We haven’t written much about the stimulus plan on the blog. It is more of a national issue, and it is all just too depressing for words. Dr. Joseph Haslag recorded a great radio commentary about it, though, if you would like to listen. But now some in Missouri are discussing the wisdom of letting the camel’s nose under the tent for the new unemployment insurance rules. I commend Lt. Gov. Peter Kinder and the legislative leadership for possibly resisting the unemployment portions of the “stimulus plan.” The St. Joe News-Press has the article here, and thanks to Combest for the link.

This is something I can write about because it is a tax I pay. My wife and I pay unemployment taxes for our child’s caregiver, and five times a year I calculate the tax and mail it in. (Four times for the state, and once for the feds.) This is not withheld from a paycheck, it is entirely employer-paid. I love what the Lt. Gov. said here:

“We are here to say no,” Mr. Kinder said. “This is essentially a federal bribe to change state law permanently, and the bribe lasts two years.”

And, after those two years, employers are going to have to pay higher taxes permanently. They have already increased the state’s unemployment tax wage base for 2009 — and I think that increase is the only increase employers should be forced to pay. As I said, the whole thing is just so depressing, pun intended.

I just quickly want to do my part to spread the word about tomorrow’s protest of the nationalization of our economy. Tomorrow, aka Friday, February 27, at 11:00 a.m. down at the foot of the Arch. The e-mails I have gotten say Wharf Street on the river. I always thought it was Leonor K. Sullivan Blvd., but it is probably just two names for the same street. (Sort of like Delmar and you-know-who in the city.) If you need directions to attend, let me remind you that it is at the riverfront base of the largest monument in the United States, so if you still need directions, you should probably just not come in the first place.

Apparently, some dentists are upset that, god forbid, people are making money on something that involves teeth but does not involve them. So, they have gotten a bill introduced to regulate teeth-whitening procedures. The bill proposes that anyone offering teeth-whitening services, like spas, etc., has to offer it under the supervision of a dentist. The Columbia Daily Tribune has this story. House Bill 766 would basically eliminate those kiosks in malls that offer the service quickly and inexpensively.

I realize that several people have died in these mall procedures, but the market should still determine whether people get to use the service. Oh, wait! That didn’t actually happen. Nobody could possibly be hurt getting their teeth whitened, and this bill is nothing but the worst kind of rent-seeking activity by the dental lobby. It is a great example of what I and others have said in our studies about occupational licensing: Licensing never comes about because the public demands a solution to a need. It ALWAYS comes about because existing practitioners are trying to limit their own competition, and legislators eagerly agree.

I hope the majority of the legislature sees this for what it is — a naked attempt at small-scale, legalized monopoly by the dentists.

Red-light cameras, ahoy! Just another step toward a day when we have to put on our safety helmets to get out of bed in the morning, and only after having signed a notarized affidavit that anything done within that same bed the night before was fully consensual, non-discriminatory, in total compliance with all ADA regulations, properly permitted by local authorities, undertaken only after ensuring all taxes on the location were paid in full, all participants had passed a health screening beforehand, and all legal documents pertaining to the potential results of the activities within same bed on prior evening had been read, signed, and dated, before undertaking the authorized removal of one’s safety helmet and initiation of any activities that perhaps might involve another kind of safety helmet anything at all.

This news from the KC Star is pretty awesome. Officials in Kansas City are talking about privatizing the airport, just as Chicago just did with Midway. This is just in the discussion stage, but Mayor Funkhouser actually proposed it years ago when he was auditor. Chicago was in a better position to do this than many other cities were, because Midway is sort of the area’s backup airport. There, Mayor Daley has led the way on privatization among American mayors, and it would be exciting to have KC follow suit. Expect to hear much more from the Show-Me Institute about this subject, as it moves forward.

I will be appearing on the Vincent David Jericho radio show tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 6:30 a.m., to talk about my recent study about the economics of Missouri government. All the info you need to listen in is right here.

Earlier this month, the Center for American Progress released a study suggesting that credit card companies utilize text messaging in order to administer early warnings to customers who are at risk of incurring penalty fees. From the perspective of the credit card holder, this information could be very helpful in reducing the occurrence of penalty charges.

I disagree with the Center for American Progress, however, regarding their suggestion that this should be written into law. However helpful such a practice might seem from a consumer standpoint, it’s difficult to gauge the costs involved in implementation and therefore determine whether, overall, it would actually be a value-added service in practice. The decision should probably be left to market forces.

