It seems that property tax reassessment reform is nearing final passage in the House (it’s already passed the Senate). I’ve written before about this bill, but here’s a reminder: It would mandate that local jurisdictions roll back property tax rates in response to higher assessments. Advocates argue that the rollback provision is necessary because it ensures that city officials approve tax increases by a vote, rather than by simply inflating property values.

The article has some pretty good coverage of the arguments. In addition, Dave Stokes wrote a fairly comprehensive review of property tax reform last December, and blogged about it here.

But I still don’t completely buy the whole “rollback” argument. While I recognize the potential for appraisal abuse, people certainly don’t feel upset when their house depreciates and they then pay less in taxes. So why should it work in reverse? And if we extend the argument further, why not mandate the same thing for sales tax rates? If the price of a good appreciates in value, should consumers pay a lower tax rate on that good so that the nominal amount of tax is the same as before? Certainly, that would seem silly. But maybe I’m just missing the point.

I definitely disagree with the recommendation that a fair compromise would involve simply adjusting property appraisals by a county average for a particular type of property. Property values are idiosyncratically determined by their specific locations, and it would be patently unfair (in my opinion) to subsidize booming neighborhoods at the expense of houses that have lost thousands of dollars in value.

A chilling article about the North Korean regime.

No matter what your feelings about capitalism are, no "capitalistic" country has ever been as barbaric as these regimes claiming to be "protectors" of the people.

The Show-Me Institute, in conjunction with Saint Louis University, is sponsoring the second lecture in its Series on Economic policy on Thursday, April 17. The speaker, James Guthrie, will address the question, "How Much Money Will It Take to Give America Good Schools?" Here’s a snippet from Guthrie’s bio:

James Guthrie is a professor of public policy and education, chair of the Leadership, Policy, and Organizations department, and director of the Peabody Center for Education Policy at Peabody College of Vanderbilt University. He instructs both undergraduate and graduate courses, and conducts research on education policy and finance. He is founder and chairman of the board of Management Analysis & Planning, Inc. (MAP), a private sector management consulting firm specializing in public finance and litigation support.

A pre-event reception will begin at 3:30 p.m. on April 17, with the lecture beginning at 4:00. If you, or anybody you know, may be interested in further examining the complex issues surrounding school finance, be sure to take a look at the event invitation, and then register online.

There are pros and cons to this teacher pay proposal:

House Bill 2430, sponsored by Democrat Jason Holsman, would pay teachers a recruitment bonus of $5,000 to work in a small district. Math and science teachers would get $7,500.

After five, 10 and 20 years in the district, the teacher would receive a retention bonus of $2,500, $5,000 and $10,000 respectively.

Rewarding teaching just for sticking around is not the way to encourage innovation. If you’ll get a bonus after a certain number of years automatically, why strive to teach better? Current salary schedules already place too much emphasis on tenure and not enough on teaching quality.

On the other hand, higher pay for math and science teachers is a good idea. Districts have trouble holding on to math and science teachers when they have to pay them the same as English and history teachers. In general, districts should be free to offer more money to teachers they want to retain — whether that’s because they teach hard-to-staff subjects or because they’re exceptional teachers.

John Stoeffler has a column today in the South Side Journal, in which he quotes the famed constitutional scholar Joseph Story in support of his argument that each branch of government should be its own "final arbiter when it comes to deciding upon the constitutionality of the powers the Constitution authorizes and delegates to it."  If Congress or the president overstep their proper constitutional authority, Stoeffler says, the only legitimate remedy is to vote the bums out — the courts should have nothing to say on the matter. Stoeffler, who apparently operates a "constitutional think tank" called the Madison Forum, makes this notion of limited judicial authority the basis of his support for a proposed constitutional amendment before the General Assembly that would prohibit Missouri’s courts from ordering any increase of taxes or any expenditure of public funds unless they have been specifically authorized by the legislature or a vote of the people.

Stoeffler’s reasoning is flawed, even though the idea behind the constitutional amendment itself has some value. Federalist 78 explains that the judiciary is the proper branch of government to keep the other branches of government within their constitutional boundaries. Alexander Hamilton’s explanation of the judicial authority is directly contrary to that adopted by Story (and now, apparently, Mr. Stoeffler):

If it be said that the legislative body are themselves the constitutional judges of their own powers, and that the construction they put upon them is conclusive upon the other departments, it may be answered, that this cannot be the natural presumption, where it is not to be collected from any particular provisions in the Constitution. [... T]he courts were designed to be an intermediate body between the people and the legislature, in order, among other things, to keep the latter within the limits assigned to their authority. The interpretation of the laws is the proper and peculiar province of the courts.

