Today brought sad news for Laura Dekker: The Dutch court has forbidden her to set sail and extended state guardianship until July. This despite the fact that she passed every test they set for her:

The court said that while Dekker’s sailing skills were adequate and a psychological report concluded that the voyage would not harm her social or emotional development, there were questions about safety and her ability to continue her schooling while at sea.

It turns out that the psychological assessments were given simply for the purpose of digging up a reason to stop Dekker. She wouldn’t have been allowed to sail had she failed them, and she’s not allowed to sail now that she’s passed.

I’m appalled that Dekker’s inability to attend school while sailing is given as a reason for the state to detain her on land. By this reasoning, a court could prevent kids from going on extended vacations with their families or participating in any competitive sports.

I think not, but that’s what a poster from the New York City Health Department does. The poster, which is intended for a religious Jewish audience and is also available in Yiddish, reminds people to wash their hands for at least 20 seconds. It also shows several hand washing steps that you would expect on a poster in the bathroom, such as “scrub” and “rinse.” The unusual thing is, the instructions incorporate a Jewish hand washing ritual and the prayer said after using the bathroom. The last instruction on the poster is “Pray,” underneath a picture of a scroll containing the first two words of this particular prayer.

I would find it cute and informative if a Jewish organization published this poster in an effort to educate people simultaneously about hygiene and Jewish religious practices. But the state shouldn’t tell people how to practice Judaism, or any other religion.

I’m not against translating government documents into foreign languages, and translating a poster into Yiddish could be reasonable in a city with a large Jewish population. However, the translation should present the same content as the original — it shouldn’t add religious instructions.

Our Policy Pulse site has a good story with some detailed links to the recent budget cuts announced by the governor. I hope and plan to have more thorough work on these proposals released soon, but I don’t want to rush anything — and many of us will be out most of next week at a conference. So, I just want to quickly take the opportunity to commend Gov. Jay Nixon for his willingness to make the hard fiscal decisions that are necessary, including laying off state employees and cutting budgets, rather than trying to raise taxes. He deserves a good deal of credit for that.

You may well have noticed that we’re rapidly reaching the end of 2009, and yet we had not yet released our annual report for last year. I’m happy to announce that this is no longer the case. The Show-Me Institute’s 2008 annual report is now available on our website.

Releasing the annual report so late in the year has become something of an unintended tradition — albeit one that we firmly intend to break for 2009’s report. Here’s what I wrote two years ago:

Most non-profit organizations release their annual reports much earlier in the year than this. Ours would have been out sooner, too, but we decided to commission a thorough independent audit — to make sure everything was fully on track and accounted for during our first full year of operations. We had most of the report ready to go several weeks ago, but we didn’t want to issue an incomplete profile. Some things are worth the wait.

And here’s what I wrote last year:

We had hoped to release this a few months ago, but a string of delays kept pushing it back in our schedule. We’re planning to begin working on the 2008 annual report in the next month or two, so that we can have most of the content ready by year’s end, then add the financials and other finishing touches in early 2009. That should allow for a much earlier release date next year.

So, what was the problem this year? Any guesses? Yes, once again, the audit took much longer than anybody expected, and after we finally got the numbers back we ended up making several changes to the work we had already completed on the annual report. I think that the end result is pretty great, though, if I do say so myself. And I’m particularly happy we managed to include a nice feature on our intern program and our free-market book club — including an excellent group photo on the cover that includes a collage of many of the books that the club read during 2008.

The Show-Me Institute had some outstanding accomplishments during 2008, and a large part of that success can be attributed directly to the people reading this blog, who are engaged by our ideas and research. We hope you’ll continue to help us finish up 2009 in style, and next year, I hope we won’t have to wait this long to tell you all about it!

I blogged yesterday about how tax policy distributes people and businesses. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal illustrates an example of this: Tax credits distribute film production activities.

Instead of leaving filmmaking to states that specialize in it, like California, and then realizing gains from interstate trade, star-stuck states are competing with each other (and with other countries) to attract cash-strapped filmmakers. And, just like any other business would, filmmakers move to the state that offers the most tax incentives and subsidies. They even rewrite their scripts to accommodate the setting changes. According to the WSJ article:

Michigan offers credits for as much as 42% of a film’s in-state budget, and Utah and North Carolina have both recently increased their incentives to stay competitive. France recently enacted a new law that creates a 20% rebate for foreign productions shot in the country that have ties with French culture.

Missouri offers a film production tax credit for up to 35 percent of the amount spent in Missouri for activities related to film production.