Criticizing economic stimulus on a free-market blog is like wearing school colors to the pep rally. Sure it will get you a lot of high-fives, but there’s a risk that people who don’t share your spirit will miss the point. Widespread wealth should be our goal. We want more people to have more of what they want. During recessionary periods, there is often a cry for the government to “do something” in spite of academic economists assuring us that markets clear and GDP growth is not a straight line. Another warning, heard less often, is that a frequent cause of recessions is governments redistributing income, spending taxes on infrastructure, and manipulating trade.

The problem with stimulus is the problem of economic calculation: Where can the money be put to best use? In a free market, people spend money on things they want, and in the next round of production and sale, there is then more of what people want produced (to meet the demand). In a planned economy — or one based on redistribution — it is up to the experts to decide what should be produced, and in what quantity. If the experts don’t feel up to the job, they can always ask the people what they would’ve bought if they’d been allowed to keep their money, but that’s probably less efficient than just taxing less in the first place.

I hate awards shows, but I do enjoy the Oscars. Before children, I used to go to the St. Louis Film Festival Oscar party every year, and, in fact, that was the first date I had with my wife back in 2001. I thought that last night’s show was very good, but that is not the point of this post. As the title might indicate, I am going to take a rip at Daniel Craig for his moronic comment about American suburbia in the 1950s being a prison. As I go, I am going to pretend that Mr. Craig will A) read this and B) care.

I am not an obvious defender of suburbia. During my 20s, I chose to live in downtown St. Louis and in the Central West End. I now live with my family in the way-out suburban community of University City, which is where I lived for most of the time growing up. (If you are not familiar with U. City, it borders St. Louis city and is hardly the typical “suburb.”) But just because the stereotypical suburbs at the heart of Revolutionary Road (one of the only films I actually saw this year) may not be for me, it is clearly beyond stupid to claim they are some kind of a “prison.”

I remember almost exactly what Craig said. He was commenting on how production designers in “Revolutionary Road” made suburbia look “like anything but the prison it was.” He didn’t add, “for some people,” or “for this character,” or “some suburbs.” It was a general condemnation of American suburban life — a life that, another blogger noted, billions of people around the world would kill to lead. I don’t know whether Daniel Craig even knew what he was talking about, or whether he just repeated some writer’s idiotic viewpoint. But if you don’t like the suburbs, then don’t live in the suburbs. Roughly a hundred million Americans live in the ”suburbs,” and they live lives of freedom and opportunity. Just because it didn’t work for one character in a good-but-a-little-over-the-top movie doesn’t mean everyone else thinks it’s a prison.

As Thomas Sowell said, everything is a trade-off. Many people choose the suburbs for all the standard reasons: larger lots, good schools, low crime rates (think Ferris Bueller). Some people choose rural living for its advantages: closer to nature, tight communities, peace and quiet (think John Cougar Mellencamp songs). Others choose urban living for the excitement, culture, convenience, and diversity (think Sex and the City). Maybe if you are rich, you get to have all of these things regardless of where you choose to live. Most of America, though, has to decide what is best for them and accept the trade-offs, while most of the rest of the world is amazed by the standard of living in all three options.

Our buddy Dave over at the Arch City Chronicle has a story up about how Reps. James Morris, Jamilah Nasheed, and Chris Carter will hold a town hall forum to let residents offer their opinions about whether the St. Louis Public Schools should sell their vacant school buildings to charter schools.

The event will be held this Friday, Feb. 27, at 6:30 p.m. in the Isom Community Center, 910 N. Newstead. I encourage all of you to attend and let your opinion be heard.

Personally, I have a hard time imagining why the SLPS wouldn’t want to sell to charter schools. The buildings would be vacant anyway. We’ll see whether residents would rather have dilapidated buildings, or places of learning that raise their community’s overall happiness and property value. It will be interesting to see what comes out of the meeting.

I’m quick to point out misuses of tax dollars and state programs that are going nowhere. But it’s important to notice when state-sponsored programs do something right, too. I was impressed by Susan Weich’s column in the Post-Dispatch about a new daycare program for adults with developmental disabilities. Here’s how the director of Resources for Human Development (which runs the program for the Department of Mental Health) describes its unique style:

“Most other day habilitation services hire staff who have experience working with people with disabilities, but we took a backwards approach,” he said. “We hired artists and musicians and are training them to work with people with disabilities. It’s been a really cool thing.”