Hamilton also opined on the limitations imposed on the judiciary itself. In contrast to the executive branch, which "holds the sword of the community," and the legislative branch, which "commands the purse" of the community, the judicial branch "has no influence over either the sword or the purse; no direction either of the strength or of the wealth of the society; and can take no active resolution whatever. It may truly be said to have neither FORCE nor WILL, but merely judgment; and must ultimately depend on the aid of the executive arm even for the efficacy of its judgments." (Emphasis in original.)

So, as described by the authoritative statement on the meaning of the U.S. Constitution, the proper role of courts is to rule upon the constitutionality of the acts of the other branches of government — but they are only empowered to strike down violations, not to refashion the laws so they will conform to the judiciary’s notions of what is proper. For example, school finance cases have been raging for years in Texas, but (despite the intense efforts of the school districts) the Texas Supreme Court recognizes that even when it has held the financing program unconstitutional, it is not permitted to compel the legislature to adopt a specific scheme. Instead, while the unconstitutional system may be enjoined, the legislature has full discretion as to how it will remedy the deficiency. And, of course, even the judiciary’s decisions are subject to checks and balances, in that the executive branch must agree to enforce the courts’ judgments.

An economics blog I frequently visit scours the Internet for “Greenspan mess” sitings — articles in which the words “Greenspan” and “mess” are mentioned in the same paragraph (this occurs much more frequently as of late).

I think we could do the same thing in Missouri with the words “developer” and “blight.”

On today’s list: O’Fallon.

“City officials late Thursday night were debating whether to declare blighted the site of a proposed eco-friendly housing development to allow a developer to receive a tax break over 20 years.”

Missouri newspapers should just hotkey this sentence. It could read something like this:

“[State, County, City] officials [insert time] were debating whether to declare blighted the site of [insert property or district here] to allow a developer to receive a tax break over [enter years here] years.”

The funky mayor of Kansas City appears to understand that political patronage and city hall featherbedding are the ways of political machines, not responsible government. I absolutely love this quote from him in today’s Prime Buzz blog, by the Kansas City Star:

"My job is not save someone’s job," he said. "My job is to exercise leadership."

He said his responsibility is to ensure city workers are doing their jobs well on behalf of citizens.

The above quote gives me hope, which is of course all the rage in fashionable American politics these days. But I digress. The mayor’s response was to a question about whether he is going to fill two openings on his staff. He said yes, and left himself open to criticism (already appearing in the article’s comments section) about "not caring" or "being a meany" or some such crap.

The key question should not be whether the mayor is going to fill his two positions. The question should be: Are they truly needed, and is there enough to do for the new hires to work an honest 40-hour week (or more)? If the answer to those questions is yes, then the mayor should fill the spots. One of the openings is for a policy analyst, and I can assure you that nobody in American business or government has a more demanding job or works harder than policy analysts. …

I shall close in all seriousness. Government is not a jobs program, and taxpayers should not have to fund city workers just because they have been there awhile, or they have good political connections, or because it would be cruel to let them go, or whatever. It is terrific that Mayor Funkhouser understands this, and is leading by making the hard but necessary decisions. Saint Louis City Hall could take a lesson from this. And as I now await the angry phone call, I should clarify that I am referring to Saint Louis city government as a whole — not just one office or leader.

I’m all for preventing drunken driving, but I don’t think scarlet-letter license plates are going to solve the problem. Here are a few reasons I doubt they’ll be so effective as some legislators hope:

1. Drivers will start paying more attention to the license plates around them when they should be paying attention to traffic signs and signals. This distraction could itself cause accidents.

2. In many families, two or more people takes turns driving one car. It’s unfair to subject relatives of a drunk driver to scarlet-letter license plates. This also makes the plates less useful, because no one will know whether they indicate a convicted drunk driver or just a family member.

3. If a car is swerving or otherwise behaving erratically, police should pull it over — whether or not the driver has been convicted previously. As for all the previous offenders who apeear to be driving normally, it’s unlikely that the police will be able to track them all down by their license plates and keep close enough tabs on them to prevent accidents. If convicted drunk drivers are so dangerous that police really need to see that on their cars, then those people should not be driving at all.

Voters in the state of Florida will have the opportunity to eliminate a provision of their constitution that (according to a recent appellate court’s ruling) requires religious discrimination. The provision is a Blaine Amendment, named after James G. Blaine, a congressman who drove an effort to amend the U.S. Constitution so that Catholics would be excluded from certain public benefits. His efforts were unsuccessful at the national level, but 37 states — including Missouri — still have a
Blaine-type amendment within their constitutions. Most of these, though, have been rendered only marginally effective toward their original purpose, because the states have either modified them through amendment or the Supreme Court has interpreted them in such a way as to render them inactive.

