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.

Michael Cannon, director of health policy studies at the Cato Institute, spoke this month before the Missouri House of Representatives’ Interim Committee on Poverty about how Missouri can expand medical coverage to poor residents by embracing freedom and deregulating an insurance industry dominated by special interests.

Mr. Cannon argues that expanding current medical social programs, such as Medicaid and SCHIP (State Children’s Health Insurance Program), is attractive because for every dollar Missouri spends on coverage, the state receives $1.50 from the federal government. But expanding government health care is ultimately unsuccessful, as these programs subsidize health care costs for thousands of non-needy individuals (such as senior citizens with substantial retirement assets), drive up the cost of private medical insurance, and do nothing to address systematic quality programs among low-income recipients.

Worse, however, Mr. Cannon argues that the expansion of government anti-poverty programs snares low-income families in a “low-wage” trap — particularly in heavily subsidized health care states like Missouri. Like most states, Missouri offers various forms of assistance to families with low incomes, and these benefits decrease as wages increase. This means that within certain income ranges, a rising wage will actually decrease annual income, as recipients receive fewer government benefits while they pay higher taxes. Mr. Cannon presents some striking examples of the “low-wage” trap for Missourians:

Consider the case of a single mother of two who lives in Missouri and works full-time:

• If she earns $8 per hour and receives a $2-per-hour raise, her annual income would go down by more than $5,000.
• Her hourly wage could double to $16 per hour, and she would still be more than $2,000
  worse off. Just to break even, her hourly wage would have to rise above $18 per hour.
• In other words, if she earns $17,000 and could somehow increase her earnings to
  $37,000, she would lose all of that $20,000 to taxes and forgone government benefits.
  (Economists would say she faces a marginal effective tax rate of 100 percent.)

This “wage-trap” is inexcusable. Many low-income individuals may not have the means to advance fast enough up the economic ladder to compensate them for their loss of benefits, forcing them to stagnate in poverty.

A better solution would be for Missouri to reduce the monopolistic protectionist polices that are designed to protect the state’s insurance providers. The Congressional Budget Office estimates that state regulations increase the cost of private health insurance by as much as 15 percent. Allowing Missourians to choose their levels insurance coverage (rather than being subject to levels of coverage that are mandated as "appropriate" by officials — such as coverage for chiropractors, and even hairpieces, of all things), and allowing residents to choose coverage from out-of-state insurers, would dramatically decrease the cost of private health care in the state.

Instead, Missouri legislators have consistently bowed down to insurance industry special interests, which continue to bankroll their campaigns.

Real freedom entails freedom of choice, and the responsibility of living with those choices. All I ask is that legislators treat individuals as adults, rather than having the arrogance to treat certain groups (like the poor) as children, always insisting that "We know what’s best."

I like to believe that most people want the same.

The Kansas City area is addressing the way it handles waste, just as St. Louis County has been doing. Here is an excellent commentary on the changes in St. Louis County, written recently by a member of our board of scholars, Michael Pakko. I agree with much of Michael’s argument, although I think the fact that the St. Louis County plan would clearly improve the quality of the local roads in unincorporated areas — which are paid for by everyone in St. Louis County, rather than just the unincorporated residents — is a strong argument in favor of the plan, and deserves careful consideration. But I digress.

The Kansas City area is considering many options — some good, some bad. I like this one a lot:

Even before the solid waste plan is done, the city is arranging to have Missouri Organic Recycling, a Kansas City firm, start taking food waste from the City Market by the end of the year. Food scraps will go to the firm’s composting facility south of Liberty and then will be sold to large landscapers and homeowners.

I also like the idea of paying according to the amount of trash you generate. I don’t see why an elderly person living alone should pay as much for trash collection as a family of six. From the article:

Johnson County [Kan.] residents may begin to see a pay-as-you-throw trash rate that provides an incentive to recycle.

However, some bureaucrats still don’t understand basic rules of incentives (emphasis added):

“There’s an unfortunate attitude from some residents that they shouldn’t have to pay for recycling,” said Betsy Betros, Johnson County’s director of pollution control. “But everybody doing their part will really make a difference.”