The “you don’t have research” education naysayers could learn a lot from Resources for Human Development (RHD). RHD didn’t wait around for a university to do a controlled study on arts and disabled adults. It tried out the idea in a few places — Boston and Rhode Island — and then decided to open a new center in St. Louis when those early results were encouraging. Furthermore, RHD recognized that credentials are just a proxy for knowledge and skills, rather than an end in themselves. Artists can be trained to work with disabled adults, just as mid-career scientists can be trained to teach high school chemistry.

RHD’s flexibility and innovation should serve as an inspiration to other organizations in the public sector.

Last night, KSDK Channel 5 in St. Louis ran a story about the controversy over a program to house veterans with problems like alcohol or drug dependency in a downtown apartment building. The Post-Dispatch has a story about it today. To sum it up in one sentence, downtown residents are concerned about housing veterans with these problems in their neighborhood, and angry that they were not consulted about it beforehand.

I have probably never sided with the government nearly as much as I have on this issue. Please tell me why the hell the residents of the area needed to be consulted before the program moved forward? Obviously, this use was within zoning rules for the area, so that argument is moot. Why should St. Patrick’s Center or City Hall need to ask permission or seek input before they move forward with a worthwhile program that is perfectly legal and completely normal for the area?

I like one particular speaker in the Channel 5 video who expresses concern about housing 45 or so veterans at 12th and Washington, because his grandkids visit him downtown. Where to begin on this insanity? There are two homeless shelters already there (Salvation Army and Larry Rice’s place), and a hotel on 9th St. that houses more sex offenders than any other place in Missouri. I would think they might want the veterans downtown; at least you know they can shoot.

I used to live in downtown St. Louis, from 1998 to 2002. I fully understand the residents’ concerns about the homeless, and I have no problem with efforts to move homeless shelters out of the area. I agree that the loft district will never fully succeed with two homeless shelters operating in its heart. But the veterans in this project are not homeless. They are given apartments and required to hold a job while they are enrolled in the St. Patrick’s Center program to help them overcome their issues. It is a terrific program for people who need and deserve help. I can’t fathom the opposition that is highlighted in these reports.

I think this might be another example of the harm that eminent domain and government-driven “economic development” have done to people’s minds. Some people think they have the right to tell other property owners what to do with their own property, even when it falls perfectly within the zoning codes.

This article in the Post-Dispatch describes a proposal for the state to offer scholarships to stay-at-home moms. Here’s what Rep. Cynthia Davis (the bill’s sponsor) says in justification for the idea:

“Every rule we pass in this building either encourages or discourages a behavior,” Davis said, and added that this rule encouraged women to stay at home with their children. “When your child falls down and gets a boo-boo, you’re there to kiss it better.”

Davis said the bill would also help women re-enter the work force after their children were grown.

The thinking that federal or state government needs to pick winners and promote some economic choices at the expense of others has tremendous currency right now. Compared to all the other “stimulus” expenditures that are in the air, a scholarship of a few hundred dollars for some women isn’t going to be all that damaging. Still, we should consider whether this is really an equitable use of tax dollars. What about moms who don’t have the resources to stay at home? Or who can’t conceive? (Laws like this do “encourage” behaviors — like trying to have octuplets!) What about dads who stay at home? And then there are moms who already have Ph.D.s and are making sacrifices to stay home with their children, but have no use for further scholarships.

The $1,000 limit on mom’s earnings in order for her to qualify seems like it was pulled out of a hat. Maybe a woman who works for a couple hours a day while her children are in school earns $2,000 or $3,000 a year. There’s no big difference between her and someone who earns $999, but under this bill, she would be penalized.

The $600 scholarship amount is small, and it won’t change many people’s life decisions one way or another. It would basically give free money to people who have already done what Rep. Davis wants them to do. Not the worst possible use of resources, but not the best either.

The Parkway School District’s foray into single-sex education is steadily gaining popularity. What began as a tentative experiment with first-graders is now an established program at Carmen Trails Elementary School, set to include third-graders next year in response to parents’ demand.

This sentence caught my eye:

And even though the school doesn’t have test data to prove its success, the program is growing.

Critics of successful initiatives in education repeatedly make that charge — there’s no “research” or “data” to prove that a program is the best. A great example is the SLPS math teacher who developed an amazing new approach to teaching math, but was told that his work couldn’t be expanded because it wasn’t backed up by research.