As a fiscal conservative, I am in favor of reducing tax burdens in general. However, I believe that filmmaker tax credits are bad policy for several reasons.

First, states lose money on them. Filmmakers can frequently claim more than they paid in taxes because refundable tax credits function like grants. My home state, Wisconsin, offers a refundable tax credit of 25 percent for all production-related activities, as well as the use of state-owned buildings and locations free of charge. When Johnny Depp and Christian Bale filmed Public Enemies in the state capitol building in Madison, the state lost money. According to an article in the Wisconsin State Journal:

The state paid $4.6 million to the makers of Public Enemies through the credits, even though the film generated an estimated $270,000 in state taxes.

Second, there are more cost-effective ways to create jobs. In March, the Wisconsin Department of Commerce published a cost-benefit analysis of the state’s film tax credit program, which reported that it costs 20 times more to create a job using the state’s movie tax incentive program than it does using other state job creation programs.

The state subsidy going to films such as “Public Enemies,” starring Johnny Depp, cost $128,000 per each year-long job created, the Department of Commerce study found. In contrast, the agency’s other programs cost about $6,200 for creating a job for the first year and that position might, unlike some film jobs, last much longer than that, the study found.

This quotation introduces a third important point: This economic activity is short-lived. As soon as they complete shooting, the filmmakers pack up their sets and leave the state. Under other job-creation programs, the jobs are more permanent.

Commerce officials said that since taxpayer money for creating jobs is limited, it makes sense to compare how much it costs to create a job with the film program compared to others targeting manufacturers and high-tech businesses.

If the pukka focus of these subsidies were job creation, then they could be directed better elsewhere. I think that the real focus of film tax credits, however, is attracting celebrities to Midwest states. If it weren’t for the subsidies, why would Johnny Depp ever set foot in Wisconsin?

An op-ed in the Birmingham Weekly contains an error that’s familiar to anyone following school lunch policy. It conflates “healthy” food with “local” food:

Currently each of these “funded” meals are allotted $2.57, which means that after you strip away labor, energy and overhead costs, schools have $1 per meal to spend on ingredients. This leaves schools and cafeteria managers challenged to find good, fresh, local ingredients to serve their students.

I might give local food advocates a pass on this if money were no object. If, for example, George Soros got the idea to donate $10 lunches to school students and he wanted to buy local, that would be his prerogative. In the real world, however, school lunches are subsidized by taxpayers. And, as the op-ed states, districts have limited resources with which to pay for food.

Districts need to put together the healthiest meals possible within budget constraints. If healthy, cheap produce comes from California, districts should buy produce from California — not from someone in Missouri who will charge more. When districts bring location into the equation and give local food preference over the healthiest, cheapest food from somewhere else, they’re sacrificing either food quality or economy. They’re shortchanging students or taxpayers — or both.

And the problems with schools choosing local food over other food go beyond finances. Some products can be obtained locally for a premium, but some can’t be grown nearby at any price. Should Missouri children give up oranges and bananas because they’re never local? What about fresh produce in the winter? Finding these items locally is indeed a challenge, and a challenge that districts won’t be able to overcome without changing the world’s geography or the nature of plant life.

The Michigan House passed a bill that would exempt babysitters like the woman who watched neighbors’ kids at a bus stop from daycare regulations. If the bill becomes law, Michigan won’t require you to get a license just to look out a window at some kids for 20 minutes. This is why I always say to take laws at face value and not to assume the government will allow for reasonable exceptions in practice — because it won’t. (Hat tip: John LaPlante.)

Voters in Saint Louis County and Jackson County have some tax and smoking proposals on the ballot Tuesday. Most of the Show-Me Institute staff will be at a conference next week, so I’m posting some thoughts on the issues now. For the Jackson County voters, you get to choose whether to renew a sales tax focused on fighting drugs / crime / bad stuff everywhere. I highly recommend this column on the COMBAT tax by Patrick Tuohey for the details about the proposal.

The proposed smoking ban is on the ballot in Saint Louis County. Also, given that the city appears poised to do whatever the county does on this issue, the vote will in some ways determine whether there will be a smoking ban in the city, too. I recommend this testimony by Show-Me Institute policy analyst Dave Roland about the smoking ban issue.

Finally, there is a Saint Louis County sales tax increase on the ballot that is supposed to fund improvements to the county’s emergency communications equipment. I wish the proposal had a sunset date, like the above-mentioned COMBAT tax in Kansas City, but I’ll probably still vote in favor of it. I’ll probably also vote in favor of the smoking ban, which will definitely put me in the minority here at the Show-Me Institute.