If you want people to recycle, which most of us do, then just charge for trash by the pound — but make recycled trash free, or at least heavily subsized (as the article indicates it may be). Don’t couch your argument for higher taxes or fees in some sort of "Let’s all pull together" garbage (pun intended).

The National Motorists Association has compiled a state-by-state list of the “Worst Speed Trap Cities” in the country. For Missouri, the undisputed winner was the town of Foristell in St. Charles County. The small town of 330 people issued more then 3,200 traffic-related tickets in 2006, with overall fines totaling $284,367.

Nothing makes me angrier than cities that use traffic violations as their primary source of revenue. There is no reason why small towns in urban counties should even maintain a police department, let alone use it to enforce traffic laws on interstate and state highways. Clearly this is a job that would be better performed at the county level, where law enforcement should be used to protect motorists from reckless drivers (rather than issuing tickets to motorists going three or four miles over the speed limit on a rural road). And this goes for red-light cameras, police checkpoints, and everything else Dave likes to quip about, too.

When small towns (I’m looking at you, Bella Villa and St. George), use their police forces to intimidate and harass motorists, they undermine support for the state’s police officers in general. And that’s not fair to the thousands of honest, hardworking police officers who are protecting Missouri’s citizens.

This holiday weekend, let’s be thankful … that we don’t have too many national holidays. We all take a few days off together, but most people take longer vacations at times that are convenient for them and their employers, rather than times mandated by the state. Things are different in China. This AP article (also in the Post-Dispatch, although I couldn’t find it on their website) describes the chaos that follows from planned holidays:

As China becomes more prosperous, its people are traveling more on their vacations - and overwhelming the facilities. The resulting public backlash is prompting the government to rethink its tightly regulated national holiday policy.

Most Chinese cannot take a break when they want. Rather, the government has set three weeks a year as national holidays.

The article describes a new plan to break up a weeklong holiday into several daylong holidays at different times of the year. Here is my favorite sentence in the article:

The plan has set off a lively debate in the state-run media.

Yeah, right.

From this article in the Post-Dispatch, it’s not clear whether students are being pulled away from school or pushed out (emphasis added):

"The reasons that kids miss school are as varied as the bugs in your garden," said Jodi Heilbrunn, an analyst with the National Center on School Engagement, which studies truancy. "Kids who are really smart and bored to tears, kids who have learning disabilities, health problems, mental health problems."

If kids are leaving school because of boredom and learning disabilities, that sounds like the schools aren’t responding to kids’ needs. Sending them back to the same bad situation isn’t the answer, so I was glad to read the article’s headline: "Truancy Court Offers Choices, Support." However, the only choices mentioned in the article are rewards and punishments for the truants. If they go back to their old school, they can earn a gift certificate to Target. So while they’re sitting in school, bored to tears or struggling with a disability, they can be thinking of all the underwear and household goods they’ll get to buy at Target.

I think choices in education are a good thing, but the choices I had in mind were more along the lines of choosing schools where students can be happy, safe, and academically successful — not choosing which bribe to take for showing up.

My birth cohort, unfortunately also known as the "hand-it-to-me-on-a-silver-platter" generation, is getting involved in politics:

The goal is not to influence candidates’ platforms but to encourage them to engage with young voters on topics that matter to them, said Rice, the campus coordinator for the program’s chapter at Meramec.

"Politicians talk about Social Security and talk about Medicare, but they’re not talking about college affordability because students aren’t forcing them to," she said.

"It’s our time to let everyone know what we think," she said.

In fact, college has never been more affordable. Besides subsidized student loans, there are grants, including some specific to Missouri. The most expensive private colleges are pledging to give huge scholarships to middle-class applicants. And many economists believe that the gains from college in terms of lifetime earnings, health, and happiness far outweigh the costs, although others (most notably Richard Vedder) disagree about some of the details.

So I think the students in the article are misguided in their fight for college affordability. If  you can borrow money to finance your education and then reap the rewards for the rest of your life, it’s not unaffordable. It’s just a large investment.

I’m also confused by the claim that these students don’t intend to influence politicians. What are they trying to do, then? Flirt with them?