Everyone would love to have vast stores of high-quality data on educational practices. But in our less-than perfect world, schools need to make decisions without it. One way to do that is to follow Parkway’s lead, expanding programs that parents want. Giving parents a choice between single-sex and coed classrooms lets people vote with their feet. And it makes it less likely that any child will be assigned to the wrong room. If some children do better in a single-sex environment and others fair poorly, you don’t want them all arbitrarily forced into one of the options.

Since children are different, more research might not even help much. A study that shows the average student improves in a single-sex classroom doesn’t guarantee that individual children will thrive under that policy. And while it’s true any particular program might not succeed if applied generally, working top-down from studies to practice has drawbacks too. A general trend identified in research might not be evident in the local public school.

Gov. Jay Nixon intends to increase funding to the Access Missouri grant program by $2.5 million. In addition to the funding increase, the governor wants to significantly decrease the amount of grant money that students attending private colleges are eligible to receive (by as much as $1,750 per student per year). Currently, private college students are eligible for grants up to $4,600 each, while public college students may receive a maximum of $2,150 each.

While Gov. Nixon’s plan to redistribute the grants more evenly between private and public institutions seems logical, economic implications tell another story. Generally, private colleges tend to be more expensive than public schools, so the higher grant money available to private school students is in actuality the same amount (or at least similar) offered to public school students in relative terms. If grants for both are relatively the same, then reducing the private school grant money would cause a disparity in competitiveness between public and private colleges, tipping the scale in favor of public colleges.

Furthermore, private colleges tend to provide more specialized degrees than the typical public college, so reducing grant money to private school students would have a negative effect on the diversity of the labor force.

I greatly enjoyed the discussion a short time ago on KMOX’s Mark Reardon Show about red light cameras. The host had Senator Jim Lembke on to talk about his bill before the legislature to outlaw red light cameras in Missouri. I attended a rally a few months back protesting these cameras that was sponsored by a new group dedicated to outlawing them in Missouri. (Intern Phil recently posted a nice summary of our writings on this subject.)

Red light cameras are a violation of our constitutional rights. They violate the 4th, 6th, and — most importantly — the 9th amendments. The 9th amendment involves your right not to be videotaped by a camera every moment of your life. They are nothing more than a scam to get more money for municipalities. I hope Sen. Lembke’s bill passes unanimously as part of a statement by Missouri legislators that they’re willing to defend liberty. (I know, however, that will not actually happen.)

I have written about this before, and I look forward to a regional jail shared by the cities and Jackson County becoming reality. The Star has the update.

This is an excellent example of the type of regional cooperation that will save taxpayers money. The only thing I can add to this discussion is the perspective of history, and to remind people still undecided on this in the western part of the state that St. Louis County did this in the 1990s. The St. Louis county jail, which is used by all of the municipalities, has worked out great for everyone. I am sure it will work for KC, too, especially if they build it art deco–style right by city hall and the courthouse.

Thank you, Missouri State Teachers Association, for linking to this article about a new route to teacher certification through the Denver Public Schools. Prospective teachers can spend 10 months in the classroom working under a mentor teacher, complete coursework for a master’s degree, and receive certification — provided they agree to work for the district for five years.

This doesn’t look that far removed from traditional certification, because of the coursework requirement, but I do think it’s a step in the right direction. Working in a classroom from the very start of the certification process will give people a better idea of whether teaching is the right job for them. And it will add a practical dimension to the training process, providing balance to the theoretical education courses. It may even introduce some competition into the profession, if more people are attracted to the apprenticeship than to traditional routes.

The Post-Dispatch has a quick-hitter about a rebuilt gas station in Brentwood that is now offering E-85 gasoline. (I used to fill up at this station all the time when I lived in Brentwood Forest.) Because there is no mandate to sell E-85, the station owners have to include the reduced energy output of ethanol gas in their pricing. According to the story, they are selling it for 20 cents less per gallon.

This is how markets are supposed to work. Our new SUV (just doing my part to get the economy moving) is a flex fuel vehicle. I honestly didn’t think much about that when we bought it, I was much more concerned with making sure my wife and I had the ultimate set of rims. But if a station gives me enough of a price reduction on the E-85 gas, I will certainly consider buying it. This is the nature of capitalism: The government does not tell me what I have to buy; businesses give me a choice. Recent events have probably made people forget about that.