Finally, it is disturbing — but not surprising — to see all the tiny villages in St. Louis County trying to pass new business taxes through the ballot. The village of Uplands Park has 460 people, and the entire village is about the size of a golf tournament check. Who do they think will pay the 8-percent franchise tax on telephones? This would just dramatically raise the phone bill of every person in the city. I hope the voters realize that.

The headline for this AP article on rail subsidies says it all. Shockingly, a government agency has overstated its efficiency and understated its subsidies. This report covered by the article documents the enormous subsidies required to operate Amtrak. It is notable that the totals used in this new study come very close to the totals used by Randal O’Toole in his work for us on high-speed rail. Compare this excerpt from the AP article (emphasis added):

The Northeast corridor has the highest passenger volume of any Amtrak route, greatly enhancing efficiency. The corridor’s high-speed Acela Express made a profit of about $41 per passenger. The more heavily utilized Northeast Regional lost almost $5 per passenger.

With this excerpt from Randal’s paper:

If trains in the most heavily populated corridor in the United States cannot cover their costs, no other trains will come close.

According to the bipartisan Amtrak Reform Council, Amtrak’s trains between Boston and Washington lost nearly $2.30 per passenger in 2001.

They are almost certainly considering different years, so the fact that the estimates are so close is good evidence for the accuracy of O’Toole’s work (not that more evidence was needed). The study claims (and I’ll accept the claim as true) that the northeast high-speed rail system makes money. Before anyone jumps to the conclusion offered in the article:

Rail planners may decide that spending the funds on high-speed rail makes more sense than slower intercity rail, which the Amtrak numbers show need higher subsidies.

You must read the history of high-speed rail in Japan, which O’Toole thoroughly documents in his paper on high-speed rail for the Show-Me Institute. In Japan, the first high-speed rail system was successful because it connected three cities in one of the most densely populated parts of the world. However, for reasons of politics and more, Japan started building high-speed rail all over the place. None of the other routes were anywhere near as successful as the Tokyo–Osaka–Nagoya route, and the national railroad eventually went into serious financial difficulties. The moral of the story is that just because high-speed rail might work in by far the most densely populated part of the United States does not mean it will work elsewhere.

Hat tip to the Beacon for the original link.

George Soros believes that the free market is “a dogma whose time has passed,” and according to an article in the Financial Times, he has devised a plan of action for eradicating free market think tanks like the Show-Me Institute.

First, he will throw money at the problem: $50 million over five years. (He made that money as a hedge fund manager in a capitalist society, by the way.)

Second, he will use that money to buy conflate economists who agree with him:

[Soros' new] group, to be called the Institute of New Economic Thinking, will gather luminaries in the field of economics to reflect on the ideas that allowed the latest economic crisis to transpire and to bring new ideas to a profession that some argue has become too deeply entrenched in free-market ideology.

Third, he will rely on market mechanisms when they are convenient to his cause:

He hopes, however, to inspire a groundswell of support from students that will “shift demand” at universities to include economic ideas that are more reality based and less focused on rigid mathematical models.

I think that Soros needs to restructure his incentives. If he really wanted to eliminate free-market think tanks, he should pay them to stop working. If Soros stopped by the Show-Me Institute and offered me, say, $5 million to walk away from my cubicle, I would take the money and run. I love my job, but I am a self-interested individual, just like everybody else.

A debate on the New York Times website examines the question of regulating twins. Just as many people called for restrictions on in vitro fertilization after Nadya Suleman gave birth to octuplets, some medical experts are outraged by the far more commonplace occurrence of twin births — and they’d like the government to intervene.

The first panelist, Mark I. Evans, correctly points out that twin births have a larger effect on the health care system than do newsworthy events like the birth of octuplets. Twins are more likely to be born prematurely and to experience other complications. Although Evans stops short of recommending policy changes, some of the other panelists suggest regulation to prevent twin births.

I don’t think public opinion sides with the experts who consider any case of twin gestation to involve unacceptable risk. Nor do most casual observers decry Suleman’s actions based on a comparison of the cost of the octuplets’ birth with other burdens on the health care system. Instead, the objection to Suleman seems to arise from rule utilitarianism — the idea that bearing octuplets is morally wrong because it would be disastrous if everyone did so.