There’s some discussion over at NCLBlog about research by Show-Me Institute scholar Mike Podgursky that was published in Education Next. This particular article deals with teacher pensions in states other than Missouri, and wasn’t published by the Show-Me Institute — but because how we pay teachers is a hot issue here, too, I’ll try to cover the substantive points in a later post. Right now, I just want to point out something funny in the comments on NCLBlog. When they mentioned MIke’s affiliation with SMI, they labeled it (as people often do) a "right-wing" think tank. I’ve just about given up on correcting that error by now — the funny part is what comes next. Someone else commented that the "right-wing" label is unhelpful, and here’s the response:

I don’t think it’s juvenile or ad hominem to label a right-wing think tank as such. I think it’s important to remember the folks who told us the smoking gun might become a mushroom cloud, that there were WMDs in Iraq, that Sadaam was in league with Al Queda, that they’d welcome us with flowers, that it might be six days, six weeks, they doubt six months, that the mission was accomplished, that catching Sadaam’s kids would end the war, that catching Sadaam would end the war, that things were getting better, that if we didn’t fight them there we’d fight them here, and whatever other notions they’d created.

People, you’re thinking of some other think tank. We don’t write about Iraq or take any positions on foreign policy. Trust me, this is a Show-Me Institute rule, and it’s enforced. I risk getting my Show-Me Daily posts pulled altogether if I even mention words like "Iraq" and "war."

Well, we have a new winner in the "Most obvious reference for a blog post title, ever" contest. Even if it is really a rehabbed old bridge, the point still stands. KWMU has a story (link via Combest) on the reopening of the McKinley Bridge, connecting St. Louis City to Venice, Ill. 

For better or worse, the newly reopened bridge will no longer have tolls, like it used to. Because the fine people of Illinois paid for this project with their tax dollars, I really don’t care. I never minded paying the toll when I used the bridge before it closed in 2001, which I am sure was was no more than twice in my life.

That is not intended to discount the impact of the reopend bridge:

By contrast, when the McKinley Bridge opens next month, about 10,000 cars and trucks will cross daily. As proud as I-DOT officials are of the two-lane structure, district engineer Mary Lamie says another span is needed.

Ten thousand vehicles sounds to me like a lot of cars and trucks off of the Poplar Bridge. The article has a great nugget that effectively explains why mobility is so important:

The reopening is a big deal to people in the Metro East like Kenneth Wilkinson who crosses the river each day from Granite City to work in St. Louis. "This should knock off about 15 minutes each way a day," Wilkinson said at a ceremony last weekend on the McKinley Bridge. "If I can save that kind of time and money each day."

An additional half hour each day, either to spend with family or work to make money, rather than wasting it on gas while sitting in traffic. That is what mobility means to people.

Combine this with the repairs on 802 bridges that MoDOT will begin soon, along with the project moving ahead on the Paseo bridge in Kansas City, and it looks like Missouri and MoDOT — as well as IDOT — are seriously addressing the transpotation needs of Missouri, to the best of their abilities. But I have said that before. 

There was an interesting (and unusually bipartisan) op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal the other day, touting an extremely simple health care reform designed to curb Medicare costs.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.) and Newt Gingrich, former speaker of the House and founder of the Center for Health Transformation, propose legislation to allow pharmacists to accept electronic prescriptions rather than traditional hand-written notes. Furthermore, they would mandate that all doctors who accept Medicare patients must convert to e-prescriptions.

The article notes that nearly one-third of the more than three billion Medicare prescriptions written each year require a follow-up doctor visit for clarification, resulting in billions of dollars in additional health care costs. They also argue that e-prescriptions would minimize prescription errors caused by pharmacists who are unable to read the doctor’s handwriting.

Reforms like these always amaze me because they’re just so simple. Not that this is going to keep Medicare solvent, by any means, but it’s the kind of thinking that does help to cut costs. A similar example would be the fact that more than 80 percent of Social Security checks are now distributed through direct deposit.

Of course, I’m woefully ignorant of the technological infrastructure that this legislation would require, so maybe I’m naive. And, apparently, Medicare wants to push this cost onto the doctors — which has doctors up in arms.

But the general idea of implementing simple cost-cutting measures such as this is something we should always be looking into.