Whether or not you like the stimulus package — and if you are hanging out at this blog, it is probably the latter — MoDOT certainly moved very quickly in putting the money to use:

I believe there is general agreement that spending money on infrastructure like this is probably the best use of the stimulus money. Sort of a best-of-the-worst / least-bad sort of thing. …

The Kansas City Public Library, with the assistance of the Show-Me Institute and several other organizations, is currently hosting a fantastic series of lectures on the challenges facing urban education. The first lecture in the series brought Dr. Eric Hanushek, a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution of Stanford University and one of the nation’s leading education scholars, to discuss what could be done to improve urban schools.  The event drew about 250 interested attendees, who were treated to Dr. Hanushek’s excellent assessment of some of the most pressing problems facing urban education — and some potential solutions. (Hint: More money is not the answer!) Video of that event, as well as Dr. Hanushek’s Kansas City Star op-ed on the same topic, is now available on the Show-Me Institute website.

This Thursday evening, the library’s series will continue, as Jay Matthews, an education reporter from the Washington Post, will discuss his new book, Work Hard, Be Nice. The book offers readers a look at how the KIPP (Knowledge is Power Program) network of charter schools has become a poster child for helping children from the most challenged socioeconomic groups prepare for academic success and college. This topic is extremely relevant for Kansas City, which saw a KIPP school open in recent years, as well as Saint Louis, which will greet a new KIPP school this fall.

And, last, but not least, I wanted to take this opportunity to plug yet another exciting event on the calendar. On May 5, the Show-Me Institute and Saint Louis University will be hosting Dr. Caroline Hoxby, yet another celebrated education expert with the Hoover Institution at Stanford, for a discussion titled, “The Promise and Performance of Charter Schools: Drivers of Educational Improvement in the U.S.?” This lecture will be a great opportunity for anyone interested in learning what research is telling us about the impact of charter schools nationwide.

This entry is about wealth. I highly recommend this article (which covers similar topics to this entry, perhaps better).

The term “wealth” gets thrown around a lot. Like “public good,” however, economists mean something specific when they talk about wealth. It is not just money; it is anything that people want. When a person has more of what they want than they did a year ago, we can say that they are wealthier. If they have more of what someone else wants, we can also say that they are wealthier if they are then able to trade with the person who desires their things and thus get more of what they want.
The question of what people want is somewhat normative (econ jargon meaning “opinion-based”), but some examples will help here. Fishing, farming, and hunting are all ways of obtaining very simple forms of wealth: food, or the stuffs to make it. Besides food, people want clothing and shelter almost universally. Thus, making or trading those things can create wealth.

This point requires some explanation. The term “create wealth” is by no means a misnomer. Any time a person exerts effort to make some materials a little bit more useful or desirable to others, they are creating wealth. As an example, oranges on a tree in Florida aren’t of much use to us in Missouri. When someone makes the effort of picking, packing and trucking them here, they have created wealth.

Trade is another way to create wealth. Any time a person trades something they have for something else, economists tend to assume that they gave up one thing for another thing that they valued more. Because trade usually happens between two people (or two families, businesses, etc.) we can assume that they each feel like they got more out of the trade than they put in, or else they wouldn’t have traded.

Adam Smith more or less invented the modern study of economics when he published “The Wealth of Nations” in 1776. It’s safe to say that no economist today disagrees with his fundamental assertions that societies are made wealthier through specialization and trade (I thought about linking to eBay and Craigslist here, but the fact is that most people do their trading face to face, at the store, etc.).

Today, and for many years now, human civilization has been able to support a standard of living well above subsistence for many people. Specialization and trade, coupled with the concomitant improvements in technology made possible through the application of science to business, have made our current level of total wealth possible. It is also possible to destroy wealth, however. When willing traders are forbidden to trade by force or by law, wealth is destroyed. Property destruction is by far the most obvious form of wealth destruction (not counting campfires or other destructive acts where the destruction itself has value).

I have tried to explicitly avoid mentioning money so far. Though it is essential to our current degree of specialization, money is not truly necessary for specialization and trade — it’s just very convenient, and uneclipsed in efficiency as a medium of exchange.

Try thinking about wealth in the terms I’ve laid out here. Imagine the wealth you create for yourself, your friends and family, your employer. See whether you can think of any forms of wealth destruction that I didn’t mention. I look forward to any and all comments pertaining to this important free-market concept: wealth.