Proponents of regulation admit that bans on twins won’t be enacted any time soon. Robert Stillman, another panelist, blames America’s respect for freedom, which he sees as an oddity. I’m amused by the attitude that there’s single-payer health care, and then there’s everything else (emphasis mine):

In our non-single payer health care system and in our national cultural context (with its paramount legacy of individual rights over those of the state), patient autonomy will almost always prevail.

A 2009 study in the October issue of the Journal of Labor Economics finds that teacher unions have no effect on teacher pay.

Shocking! As the author, Michael Lovenheim of Stanford University, notes, these results aren’t expected. Unions negotiate for better work conditions and salary increases, so it’s a general assumption that school district unionization would increase teacher pay. Previous studies have shown unionization to increase teacher pay by as much as 12 percent. A paper by Caroline Hoxby, seen here at the Show-Me Institute talking about the effects of collective bargaining, found that majority teacher union membership results in a 5-percent pay boost for teachers (study available here).

Looking at the source of Lovenheim’s data, I wonder whether his findings are attributable to a lack of available details. He calculated monthly teacher pay by dividing a district’s monthly full-time instructional payroll by the number of full-time instructional staff. That pool includes not only teachers, he writes in the study’s appendix, but also educational support staff, school-level administrators, principals, and guidance counselors.

The things I saw while attending teacher-administration contract negotiations at the Lindbergh School District in Saint Louis lead me to believe that educational support staff, school-level administrators, principals, and guidance counselors don’t necessarily benefit from teacher union negotiations, even if the union purports to represent them. In fact, in the Lindbergh case, they lost out slightly. (Administrators and the teacher union ended up agreeing that counselors and librarians should contribute to the “substitute pool” when absent from school, even though substitutes aren’t hired when either counselors or librarians are absent.)

The average pay Lovenheim calculated could be obscuring teacher gains because of the varying salary trends among non-teacher staff. For an example of this in action, see the Miami-Dade School District. After 16 months of negotiations, the district awarded its teachers an average 1.8-percent raise, while “reducing the number of days support staff will work from 260 to 250.” For the unindoctrinated, school districts generally can’t cut pay; instead, they cut days.

Another issue with analyzing the effects of unionization on teacher compensation is that non-salary benefits, such as health, life, and vision insurance, as well as working conditions, are difficult information to find, and can be very hard to quantify. The lack of availability, Lovenheim writes, forced him to leave those measures of compensation out of his study. Non-salary benefits are not inconsequential, and can add up to thousands of dollars more in compensation. If unionization helps teachers negotiate for more non-salary benefits, that could amount to a large positive effect left unaccounted.

I’m not quite sure whether the following is a non-salary or a salary benefit. In any case, it’s my favorite teacher union contract provision. From the Mehlville School District’s 2009–2010 agreement with its teacher union:

Any savings exceeding $70,000 between now and August 1 resulting from teacher staff changes will be added to the base salary.

That surely is evidence of teacher union negotiating power, especially during a recession when school districts across the state are looking at ways to make cuts.

I wrote two posts about Quest to Learn under the impression that it’s a charter school. I was mistaken. Quest to Learn is not a charter school; it’s a New York Department of Education public school. Although in some ways it looks more like a charter than a traditional public school (it has outside sponsors, and students choose to attend rather than being assigned by residence), it is not a charter.

Clearly, I was wrong to criticize Popular Science for leaving out “information” about Quest to Learn that I myself didn’t get right. My apologies go both to Quest to Learn and to Popular Science for my mistake.

One result of competition from charters, online schools, and other options is that public districts respond with innovative schools of their own. In this case, New York did such a good job that I couldn’t tell the difference!

Today’s edition of the Maneater featured an op-ed attacking the notion that a public option in health care is necessary to keep health care costs in this country low. From the article:

Indulge me in a very simplified thought experiment. You, reader, enjoy beer, and I have deep pockets. We come to an arrangement: you pay me a fixed fee, and I will heavily subsidize each of your purchases of beer over the course of a night.

What would we expect to see happen? I expect that your demand for beer will increase toward over-consumption since the more you use this service, the more attractive the deal becomes. Perhaps an astute bartender notices the strength of your demand and decides to react by raising the price of each beer by 25 percent. As far as you are concerned, you continue to pay the same as before. As far as the bartender is concerned, he’s reacting rationally to forces of supply of demand. As far as I’m concerned, I’m going to have to raise the price of my fee for future nights if I’m going to keep from losing money.

The price of beer will balloon and the culprit is an economic wedge — the difference between the price a consumer pays and a producer receives.