Faithful readers of this blog might be under the impression that St. Louis is always missing the boat on education reform. Beside the lack of private school choice, there’s the controversial state takeover, disputes between districts about student transfers, and the fact that St. Louis’ charter school system is still behind Kansas City’s. But in the private sector, St. Louis leads the way. This is from www.sciencedaily.com:

Dan Kimura, Ph.D., a senior professor of computer science and engineering at Washington University in St. Louis, opened St. Louis’ first Kumon center in 1984, in large part because of his disappointment in the math education that his sons were getting. Mathematics is a major foundation of computer science, and Kimura, whose specialty is software programming, took action.

The article describes Kumon’s growing popularity and reports that 180,000 students are now enrolled throughout the United States. Kumon Math has been here in St. Louis for over 20 years. However, private tutoring through Kumon costs more than many parents in the city can afford. It would be smart policy to involve Kumon and other private learning companies in school reform. We could have vouchers for after-school tutoring — or maybe Kumon could start a charter school.

On Sunday, the Columbia Daily Tribune juxtaposed two columns on school choice: one by David Webber (which Sarah Brodsky already touched on here), and one by yours truly. I’d like to use this post to follow up on some of the arguments made by Prof. Webber, and reiterate some of what I said in my own column.

Stephen Colbert, Comedy Central’s immensely popular faux-conservative talk-show host and sometime presidential candidate, coined the term "truthiness" to describe things that people "know" intuitively without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts. The idea would be funnier if not for the real-world consequences of allowing prevailing opinions to overwhelm evidence to the contrary.

On Nov. 6, voters in Utah decided to stay the course with the state’s underachieving educational status quo, voting down a program that would have granted need-based scholarships (valued between $500 and $3,000) for any student whose parents chose to send them to a school other than their government-assigned public school. Professor David Webber took the vote as an occasion to argue that states should abandon education reforms that would provide immediate solutions for parents through the use of public funds that would help them send their children to the schools best suited to address their families’ needs. His rationale? A perceived lack of public support for "vouchers" — a term that studies show people
disfavor, even when they support the underlying idea of school choice.

Webber’s arguments, however, are the same "truthiness" that the National Education Association, the NAACP, and the ACLU have trotted out prior to the adoption of each of the 19 K-12 school choice programs that remain active throughout the nation. As those programs have progressed, it has become increasingly clear that the doom-and-gloom predictions made by school choice opponents are utterly divorced from reality. Fourteen states (including Utah and the District of Columbia) currently maintain at least one school choice program, each of which is steadily growing and proving its value to the communities supporting them. These programs almost invariably attract more applicants than they are allowed
to serve, and no legislative or electoral vote has ever discontinued a school choice program once voters have been allowed to test it for themselves.

Consider Milwaukee, home of the nation’s first modern parental choice program. During the past 18 years, multiple studies of that program have shown performance improvements in Milwaukee public schools. Low-income parents have been so pleased with their newfound educational freedom that the program had to be expanded to accommodate the overwhelming demand for scholarships. Schools have sprouted in disadvantaged neighborhoods to serve parents who otherwise would have seen their children bused to public schools that were not meeting their needs. Graduation rates at scholarship schools are nearly double the graduation rates at traditional public schools. And contrary to preliminary concerns about the expense of non-public education and the threat of bankrupting public schools, Milwaukee public schools currently spend $12,000 per public school student while the government spends only $6,500 to educate each scholarship student. The city is saving $5,500 per scholarship student (each of whom would otherwise require the full $12,000), while also allowing thousands of families to enjoy schools of their choice. Milwaukee’s experience proves that choice can and does work to improve the lives of families.

Webber’s objection to school choice is especially perplexing, because he agrees that "parents should be able to select a particular local school that fits their transportation and teaching needs [... and] parents should have wider choices of education services." Indeed, many studies of the nation’s choice programs confirm that education improves when parents and children have the freedom to choose their schools. Alas, Webber insists — without citing any facts or studies to support his position — that choice should be limited to public schools. These things happen when "truthiness" takes hold.

