farley are able to see the possible connections here (emphasis added):

Farley has little chance of increasing revenue in the foreseeable future because its growth rate has been small. The village is at its maximum allowable property tax levy and has no businesses that could generate sales-tax revenue.

I wonder if there could possibly be a connection? To the credit of Farley’s civic leaders, at least they gave consideration to the dramatic and usually overlooked possibility of disincorporation. But sometimes you are damned if you do and damned if you don’t:

Kincaid said she had discussed the situation with representatives from Mack’s Creek, a community near Lake of the Ozarks. There, she said, the community spent money on an election required to unincorporate, but the measure failed, increasing the community’s financial burden.

It’s true: Elections aren’t free to hold. If you try to disincorporate, and fail, you just owe even more money. I guess the moral of the story is to convince the voters that if you are in a hole, the first thing to do is to stop digging.

David Weigel at Reason’s Hit and Run blog comments on Gov. Blunt’s plan to keep illegal immigrants from getting driver’s licenses, and on his promise to punish anyone who helps them get licenses illegally:

Are there fifth columnists in the Missouri DMV who are handing out licenses to people with fistfuls of pesos and kindly winks? If not, it’s already illegal to forge drivers’ licenses, but under-21s try [...] Will Jefferson City be cracking down on all of them? Just the ones who help out illegal immigrants?

Weigel makes a good point. MIssouri doesn’t grant driver’s licenses to illegal immigrants now, and we already have laws against fake applications and forging licenses. If a few people manage to get licenses illegally under the current system, new laws about it aren’t going to stop them. We should concentrate on better enforcing our existing laws, not passing duplicate ones.

Fans of free markets are doing the wave. Starting today, it’s legal in Missouri to sell tickets at prices above their face value. The Kansas City Star has the story:

The development comes courtesy of a new state law that says no county or city regulation can prohibit “the sale or resale of an admission ticket to any legal event at any price.”

According to Wagner, “There are a million reasons why people in Missouri benefit from having legalized ticket brokering.”

You can sell an out-of-print book or a rare antique for more than the original price. As a matter of fact, prices are allowed to change for just about every other item sold in our economy. Tickets shouldn’t be any different.

The article notes that people have always engaged in "ticket scalping," but that the law was rarely enforced because police have better priorities:

Violation was punishable by up to a $500 fine and/or six months in jail, but police spokesman Capt. Rich Lockhart said police only went after “a few” violators over the years.

“For us, the focus on game day is about getting people in and out of the complex in a safe manner,” he said. 

While the Jackson County Council is doling out taxpayer money to selected assistants, last night the St. Louis County Council held its annual public meeting on the budget. The best news out of the meeting, which was covered here in the Post-Dispatch (link via Combest), is that the council will not approve the tax increase sought by County Executive Dooley. Because the council chose not to roll back tax rates in response to reassessment, this was the least they could do for us. Honestly, though, Chairman O’Mara and the rest of the council deserve credit for killing this tax increase before it got going.

The main reason for the tax increase, cited by this article and prior ones, was to hire 25 more county police officers. Now, I know conventional wisdom would disagree with me, but I don’t think St. Louis County needs any more officers. Let’s be honest, here — St. Louis County is a very low-crime area for the most part, and the areas within it that have more crime are generally patrolled by municipal police departments (Wellston, Jennings, and Kinloch, for example), rather than the county. So those new officers would not go where they are most needed. I know there are unincorporated areas of the county that have issues with crime, such as Castlepoint and sections of Lemay, but the county police are able to properly patrol those areas with existing resources.

I certainly agree that the residents of areas in near-north county would be better served by the county police, rather than their own, small departments. The same goes for tiny municipalities throughout the county. (Hello, St. George, I am looking at you as I drive the speed limit through your little village.) But under the present system, if the county were to take over the policing in those towns, the towns would pay the county to do so, and hence there would be no need for a countywide tax increase. I am all for changing the system to give more authority to the county police in these tiny municipalities, but let’s change the system first, and then we can talk about a tax increase.

On the related note of a pay increase for existing county officers, I am in full agreement that the officers in the county’s primary police department deserve a fair pay increase. Their request seems reasonable. But after the substantial increase in tax money from reassessment alone, the county does not need to raise taxes further to give its employees a raise.

Finally, I want to commend a proposal by Councilmember Fraser regarding the trash hauling that was on the agenda for last night’s regular meeting:

Fraser would limit haulers to contracts in two trash districts rather than seven as the administration has proposed. The change would help small trash haulers stay in business, she said.

This is a great idea, and one that addresses the primary concern I have had about this proposal from the beginning. I am still torn on the overall plan, but this proposal, if adopted, makes it much better.

The Class Notes blog reports that Rep. Ed Robb is sponsoring a bill that would allow parents to decide whether twins should be assigned to separate classrooms. The post continues:

Columbia Public Schools has an unwritten policy that twins/multiples be separated to develop their own identities. But Assistant Superintendent Jack Jensen and several building principals tell me that the unwritten rule is adjustable when parents have a reason why the siblings should be together.

Whether or not twins should be together depends on the children involved. Giving parents this choice is a great idea — after all, they know their kids best. Furthermore, I’m confused by the rationale for the CPS policy on twins. Does this mean that kids automatically have the same identity as everyone else in their classroom?