Applying the analogy to health care, we can see that a public option would produce unintended consequences of health care cost inflation by exacerbating the effects of an economic wedge in the health care market. Sounds a lot like the conclusion of this recent Show-Me Institute study.

The St. Joseph News-Press reports that Missouri lawmakers recently proposed a solution to the problem of “tax stacking” — the practice by which municipalities attempt to pass additional tax increases through referendums in order to circumvent the state-mandated limit of an additional 1.5 percent in sales taxes. The lawmakers proposed two things:

The resolution would protect cities from the threat of lawsuit, as they believed a 1999 letter from the Missouri Department of Revenue condoned the taxes. However, the two legislators want to cap general sales taxes at one cent and other authorized sales taxes — such as St. Joseph’s CIP [Community Improvement Project] tax — at one-half cent.

These extra taxes usually come in the form of CIP taxes (also known as CID, Community Improvement District, taxes). CID taxes are levied when at least 50 percent of the property holders holding at least 50 percent of the property in the area decide to levy a voluntary tax. In practice, this money could be used for landscaping or infrastructure improvements that benefit 51 percent of the owners, to the detriment of the other 49 percent. The use of CIDs is of questionable value, at best, and this proposal would essentially prohibit further CID taxes.

When I wrote about the topic of tax stacking earlier this summer, a Farmington lawyer was suing cities to repeal these taxes. At the time, I was conflicted over my desire to see taxes lowered and my concern that the lawsuit was redistributing city money inappropriately, essentially hurting the taxpayers it was intended to help. Recollecting the money would not solve matters, because the transaction cost of both the initial collection and the recollection process (as well as the difficulty of determining the appropriate reallocation) would be prohibitively costly. Considering the situation, strengthening the tax cap is the best solution to protect Missouri taxpayers from further harm.

Tax caps would require Missouri’s cities to promote further growth if they want to increase tax revenue. Preventing extra taxes from being collected — thereby leaving more money in the hands of consumers — would permit more growth, and would result in a far better long-term outcome than simply raising taxes.

If Pennsylvania were to rescind its remaining restrictions on ticket scalping, this kind of thing would happen less often.

Less than a month after the federal ban on clove cigarettes began, a close substitute good, clove cigars, has hit the market.

During the drive home from work yesterday, I listened to a discussion of high-speed rail on NPR’s “Marketplace.” Mitchell Hartman discussed a new report from the Pew Research Center reminding us that high-speed rail depends on federal assistance. Pew calculated that Amtrak receives a $32 subsidy per ticket, on average, from taxpayers. Amtrak, however, estimates that the size of the subsidy is $8. From the show’s transcript:

The difference is Pew includes all the costs of running a railroad, like depreciation — that’s wear-and-tear on tracks and trains — and overhead, like the legal and HR departments. Taxpayers pick up those costs too. Amtrak got $1.3 billion in funding last year.

The program even quoted Randall O’Toole, a Cato Institute senior fellow and self-described “Antiplanner”:

Best thing we can do for mass transportation would be to privatize it, let the private operators respond to the market, and then we’ll have a more efficient system that might be attractive to more people.

O’Toole has written several policy studies for the Show-Me Institute on the subject of high speed rail and its free-market alternatives. His most recent, “Why Missouri Taxpayers Should Not Build High-Speed Rail,” was published late last month.

High-speed rail is relevant to Missouri, particularly as officials consider upgrading the tracks from Saint Louis to Kansas City to accommodate high-speed trains. As David Stokes testified before the Joint Committee on Transportation Oversight earlier this month:

For Missouri to build true high-speed rail — the type that American tourists ride in Europe at 150 mph — would cost Missouri taxpayers billions more, all to serve the small percentage of the population that uses passenger rail.

New York’s higher-income residents are fleeing the state, and they are taking their tax dollars with them. The New York Post reports that this is because of the state’s high cost of living and high taxes:

It all adds up to staggering loss in taxable income. During 2006-2007, the “migration flow” out of New York to other states amounted to a loss of $4.3 billion.

Not coincidentally, states that have lower tax burdens experience positive domestic migration. According to information from the Tax Foundation, New York has one of the highest marginal tax rates on personal income in the nation. In New York, the top marginal tax rate in 2009 is 8.97 percent. In Florida and in Tennessee, it’s 0.00 percent. In Missouri, this rate is 6.00 percent.

The Show-Me Institute has extensively explored the relationship between tax policies and domestic migration. In an op-ed, “Tennessee vs. Missouri: Taxes May Tip the Odds,” the institute’s executive vice president Dr. Joe Haslag explained how different tax structures contribute to domestic migration:

Economic theory indicates that the difference in income tax rates — that is, the property rights enforced on people’s labor, and the payment for that factor of production — can help to account for the differences in growth rates.