I’ve finished reading another chapter in Outliers, about education: “Marita’s Bargain.” This chapter describes a typical day in the life of Marita, a 12-year-old girl attending a KIPP charter school in New York.

I highly recommend reading this chapter. You’ll be inspired by Marita’s determination and by the many examples of how KIPP has changed people’s lives for the better.

Here are some thoughts on “Marita’s Bargain”:

1. I was annoyed that Gladwell doesn’t identify KIPP as a charter school, instead calling it an “experimental public school.” KIPP is indeed innovative, but not because it’s been given some license to experiment that other public schools are denied. KIPP’s policies and curricular choices would be legal for other schools to adopt; it’s just that traditional public schools usually don’t go out of their way to find best practices. I would expect a book like Outliers, which is premised on systematic generalization, to point out the different incentives that charters and traditional schools face, as well as the divergent outcomes for students that result.
2. Gladwell seems to imply that KIPP’s success stems entirely from the extra time its students spend on schoolwork. The omission is understandable, because there isn’t space in a short chapter to analyze all the causes of school achievement, but readers should keep in mind that dedicated principals, well-qualified teachers, and sound instructional methods enter the mix. Which adds to my frustration with Gladwell — why doesn’t he ask what brought these factors to the “experimental” school? Was it a stroke of luck?
3. I love the quotes from Marita, especially her comments on how hard she’s working at KIPP, and how her friends and family respond to her efforts. This middle-school student is making great sacrifices to get the best education she can, and I’m sure she’ll go far. Maybe she’ll appear in another Gladwell book some day, for her own scholarship or research.

The Kansas City Star has a detailed article about the upcoming cigarette tax hike, while today’s Post-Dispatch has a profile of Bill Hannegan, St. Louis’ most vocal opponent of smoking bans.

The Star story quotes a couple of statists wgo think that the cigarette tax hike is a win-win-win situation because it will provide more kids with government health insurance, encourage adults to quit smoking, and prevent future children from taking up smoking in the first place. I think it is more of a lose-lose situation, because it expands the welfare state while targeting a certain group of people (smokers) to fund the political goals of those who salivate at the idea of getting young children on the dole early, so they can spend the rest of their lives thinking it is perfectly fine and normal to be dependent on the government. From the story:

But raising taxes unfairly penalizes low-income people, who are more likely to smoke, said John Nothdurft of the Heartland Institute, a conservative Chicago think tank.

“You’re making the bottom portion of society, who can least afford to pay taxes, pay more taxes,” he said. “They’re going to subsidize middle-class families getting SCHIP.”

To think that welfare used to just be for the poor. Now, it’s for everyone!

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest bestseller, Outliers: The Story of Success. I just finished the chapter about Asian achievement in mathematics. I’ve written a few blog posts comparing Asian and American education in the past, so considering Gladwell’s argument now can serve as a follow-up.

Gladwell gives two explanations for Asian dominance on international math tests: First, he writes that Asians enjoy an advantage in learning math facts because of distinctive features of their language; and, second, that Asians’ perseverance — a direct result of their traditionally labor-intensive agricultural practices — allows them to master complex ideas that Western students give up on too soon.

I don’t know enough about linguistics or neuroscience to evaluate Gladwell’s first claim. But I’m intrigued by his second idea, that long hours of study and determination help account for the Asian math miracles. Gladwell cites a study showing that on an international math test, countries’ math scores were perfectly correlated with students’ willingness to fill out a long questionnaire about themselves — a list of questions unrelated to math. It looks like there’s a connection between patience for lengthy tasks and math success. If we take those cultural attitudes toward studying and transplant them to the United States, maybe we could replicate the Asian successes.

Here are a few things schools could do to change their math culture:

1. Spend more time on math. My impression is that schools (at least, good schools) integrate reading into several subjects — science, social studies, etc. — but that math practice stays in the math classroom. Teachers could do more to reinforce math lessons throughout the day, especially in science, and schools could allot longer periods of time for math instruction.
2. Simplify the elementary curriculum. State standards are part of the problem here, because the convoluted curricula making the rounds in the U.S. were designed to appeal to public schools. Covering more topics isn’t always better. Schools should cover a few mathematical principles each year, building up depth over the course of several weeks. Skipping around from counting to geometry to probability and back again encourages short attention spans and superficial understanding.
3. Tailor assignments to individual students. A student has little reason to persevere in trying to learn a difficult concept if the class will soon move on, whether he or she has mastered it or not. There’s no need to hold everyone back while a few students catch up, but schools could assign more independent work so the weaker students continue to review the previous material. Individualized assignments would also give the best students a chance to develop their math skills beyond grade-level requirements.

