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!”)