The basic idea is elementary economics. Consider two people with identical characteristics, one in Missouri, the other in Tennessee. Suppose those two people were given identical work opportunities, so that they had access to the same machines and plant surroundings. For one hour of work, each produced the same amount, and was paid $20. Excluding federal taxes, the person in Missouri would take home $18.80 while the person in Tennessee would take home $20. (If the person worked in Saint Louis or Kansas City, take-home pay would only be $18.60. We will save that discussion for another time.) The person in Tennessee will supply more labor because he realizes a higher return for his effort.

Related to this subject, Jenifer Zeigler Roland and Dave Roland recently published a case study that explores how different tax policies may have played a significant role in Tennessee outgrowing Missouri. They provide another explanation:

A lower overall tax burden is attractive to prospective businesses and residents, because it leaves more money available for consumers to spend on goods and services.

Edspresso links to this essay by Hope Frick, a virtual school student in Pennsylvania. She’s written an articulate explanation of why she chose to attend a virtual academy. You have to sympathize with her frustration at the responses she gets when she tells people about her school. Frick is absolutely right that online high schools should be accepted as mainstream.

There is one thing that bothers me about the essay. I’ve highlighted it in the following quote:

Approved by the state, cyber schools enable students from pre-kindergarten to 12th grade to gain a public school education from their homes.

Frick refers several times to state approval and regulation, implying that government involvement is key to virtual schools’ success. Now, it’s true that many good online schools are run by states or strictly regulated, but states are closely involved with public brick-and-mortar schools, too — and the results aren’t always stellar. That’s not to say that they’re all bad, just that there’s a lot of variation, despite the government authorization they have in common. We have to conclude that factors other than state approval cause the difference in outcomes.

The real test of a school’s quality, be it online or brick-and-mortar, is whether students learn from it and parents are satisfied. Given that thousands of students voluntarily choose virtual schools over other options, I’d say they’re doing well by those measures.

Laura Dekker is still waiting for permission to set sail; latest reports say the Dutch court will issue its decision on Friday.

Dekker is bending over backward to respond to criticisms of her plans. She’s delaying her trip until after this school year. She says she’ll study while she’s sailing, and take exams when she stops at ports along the way. She’s already submitted to an IQ test for the court’s scrutiny. (What will they ask her to do next? Postpone the voyage until she gains entrance to Harvard Law School?)

Another boat will shadow her in the most challenging waters, and a veteran sailor has volunteered to escort her the entire way.

And the big news is that she might have her own reality show. I can hear the response now: “These reality shows have gone too far. People need to stop doing outrageous things to get on television.” But I think a show could be a positive thing. It would involve a lot of close monitoring of Dekker’s voyage, and probably extra safety measures. Dekker would not be able to recklessly head off into a storm or other dangerous situation into which a film crew would not agree to come along. (Although I doubt Dekker would act foolishly on her own, considering that she intends to break up the trip into short segments and take other precautions, the close presence of people and cameras should reassure everyone further.)

I’m looking forward to hearing the court’s decision. There are just a few more days to wait!

Don’t worry, I still detest red light cameras and think they are a total violation of our rights. I think the state should ban them throughout Missouri. However, I give Springfield some credit for truly using them for public safety purposes rather than as a back-door revenue generator. The article in the Springfield News-Leader (link via Combest, who is a very safe driver), details how the city has made almost no money from the cameras, although the company that installed them has certainly made its share.

I am not generally someone who gives much credit for intent over results (that is a mindset of the left side of the political spectrum), but I am going to make a slight exception here. I still think the people of Springfield should demand that the cameras be removed, but it is better if they are only used for traffic enforcement, and not as a money raiser. Springfield’s city traffic engineer (Earl Newman, quoted below) sums it up nicely at the end:

St. Louis’s mixture of significant additional revenue with those public safety benefits worries Newman, who is concerned the financial windfall muddies the water.

“When you’re making a lot of dollars, that means people are still running lights,” he said. “And it’s going to give the appearance it’s being done for the money.”

According to a little-known website, the Drudge Report, Chicago is considering privatizing its water utility. This would follow on the heels of: a very successful privatization of a local highway, the Skyway; the successful near-privatization of Midway Airport (it was successful because even though the deal fell through, the city got to keep the enormous down payment); and the not-successful-at-all (at least not yet) privatization of the city’s parking meter system.