I am not going to give my opinion on the stimulus package here, as I would be in over my head compared to the people I am linking to in this post. But I would like to share Dr. Haslag’s commentary about it from our main website, and also link to this article (link via Drudge), which quotes numerous economists with varying views, including one gentleman from St. Louis.

There may be a new unforeseen benefit stemming from the AB-InBev deal. Jeremiah McWilliams over at Lager Heads is reporting that our new Brazillian neighbors may be pushing to end the 1-percent city earnings tax. McWilliams quotes from a Post-Dispatch business column by Joe Whittington:

Anheuser-Busch InBev has on tap an effort to lessen the burden of the city’s earnings tax, according to knowledgeable sources.

One source said the brewery has talked with the Bryan Cave law firm about representing them in the effort. Bryan Cave cited client confidentiality when questioned about the subject.

A call to acting City Counselor Steve Kovac, whose office would handle the matter for the city, has not been returned.

One source said the brewery is trying to “avoid a pay cut for the Brazilians coming to town.” InBev, which bought the brewery, is based in Belgium, but many of its top executives are from Brazil.

The 1 percent tax, which affects those who work in the city, represents a big lug for the city, and the brewery was identified in a financial report for fiscal 2008 as the No. 1 source of this tax in the city. Its payment totaled $7.39 million, or 4.2 percent of all earnings and payroll tax collected by the city.

Now, I’m sure that the chances of actually overturning the tax are fairly slim, but I love their ambition of lowering taxes for everyone. Of course, I say this without having read any of the legal theory underpinning the firm’s purported argument, because Bryan Cave is doing its proper legal duty and keeping its mouth shut. I’ll just have to wait with baited breath. There are, however, a few pieces on the Show-Me Institute’s website demonstrating that eliminating the earnings tax makes good economic sense.

Even if the 1-percent tax were struck down, though, I’m sure city officials would try to find another way to get “their” money.

Thursday, Feb. 12, our very own David Stokes will be speaking with political correspondent Steve Kraske on the one-hour program “Up To Date.” The show begins at 11:00 a.m. on 89.3 FM in Kansas City, and you can also listen online. Until then, though, be sure to read David’s latest policy study, “Government in Missouri.”

The Kansas City Star has a nice article about a soon-to-be-decided proposal that would privatize the Kansas City Animal Shelter. From the article, it sounds like this bill, which would turn management over to a private vet clinic, is expected to pass soon. This seems like an exciting example of privatization at work in Missouri. Hopefully, it will work out as well as privatization of the county pharmacy did for St. Louis County. The animal shelter bill is expected to save taxpayers $175,000 per year, but I am sure the animals would rather be taken care of by government employees than be subjected to the cold, hard hands of capitalism.

Missouri isn’t the only state in which activists are calling for mandatory insurance coverage of autism treatments. Read this State House Call post about recent developments in New Mexico and Wisconsin:

In New Mexico, the Republican legislator who proposed the mandate said, in the AP’s paraphrase, “the insurance mandate would help families struggling with the out-of-pocket costs of providing therapy and other services for autistic children.” Yes, it would. Of course, everyone else who buys that insurance would be paying higher rates to pay for this coverage. Someone has to pay for it, something the bill’s sponsor either doesn’t know or doesn’t acknowledge.

The bill passed the New Mexico Senate, and the the comparable mandate in Wisconsin is still under debate.

These mandates increase the price of insurance. Although the autism mandate would be more costly than most of its supporters claim, by itself it wouldn’t drive insurance premiums through the roof. But when you add it to mandates about a host of other conditions, the expense becomes a burden. This is the insurance equivalent of, for instance, a grocery store mandate that requires customers to buy cheese and vegetables along with every loaf of bread so that they have the right ingredients to make healthy sandwiches. That hypothetical mandate would obviously affect people’s grocery bills by forcing them to stock up on products that not everyone wants. Insurance mandates have the same deleterious effects, but lawmakers seem to think the cost magically disappears into the insurance pool.