Missourians — especially those living with the consequences of failing public schools — should pay careful attention to the success of choice in other cities and states. Talk to families participating in the programs in Milwaukee, Cleveland, Florida, Arizona, and Washington, D.C., and you will hear parents tell amazing stories about the improvement in student achievement levels, and voice their markedly increased satisfaction with their children’s schools. Equipped with the evidence that school choice is succeeding elsewhere, we can move beyond "truthiness" and develop a plan to offer Missouri’s families the kind of educational freedom that has already helped so many students realize their potential.

1. Dave is right, crime is a fact. But how it’s measured is a statistic. If an incident involves a burglary, which then leads to a rape/murder, do you measure that as three separate crimes or one? The FBI has classification suggestions, but there is no consensus on how to report it.
2. There are most definitely dangerous parts of St. Louis and the city does have a crime problem. No doubt about it. But determining whether it’s the most dangerous or the 15th most dangerous city is going to be somewhat of a subjective process. Honest researchers will admit that you can get statistics to say pretty much anything you want, depending on how you treat the data. So when I see arbitrary rankings from a dataset that is known to have problems, I have to wonder how accurate the rankings can possibly be. And at least with estimates, you get standard errors. But with rankings, the researchers make it seem like this is gospel truth.
3. I agree that the solution to St. Louis’ crime problem is economic growth and better education. That’s why removing governmental red tape and improving education are two of the Show-Me Institute’s most important goals.
4. Comparing me to Joseph Stalin is a little harsh, don’t you think? And referring to me as "young" and "impressionable?" Can we say ad hominem?
5. And lastly, responding to Dave’s comment:
   

   But trying to deny that the city has a crime problem, and a serious one at that, doesn’t do anyone any good.

   I agree. And neither does it do any good to go out of your way to single out a single city as the MOST dangerous or the second most dangerous or the 32nd most dangerous. All that does is cheapen the problem, and allows policymakers to ignore crime in their own cities. (”Hey, we’re not in the top 10, so we must be doing something right!”)

"A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." — Joseph Stalin, aka Koba the Dread

"No, crime statistics are statistics, not facts" — Justin Hauke, aka impressionable young NWA fan

The funny thing about inter-office blog fights is that you argue with coworkers online instead of walking six feet to talk to them. Ain’t technology great? Seriously, I wonder whether Justin would like to tell the family of a murder victim that the crime was just a statistic, not a fact.

Near the beginning of his post, Justin writes:

Dave has probably never been to Compton, Calif. Neither have I, for that matter, and I believe most sensible people haven’t. You can not honestly tell me that St. Louis is a more dangerous place to live, I’m sorry.

Well, Justin, it is true that I have never been to Compton, although I did once go to an NWA concert at the old Arena. As a quick aside, I went to the show back in high school with my buddy Dave G., and everyone before us in line got a full body search and everybody after us in line got a full body search, but we were just waved on through by security. True story, as Krusty would say, although to this day I still can’t figure out what was different about Dave and I in comparison to the rest of the crowd.

But back to Justin’s post. I am not the one substituting my personal impressions gleaned from the entertainment world for crime statistics compiled by law enforcement. One of us is trusting the statistics (which, while some would argue are skewed, nobody is saying they are false) and one of us is writing a blog post while envisioning himself doing an 8-ball with Eazy-E while pumping the radio front and back and side to side, and jockin’ some bit’ young ladies in suburban Cali.

Justin next writes:

The first problem I have with the data is that St. Louis’ bizarre municipal boundaries make the per-capita crime statistics appear much higher than they otherwise would be.

St. Louis is by no means the only city that can not expand its boundaries. In fact, the majority of cities either can not or do not do that. Some, such as the ones he mentioned in his post, certainly do. But there is a long list of Midwestern and Eastern cities that have not expanded their boundaries in decades. And St. Louis has a higher crime rate than all of them, except Detroit, which sort of plays the role of Mississippi in always placing last (or first) in these types of rankings. As I said in my own post, as long as the crime stats are comparing St. Louis to Kansas City rather than Jackson County, or Atlanta rather than Fulton County — and they are — then our apples are being fairly compared to other, less violent apples.