This is something that could, and should, also be considered by Kansas City and Saint Louis. Both cities function with private utilities providing electricity and gas, but both have municipal water systems. In St. Louis County, even the water is provided by a private company, Missouri-American Water. Both St. Louis city and Kansas City have a valuable asset at their disposal that the private sector is fully capable of operating. I hope both cities are willing to give this a careful review, just like Chicago appears to be doing.

The Columbia Daily Tribune examines school lunches in this interesting article. Like many districts, Columbia Public Schools is trying to serve healthier lunches. And the locavore philosophy is in fashion, so the district wouldn’t mind jumping on the local food bandwagon, either.

But the district is learning that buying local is easier said than done:

One hurdle is finding the local produce to feed 10,000 or more children per day. The demand for local produce continues to grow, but local suppliers are too few for large institutions such as schools, Fullum learned.

Too many farmers in “Missouri are growing hay, wheat and soybeans. We don’t use that in our kitchens. We need spinach. Farmers have to change that. Our farmers are just now getting the idea that maybe our schools and our university are potential customers and maybe we should do more specialized farming,” she said.

It looks like the district is allowing the locavore philosophy to distract it from its goal of serving healthy food. Local produce is not the only alternative to canned or processed food. For example, fresh oranges are nutritious, and they don’t have any added salt, sugar, or preservatives. But they’re shipped in from warmer climates, so locavores overlook them.

The district should seek out healthy products to serve at lunch, regardless of where they come from. Restricting itself to food grown in Missouri could limit kids’ diets, besides burdening taxpayers. (Even if it gets a grant from the Department of Agriculture, the money had to come from taxpayers at some point.) And it’s unrealistic to expect demand from schools to change Missouri’s agricultural output, which is at least partially determined by factors like climate and soil quality that are outside of Columbia Public Schools’ control.

If some parents care about where the food comes from as much as how healthy it is, that’s their choice. They can buy food at a farmers’ market themselves — and send it to school with their kids in a lunch bag.

The headline of this Missourinet post really got me riled up, but the body of the report calmed me down a bit. According to Missourinet, (link via Combest), Sen. Claire McCaskill favors sending senior citizens a check for $250 each, as proposed by the Obama administration, to make up for the fact that there is no cost-of-living-adjustment this year for Social Security recipients. Why is there no COLA? Well, there isn’t any inflation, so why would anyone get a COLA? That isn’t good enough for AARP and friends, who have been demanding a vote-buying bribe new stimulus payment to seniors of $250. According to the article, McCaskill:

favors giving Social Security recipients a single 250-dollar payment next year. Paying for even that, however, is an issue.

Later on in the article, it says:

She’s not yet committing to vote for the 250-dollars. She says she’ll wait to see how the money is found.

So, I guess I have to hold back for a while until the votes are finally cast, but I am certainly concerned that McCaskill, or any other Missouri member of Congress, might support this ludicrous payment to seniors that has absolutely no purpose to it other than satisfying an interest group by giving them money the country simply does not have. Take from the young and give to the old. It’s like a geriatric Robin Hood. (We have a video coming out about this shortly. It is in editing right now.)

This blog has praised McCaskill a number of times for her opposition to earmarks and other fiscally responsible stances. I hope that the article’s headline is wrong, and we get to compliment her again. We’ll wait and see.

With a vote looming in two weeks, there are still a number of unresolved issues about the Springfield pension system. How should they construct the citizen board overseeing the pension? Which employees should be moved to the state’s local government pension system, known as LAGERS? Does this suit with horizontal stripes make me look fat?

I certainly agree with the argument that the unions who will receive the pensions should have less of a role on the board than the taxpayers who will by paying for the pensions. To that end, the nine-member board idea sounds much more reasonable than this proposed 11-member board:

O’Neal and Chiles want greater taxpayer protections, with O’Neal arguing that the five members of police, fire and retiree would need only to recruit one of the six citizen members for a majority.

I think public employees will have to accept decreased benefits in the future as America’s fiscal reality sets in. I have sympathy regarding this issue for the uniformed employees who put their lives on the line for us each day. I have less sympathy for the regular government workers, many of whom work hard every day for the public, and some of whom spend every moment from day one on smoke breaks, while counting their time until the rule of 80 sets in. I have a government pension from my time at St. Louis County, but if the county needs to reduce those pensions (small as mine will be) because of fiscal demands in the future, I promise you I will be the absolute last employee to complain about it.