Here’s the story of how all this came to pass:

The 19th century saw the United States inundated with waves of immigrants, many of whom were members of the Roman Catholic Church. The nation had been, up to that point, almost uniformly Protestant in its religious composition. The influx of hundreds of thousands of new citizens who, it was feared, would challenge the religious orthodoxy and look to Rome for political instruction was more than many Americans were willing to tolerate. Nativist societies emerged whose purpose was to limit the volume of immigration and to regulate the nationality and class of persons allowed to enter the United States. The anti-immigrant attitudes eventually coalesced into support for the American Party, formed in 1843, also called the "Know-Nothings." By the middle of the century, the
Know-Nothings had realized significant political success, winning more than a hundred congressional seats and coming to dominate some state governments.

At the same time that these Nativist attitudes were fermenting, activists such as Horace Mann were pushing for the growth of "common schools" in which the youth of the nation could be taught in matters of faith, as well as in fundamental courses of study. These educators sought to find a sort of moral "common denominator" — a set of basic Christian principles to which all Protestant denominations could agree, and which would then be used as part of the curriculum. It was assumed that such a system should be considered "non-sectarian," because no one denomination could exert any special authority for its doctrines and, as a result (according to Mann himself), "[the] system earnestly inculcates all Christian morals; it founds its morals on the basis of religion; it welcomes the religion of the Bible; it allows it to do what it is allowed in no other system, to speak for itself."

To be sure, Mann’s schools required daily reading of the King James Bible, but he viewed this as no more than neutrally presenting the text and allowing the students to draw their own conclusions from it. In the minds of the Protestant majority, this distinguished the educational practice of the common schools from "sectarianism," in which a religious authority indoctrinated the students by exegeting the text for them.

The groundswell of Catholic students posed a serious problem for the common schools, however, because the religious convictions the immigrants brought with them from Europe were not easily compatible with the standardized Christianity advanced by the schools. The conflict is exemplified by the situation New York faced in 1842. As was the case in Mann’s Massachusetts, it was the policy of the New York Public School Society to have the King James version of the Bible — which was forbidden by the Catholic Church — read in their classrooms, and certain textbooks included historical characterizations that were repugnant to Catholics. The Catholics, under the guidance of Bishop "Dagger John" Hughes, demanded public support for their own schools. They initially won some concessions from the Public School Society, but ultimately the legislature created a City Board of Education to establish new public schools and acted to bar the public funding of "sectarian" schools.

A decade later, similar Catholic efforts in other states were labeled as attempts to "destroy public education" or "subvert basic American principles." These accusations coincided with the rise of the Know-Nothing Party during the election of 1854. Its action against Catholic interests was wide-ranging and swift where they had gained the necessary authority. After their sweeping victory in Massachusetts, the Know-Nothings proposed constitutional amendments that would have denied Roman Catholics the right to hold public office, and limited the franchise to males who had lived for at least 21 years in the United States. They dismissed Irish state-government workers, banned foreign-language instruction in the public schools, and established a special committee charged with the task of liberating women believed to be held captive in convents and nunneries, targeting as well "acts of villainy, injustice, and wrong [...] perpetrated with impunity within the walls of said institutions."

The anti-Catholic sentiment carried on beyond the demise of the Know-Nothings, though it was not as prominent during the Civil War and Reconstruction eras. James G. Blaine arrived on the national political scene in 1863, having ridden a wave of anti-Catholic, Nativist support from his home in Maine to a seat in the House of Representatives. He served in the House for thirteen years, acting as the Speaker of the House from 1869-1875. True to his base of support, Congressman Blaine made it a personal quest to see that the doors of the public treasury were finally and unquestionably closed to Catholics who wanted money to establish tolerable alternatives to the Protestant-dominated public school system. When, in September 1875, President Ulysses S. Grant called for the passage of a constitutional amendment that would deny public funds to religious organizations, Blaine responded by proposing the constitutional amendment that would come to bear his name, and which he hoped would catapult him to the Republican Party’s presidential nomination in 1876. It read:

No state shall make any law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the exercise thereof; and no money raised by taxation in any State for the support of public schools, or derived from any public fund therefore, nor any public lands devoted thereto, shall ever be under the control of any religious sect; nor shall any money so raised or lands so devoted be divided between religious sects or denominations.

Despite Blaine’s failure to get his amendment added to the federal Constitution, the influence of his cause did not disappear; it simply changed form. While Blaine’s supporters could not command the votes necessary for a federal amendment, they
did have the requisite votes to set the terms for new states’ admission into the union. In some incoming states, popular sentiment alone led to the passage of a Blaine Amendment. For others, however, Congress utilized its continuing anti-Catholic sentiment by requiring territories applying for statehood to include a provision in their new state constitution that would echo the restrictions of the Blaine Amendment.