I have to reprint the next paragraph in full, as Justin truly enters bizarro world:

My second point of contention, though, is that crime at the national level is grossly underreported, particularly within low-income and minority neighborhoods. I imagine that Compton, Calif., gets a much better rating because most of the crime that occurs within its borders never gets reported to the police. I mean, it’s not like the Crips go to the police station every time a Blood robs one of their fellow gang members. In contrast, I imagine that a significant portion of the crime being reported in St. Louis comes from those trepid suburbanites that make the five-mile trek into the city and become easy prey.

Where to begin? I guess at the beginning…

• IF crime at the national level is underreported in low-income and minority areas, then that happens in all of those areas, not just cities like ours trying to spin their crime stats.
• Gang members are not just confined to Compton, you know — there are plenty of them in St. Louis, too. And they are not more or less likely to report their activities depending on what the RCGA would have them do.
• As for "significant" crime reporting in St. Louis coming from suburbanites who become crime victims when they visit the city, at least Justin began that statement with "I imagine," because that idea is just a fairly tale. And even if it were somehow true, does that make the crime less important? Or less reportable?

Justin returns to reality with his summary: "I believe it is unfair to single out the city for idiosyncratic features that should be washed out of any truly unbiased statistical study." As is clear from my own posts, I am far from convinced that the city’s features are indeed idiosyncratic — and a crime is a crime, no matter who reports it or where it comes from. If St. Louis wants a lower crime rate, there are a number of things officials can do — economic growth and education being the only real answers that would be effective in the long run, and putting people in prison being the only real answer in the short run.

But trying to deny that the city has a crime problem, and a serious one at that, doesn’t do anyone any good. And trying to convince people that it’s safe to come downtown, and to the West End and Soulard — while completely true — does not do any good for the citizens who still live in the other parts of the city where violent crime is a normal fact of life.

David Webber, a professor at the University of Missouri, makes some good points in an op-ed about school choice in the Columbia Daily Tribune:

Properly administered and supervised, charter schools show promise for expanding specialized education program alternatives. Home schooling is a rapidly growing practice, and those children should be allowed to easily take advantage of public school extracurricular and supplemental activities.

Public schools should adopt more "alternative teacher certification" programs, work to retain teachers (requiring higher pay) and treat them as professionals.

However, I can’t say I share his dismissive attitude toward vouchers and tuition tax credits. He writes:

Public schools do more than teach math and reading, skills that can be purchased at a for-profit learning center at a strip mall.

Since he admits that private organizations can teach those skills successfully, why not involve them more in our education system? The argument seems to be that although public schools often lag behind private schools in teaching academics, public schools also build community pride and bring people together.

That may be true of some places, especially some rural communities where there aren’t many alternatives to the local public school. But in cities like St. Louis, where a few wealthy professionals can afford private schools while most people are stuck in the failing district, public schools can foster more frustration and resentment than community. 

Not to beat a dead horse here, but I disagree with Dave’s impression of the crime statistics in St. Louis.

Dave has probably never been to Compton, Calif. Neither have I, for that matter, and I believe most sensible people haven’t. You can not honestly tell me that St. Louis is a more dangerous place to live, I’m sorry.

I believe that the St. Louis data might be skewed and there are a couple of reasons why. For example, Dave might remember a few weeks ago when the Post-Dispatch reported that the Illinois side of the river is more dangerous than the Missouri side (according to Illinois data, which the FBI rejects). In fact, Metro East is apparently safer even than the national average.

Really?

The first problem I have with the data is that St. Louis’ bizarre municipal boundaries make the per-capita crime statistics appear much higher than they otherwise would be. Crime is a problem in areas of most U.S. cities, but the difference is that it is generally spread out over a larger population. But when St. Louis unincorporated itself from St. Louis County more than a century ago, it effectively land-locked itself. So, unlike metro areas such as Phoenix or Houston (which continue to incorporate “safe” suburban satellites within their municipal boundaries), St. Louis is stuck with inner city crime with nowhere to run. And that is an idiosyncratic feature of the data that should have been accounted for.