It will be very interesting to see how this vote turns out. The Show-Me Institute has some interesting things to offer on this subject.

A proposed charter school, Excelsior Prep, has been turned down by a school board in Oregon. Surprise, surprise:

“We were expecting this,” said Excelsior Prep Board member Tonjia Haskins after the meeting. “They have been opposed basically since the beginning.”

Getting charter applications denied by Oregon’s school boards is par for the course, but what’s outrageous in this case is that the reasons given are the charter’s impressive standards and goals. Here are the district advisory committee director’s comments:

“They thought they could go out and hire teachers for half of what public teachers are paid to deliver a more difficult curriculum than most public schools currently offer,” he said. “I don’t question their commitment at all, in fact, I applaud it, but they didn’t know how to get it done.”

So an intention to be more efficient and academically rigorous than traditional districts is reason enough to deny a charter! Charter proposals in Oregon don’t stand a chance — charters that want to do better than the districts aren’t allowed to go forward, while few students would ever enroll in a charter that made no improvements over the traditional public schools.

“Lack of community support” is another common criticism of Oregon’s charter hopefuls, and it was brought up in this case, too. Again, it’s a test that charters can’t pass. Most parents won’t sign on to a school that doesn’t yet exist, especially if the charter proposal constantly fluctuates in response to district demands. The problem is compounded because marketing has to be limited to word of mouth, for who would pour money into an advertising campaign for a proposed school that may never be approved?

We can’t foresee whether any charter will succeed, but we shouldn’t summarily write them off as failures and forbid them to open. If a charter doesn’t find enough community support or neglects to keep its promises, students will abandon it to return to the traditional public schools.

I’m anxious to see the result of Excelsior Prep’s appeal to the Department of Oregon. Knowing the state’s track record, I can’t be very optimistic.

When teachers in the Harlem Success Academy charter schools observed that students were struggling with farming references on standardized tests, they decided to do some unconventional test prep. They took their classes to a farm and let them learn firsthand about sheep and pumpkins.

Some people (namely, commenters on the New York Times website) see this as a sign that teaching to the test has gotten out of hand. I think the field trip is more reasonable than most of the test prep that goes on in schools. Children who struggle to read a passage on a standardized test because they’re unfamiliar with farms will run into the same problem whenever they come across agricultural terms in a newspaper or a novel, so schools are right to address the deficiency early. And a field trip to see farm animals gives students direct knowledge of the world, unlike a day spent memorizing “test-taking strategies” that have no application outside of the classroom.

The traditional approach to test-prep — practice questions, out-of-context vocabulary lists, and lectures on the process of elimination — doesn’t work very well, but many schools fall back on it because it’s easy to implement during regular class time. It’s great that a charter has approached the problem creatively and found a hands-on way to give kids an advantage on tests.

Of course, students wouldn’t have to go all the way to a farm to learn about chickens if enough chickens lived in the city. Local governments should bear in mind the educational repercussions when they consider banning farm animals.

Clayton residents are debating whether the city should restrict pet chickens. This Post-Dispatch article presents the usual quotes from neighbors who abhor all things farm-related. Also noted are the people who want Clayton to promote chicken ownership actively:

On the other side of the issue is Clayton resident Stan Braude, a biology professor at Washington University.

Braude said after the meeting that he hoped the city would encourage more residents to have a few hens in their backyards.

What would Clayton have to do to increase hen ownership? I’m imagining a chicken incentive program, reminiscent of Cash for Clunkers — or, alternatively, a fresh eggs buyback program.

I hope Clayton avoids both regulation and encouragement, and instead allows people to make decisions about chickens for themselves. If anyone can’t stand to live in a city that permits chicken raising, they can always move out to Chesterfield.

This week, I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend two consecutive afternoons being interviewed on St. Louis’ WGNU, a radio station with programming directed to the city’s African-American population. On Monday afternoon, I spent an hour as part of a panel conversation (with Sheila Rendon and Romona Williams of the North Side Community Benefits Alliance) discussing eminent domain and the proposed NorthSide Regeneration Project on Kuumba Nia’s radio show. (Audio available here.)

The conversation went so well that I was invited back the following afternoon to spend another hour discussing the same topic with co-hosts state Sen. Robin Wright-Jones and John Bowman on her show, “The Wright Side of Politics.” (Audio available here.) My conversation partners the second day were Barbara Manzara and Keith Marquard, also of the North Side Community Benefits Alliance. If you’re interested in hearing from those on the front lines of the upcoming battle over the proposed redevelopment effort, give these two shows a listen!