I do see how identical twins could be a headache from a school’s point of view, though. When I was in ninth grade, two identical twins who were not assigned to the same classrooms switched their schedules. So one day Twin A attended Twin B’s classes, and vice versa. The teachers didn’t notice. But those are the kinds of issues that are better dealt with on a case-by-case basis, not by a blanket prohibition on keeping twins together.

There’s another new Missouri education blog out there, this one courtesy of the Columbia Missourian. In its first few posts, it covers art and language education at both public and private schools, and reprints an article about the Show-Me Institute’s education conference. One feature of the blog that looks particularly promising is that it allows citizens to contribute their own education-related stories and photos. I hope this blog’s openness to publishing content from a variety of sources will prevent it from going the way of the MSBA’s one-time blog.

Check it out: http://schoolhousetalk.blogspot.com/

The Kansas City Star has an article on the age-old question of what to do with leftover budget money.  I guess it’s not an age-old question; it really began with the evolution of democracy around 1776. Before that, the answer was always, "Give it to the King." But anyway, there is some leftover money in the budgets of the Jackson County Council and Election Board, and considering all the things they could do with the money, they have — shockingly — chosen the absolute worst: Give it to the hacks.

This is really atrocious. Let’s check out the things that could be done with extra money: 1) Return it to the county treasury for next year; 2) quickly pass legislation transferring it to a pressing need; 3) lower taxes; 4) use the public’s money to benefit your cronies. The Jackson County Council chose number four:

Tarwater and other legislators said they were giving bonuses because they had money left in their budgets and their aides were doing good jobs. Tarwater will give $4,000 by year’s end to his aide.

I used to be an aide at the Saint Louis County Council, so I had basically the same job. Never in a million years would the council have just given leftover money to the aides as a bonus. (For the record, the position of council aide in St. Louis — and I am sure this is true in Jackson Co., too — is a very good job for a number of reasons.)

The Jackson County Election Board is doing the same awful thing:

Tammy Brown, chairwoman of the Jackson County Election Board, said she would have enough money left in her 2007 budget to grant $78,000 in bonuses by year’s end to the 34 board employees. Rizzo, chairman of the legislature’s budget committee, said election employees do an exceptional job and he would support the bonuses.

2007 was not an election year, so I really doubt the people at the election board worked all that hard — certainly no harder than they are supposed to work as part of their job.

I have written before that Jackson County Executive Mike Sanders is becoming one of my favorite elected officials. While the council budget is outside of his control, at least we get this in the article:

The Sanders administration will not support fund transfers for pay bonuses, said Shelley Temple-Kneuvean, deputy chief administrative officer.

I should also say, good for the three councilmember who are not participating in the bonus scheme. Which is exactly what it is: a scheme to reward loyal supporters with public money. Just horrible.

Most journalists aren’t number people. If they were, they’d be much less likely to wind up in a profession dominated by words. We’re trying to ameliorate the situation, at least a little, by cosponsoring CARR training sessions here in Missouri with the Heritage Foundation, the Sunlight Foundation, and the Missouri Broadcasters Association. These sessions help to give journalists some basic grounding in computer-aided statistical reporting.

A recent article in The Washington Missourian about property tax assessments (I found the link via John Combest’s always useful page) highlights the need for journalists to check, doublecheck, and triplecheck their numbers — and always get another pair of math-savvy eyes to inspect their work:

Kim and Steve Obenauer were shocked last week when they found out their real estate tax bill has increased by nearly 87 percent this year. [...]

The tax bill for the lot with the mobile home was $79.08 in 2006. This year’s tax bill for the property is $605.41.

Wait a second, I thought — wouldn’t that be an increase of more like 600 to 700 percent? I called up Windows’ trusty calculator, and found that, indeed, moving up from $79.08 to $605.41 constitutes an increase of 665.57 percent. Why such a large discrepancy between the actual figure and the reported figure, I wondered? I figured it was probably just a typo, and moved on. Then I found this sentence:

One woman’s tax bill increased 61 percent, from $390.63 in 2006 to $1,009.10 this year, Emmons said.

But that would be an increase of well over 100 percent! Sure enough, a quick trip to the calculator revealed an increase of 158.33 percent. That’s when I realized what the Missourian piece was doing wrong — it was taking a backward look at the numbers, as though the new tax figures were starting points.

Take the first set of numbers, $79.08 and $605.41. If a homeowner were assesed $605.41 one year and $79.08 the next, that would constitute a decrease of 86.94 percent — or, rounded up, 87 percent. The problem is, that same figure doesn’t apply in reverse. Percentage changes are relative, depending on which number is the starting point, so even though $79.08 is only 13.06 percent of $605.41, calculating the reverse shows that $605.41 is 765.57 percent of $79.08 — or, after subtracting the original 100 percent, an increase of 665.57 percent more than the original $79.08.

The same is true of the second set of numbers. Moving from $1,009.10 one year to $390.63 the next would be a decrease of 61.29 percent, but the reverse, moving up from $390.63 to $1,009.10, is an increase of 158.33 percent. In other words, if you take the difference between the lower figure and the higher — that difference being $618.47 — you can fit $390.63 into it 1.5833 times, which is where we get the 158.33-percent-increase figure. If you take that same difference and try to fit $1,009.10 into it, you’ll find that it fits 0.6128 times, which is where we get the 61.28-percent-decrease figure.

I don’t write this as an unfriendly challenge to anybody at the Missourian. Rather, I simply hope it illustrates that, as Judge J. Smith Henly wrote, "Statistics are elusive things at best," and nudges Missouri journalists toward using a little more care when working with figures.