My second point of contention, though, is that crime at the national level is grossly underreported, particularly within low-income and minority neighborhoods. I imagine that Compton, Calif., gets a much better rating because most of the crime that occurs within its borders never gets reported to the police. I mean, it’s not like the Crips go to the police station every time a Blood robs one of their fellow gang members. In contrast, I imagine that a significant portion of the crime being reported in St. Louis comes from those trepid suburbanites that make the five-mile trek into the city and become easy prey.

The point of my post was that while I agree that the city has crime problems (I thought I stressed that point when I mentioned that I was mugged outside of my apartment), I believe it is unfair to single out the city for idiosyncratic features that should be washed out of any truly unbiased statistical study. Maybe the data is right, but even then, I don’t see how reporting these statistics does anything but blur the issue.

In closing, I want to add Mark Twain’s famous quip about statistics: “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics." As a native Missourian, he might have had a problem with the St. Louis crime data, too.

My colleague Justin seems to be attempting, in his prior post, to refute hard numbers with personal experiences, which is always a poor idea when making an argument. As for the crime report, I tend to agree with the publisher, in that if Saint Louis city government spent as much time trying to fight crime as it did fighting this report, we would all be better off. From the Post-Dispatch:

But in a tense 90 minutes on the phone, Jenkins would not budge, Fleming said.
"His dismissive conclusion at the end was, ‘Go fight crime.’"

I say this as someone who lived in the city for a long time (1995 to 2002) and moved out for reasons that had nothing to do with crime or safety. I go to the city regularly and always feel safe, except when I am trying to steal crack from drug dealers late at night in dangerous neighborhoods, but — heh — you’re not supposed to feel safe when you do that.

The numbers are the numbers, and I trust the numbers to be more accurate than Justin’s impressions of Compton, Calif., which I am sure he got entirely from rap albums. As for inconsistencies in how cities collect the numbers, the publishers discounted cities that really do a bad job of collection, like Chicago. Furthermore, I would have more sympathy for the "different data methods" argument if St. Louis City Police had not had its own scandal a few years back with underreporting rapes. If the most compelling argument you can make is that other cities underreport crime, too, you don’t have much of an argument. As long as the stats are comparing St. Louis City to Detroit rather than Wayne County, and to Kansas City rather than Jackson County, as I believe they are, than we are talking apples to apples — and the stats are legit, if impolite.

Amidst St. Louis’ celebration of the Cardinals’ World Series victory last year, an independent report compiled by CQ Press ranked St. Louis as the most dangerous city in America, based on FBI statistics.

Apparently we no longer hold that honor. We’re now number two.

These statistics continue to amaze me, because I find it very difficult to believe that St. Louis is more dangerous than, say, Compton, CA; Camden, New Jersey; or Gary, IN (or really, for that matter, Kansas City). And the annual studies have been routinely criticized for their methodologies, which are grossly inconsistent and dependent upon idiosyncratic crime referencing systems used by municipalities. In short, I tend to agree with Michael Tonry, president of the American Society of Criminology, when he states:

[These rankings] do groundless harm to many communities. They also work against a key goal of our society, which is a better understanding of crime-related issues by both scientists and the public.”

Of course, I have been mugged and robbed in St. Louis, so who am I to really say differently?

Also of note, my hometown of Sugar Land, Texas, was ranked the fifth safest city in America.

Because apparently I like extremes.

Charter schools are news at Edspresso, too. The top link this weekend is to a study on charter schools and other forms of parental choice by the National Center for Policy Analysis. The study focuses on how charter schools can help Hispanics who are at risk of dropping out of high school.

I believe parental choice policies can bring down the drop-out rate, but I’m concerned about the emphasis this article (and others like it) place on the cost of dropouts to the state. The implication is that if choice policies kept people in school, those costs would disappear. That’s not necessarily true. Students who, because of various mental or physical problems, are at risk of dropping out, are also more likely than others to need state services when they grow up. Even if we get them to stay in school an extra year or two, they may still be unemployed afterward, or need some kind of support. And although economists have done careful analyses to show that there are benefits from education, it’s hard to say exactly what effect an extra year of schooling would have on a potential dropout.

I think charter schools are a good idea because they expand people’s choices, but we shouldn’t count on them to end the welfare state or erase unemployment. As has been discussed in the last two posts, charter schools aren’t a "magic bullet."