These constitutional provisions are relics of anti-Catholic bigotry. They reflect some of the worst impulses in the human character — exclusion and discrimination against those who may think or believe differently from the mainstream — and they are directly contrary to the ideals of the First Amendment, which guarantees a right to the free exercise of religion without exclusion from generally available governmental benefits.

The St. Louis Post-Dispatch editorial board is certainly capable of surprises, and this morning’s editorial about Amtrak is one such instance. I don’t have much to add; mostly, I just wanted to highlight it here because, you know, we get a lot more traffic than some old dead-tree newspaper. As they put it:

As to the rest of it, that should be Amtrak’s problem, not the taxpayers’. Taxpayers already are paying 80 percent of the cost of hauling an Amtrak passenger across the state. That’s enough. Outside of the crowded eastern corridor, passenger trains no longer make economic sense.

Facts are facts, unfortunate as they may be to someone who loves trains, like I do. It would be fabulous to somehow fix the problems and allow Amtrak to be on time with its trains, but I don’t see why taxpayers, rather than riders, should fund those fixes. It’s hard enough to argue in favor of keeping the subsidy at the current level, as the romantic in me supports, but increasing it would be wholly irresponsible.

Amazon.com, the world’s largest Internet retailer, recently
announced its intention to sell wine through its online marketplace, a venture
that is sure to bring good, cheap wine to the masses and establish the
Seattle-based company as one of the country’s largest wine retailers. This
fact is great news for oenophiles in Missouri,
as the states’ direct-shipment laws allow for any out-of-state retailer or
manufacturer to ship up to two cases of wine per month to any customer without
restriction (and more if a special excise license is procured, which it almost
certainly will be).

However, what if wine just seems a little too “fancy” for
your next adventure across the Lake of the Ozarks Community Bridge to a certain section of Camden County, and you don’t want to deal with the hassle of
visiting your neighborhood gas station/pharmacy/liquor store/grocery store to
pick up a few cans of Missouri’s official beverage? Can’t it just be delivered to your home?

Actually, no. Anheuser-Busch (along with every other brewery
and distillery in the state) cannot ship directly to consumers. The reason
for this happens to be the same reason that people in Kansas and Utah won’t be able to take advantage of Amazon’s most recent business venture: After
prohibition, almost all states in the union moved to what is now known as the
three-tier distribution system, composed of manufacturers, distributors, and
retailers of alcoholic beverages. This system was designed to ease the states
back into alcohol consumption, and to further regulate companies like A-B.
However, its separation has led to the notion that producers cannot sell
directly to consumers. In Kansas,
this means that wine can’t be delivered directly to your home. In Missouri (thanks to the
input of a remarkably powerful wine lobby) it can, but you still have to buy
your beer at the store, because the beer lobby is more concerned with other things. This isn’t a big deal if you want to get a Budweiser,
but if you’re in Kansas City and you want to sample the latest Schlafly Reserve, or you’re stuck in Saint Louis without a
special kind of Boulevard, you’re out of luck.

The only solution to this problem? Eliminate the three-tier
system and allow manufacturers to sell directly to customers. This will keep
prices down for consumers and allow for more freedom for direct-delivery
purchases, for both beer and for wine. I really doubt anyone at A-B would be
sad if they were able to sell direct, both because revenue would skyrocket and
because no midlevel jobs would be lost — distributors of A-B products are all
monopolistic in their sale of the company’s products as is. Meanwhile, all of Missouri’s smaller
breweries would no doubt see an increase in business as their distribution
areas grew. How can this not be a good thing?

There’s an interesting article in the Star today about the proposal for a shared, regionally built jail for the Kansas City area. I think this is a great idea and an opportunity for shared investment. Regional jails have worked very well in Saint Louis County and city. The county jail in St. Louis, which was initially paid for by the county via a bond issue but is used by all the municipalities, has worked out great. In St. Louis city, there are two jails. The new city jail is just for the city itself, although I think the feds pay to house some prisoners there on a temporary basis. But the lower-security city workhouse up on Hall Street houses low-risk prisoners who can’t pay their fines or restitutions from others counties, too, and that works out well for the city’s finances.

Jails are one of the few areas where I would generally be against privatization — although some services within jails should certainly be outsourced and privatized, such as the pharmacy. Consolidation is the key to efficient use of tax dollars for jails, and it’s great that the Kansas City area may be moving in that direction. Just as St. Louis County put its jail right next to its other government buildings, I think Kansas City should build a 20-story art deco jail right next to City Hall and the courthouse. Now, that would be sweet.