We’ve added a new tool to our Show-Me Living arsenal.

Check out our new Google map of the Saint Louis metropolitan area. It provides our visitors with the ability to interactively look up the academic rankings for their school and school district on a map, and compare those rankings to other schools nearby. Thinking about moving this summer? See how your new school compares with "Show-Me: The Grades." And, while you’re there, be sure to check out how your taxes might change, too.

We plan to expand this map to cover the entire state, so please feel free to send us your thoughts on how we can make it more useful for you.

I’m a meticulous record-keeper, particularly when it comes to either my car or my finances.

In our recent ethanol case study, Dave Stokes and I argued that the E-10 savings projections reported in the Missouri Corn Merchandising Council’s study were wrong partly because they failed to address the fuel efficiency decrease of ethanol-blended fuel that had been noted in numerous scientific studies, including one by the Environmental Protection Agency.

So, I’ve been curious to see how much the E-10 mandate has affected my car’s individual performance. After filling up my car this morning, I looked through my fuel log and made a back-of-the-envelope calculation of the difference in fuel efficiency this year.

My car has a 13-gallon tank, but I typically fill up about 12 gallons on average. In 2007, my car averaged 308 miles between fill-ups (25.67 miles/gallon). This year, my car has averaged 281 miles between fill-ups (23.42 miles/gallon). That’s a drop in fuel efficiency of 8.77 percent.

Now, admittedly, this is a little bit of an ad hoc calculation and other variables clearly impacted my car’s gas mileage. But Missouri’s E-10 mandate has obviously played some role.

So, how much has the drop in fuel efficiency cost me? Let’s say I fill up my car twice a month (24 gallons). With $4-per-gallon gas, the 8.77 percent drop in fuel efficiency will cost me nearly $100 this year.

So much for E-10 savings.

Clearly, Eric Dixon played an influential role in yesterday’s Supreme Court decision.

Missouri now becomes the 38th state to legalize the use of a midwife, certified by a private entity.

In the Post-Dispatch’s coverage, the state’s medical lobby provided a statement:

Tom Holloway, who lobbies for the Missouri State Medical Association, said the new law jeopardizes public safety because it allows midwives to "provide unlimited services related to pregnancy: C-sections, drugs, epidural anesthetic, even abortions, without any state regulation or oversight."

This clearly misses the point. The state’s oversight and regulations haven’t changed. Any expectant mother can still choose to use an “approved” nurse/doctor and receive the same care as always. But they don’t have too. And that is the point.

John McCain has proposed a $300 million prize to the first person who can develop an automobile battery that "far surpasses existing technology." In addition, U.S. automakers will receive a $5,000 tax credit for every zero-carbon-emissions car that they can develop and sell.

Well this is pretty vague. But more importantly, it’s really silly.

The incentive for alternative fuel technology already exists, and the first person to develop and market a practical alternative to the standard combustion engine will be rewarded much more than a mere $300 million. McCain argues that this would amount to about one dollar per U.S. citizen, and is "a small price to pay for helping to break the back of our oil dependency." I, personally, would be willing to pay a lot more than $1 for a practical alternative to fossil fuels. But no politician has the right to make that decision for me (or for any other taxpayer). The government shouldn’t be in the business of deciding good and bad business ideas. We already have a pretty good system in place to do just that.

A letter in the Springfield News-Leader urges the state’s congressional representatives to vote for the adoption of the Fairness in Nursing Home Arbitration Act, which would allow the families of nursing home residents to litigate disputes. This law would invalidate many of Missouri’s existing nursing home contracts, which require families to sign a mandatory arbitration clause in order to insure them against a lawsuit in the case of an injury or death.

I’ve written an op-ed about nursing home regulations before. In that article, I argued that nursing home abuses are very much a reality, but that additional regulation will only make long-term care coverage worse. Saint Louis currently enjoys having the second-lowest nursing home costs in the country, averaging $42,877 annually. Nationally, the average annual figure is $65,200, with costs as high as $191,385 in some states. This is a tremendous bill to foot for 10 or 15 years of potential care.

It’s very obvious why nursing homes require an arbitration clause. They are charged with ensuring the safety of residents who often are suffering from dementia or Alzheimer’s and may be largely a danger to themselves. The costs of litigating every potential event (whether or not it results from negligence by the nursing home) would be prohibitive, and would force many nursing homes out of business — only driving up the costs of long-term care.

This doesn’t mean that we should exonerate negligent health care workers. Many nursing home contracts are already in violation of existing laws. We should concentrate first on enforcing the laws on the books before driving up costs to the industry with little guarantee of improvement in service.

Criticism of the Anheuser-Busch deal has grown increasingly ridiculous. In a particularly glaring example of one-sided electioneering, the Post-Dispatch reveals (as if this were a shock) that Cindy McCain holds more than $1 million in Anheuser-Busch stock and stands to reap a significant windfall if the InBev deal goes through.

Shocking. You know who else stands to benefit? Me, probably you, and just about everyone else.

Who actually owns AB? The Busch family? Its employees? The city of St. Louis?

Let’s take a quick look at AB’s latest financial statements. The largest individual shareholder of Anheuser-Busch (owning about 5 percent of total shares) is Warren Buffet. Well, he’s from Nebraska, so obviously he’s an outsider. But what about institutional investors? Well, a British conglomerate owns about 6 percent. And Mr. August Busch? A whopping 0.2 percent (though I believe he has about 4 percent of the voting power)!

And you know who else owns AB? Me, along with several hundred thousand of my closest friends at Vanguard. And probably Barack Obama, Francis Slay, and Matt Blunt, too.

Saint Louis has no “right” to AB when only one percent of the entire company is owned by AB insiders. And more than that, how do Missouri governmental officials have a right to have any say in a shareholder decision whatsoever?

One comment in the Post-Dispatch article is particularly misguided:

[H]ow ridiculous to say that Barack Obama wants the brewery to remain American while Republicans want it to go. Hello!?! Republican (Ex Chief of Staff to Matt Blunt) Ed Martin is behind the “SaveAB.com” along with SEVERAL other Republican operatives.

I don’t see all of these Democrats in the city doing much to stop the deal.

As well they shouldn’t, because it’s none of their business. This is a decision for the 99 percent of the company owned by outside investors. That’s how a free-market economy works. As voting shareholders, we can each choose to vote however we please. But what we cannot do is ask our government to step in and force a decision on our behalf. There is nothing less American than that.

The Wall Street Journal ran an interesting article today about the new “urban renaissance," which has been fueled by baby boomers and “millennials” fleeing the suburbs for chic urban living and lower gas bills.

This is good news for Missouri’s urban areas, which have made important strides in improving livability over the past several years.

But the article fails to address a third demographic noticeably left out of the equation. What about the 30- and 40-somethings raising young families? Why aren’t they moving into the cities?

We all know why. It’s the schools. And this is still the big elephant in the room regarding why cities remain less desirable than suburbs for many parents.

The article also attributes much of the recent urban growth to "New Urbanism" and the trend toward light-rail commuter trains. While I love commuter trains (particularly in cities where they work), research suggests that they do little to spur urban growth. Most cities (unless they have an extremely dense urban center) would be better off expanding existing bus lines (which we discussed in our review of Kansas City’s light-rail proposal) — but I guess buses aren’t as “sexy” as trains. 

It’s a shame that the Journal fails to understand this.

But at least one thing is true. Economic incentives always correct market imbalances. Think about it. Is it government fiat that is changing Americans’ attitudes toward public transportation and energy policy, or is it the market’s forces at work?

It’s a shame that environmentalists fail to understand this.

We’ve praised Sen. Claire McCaskill repeatedly on this blog, but her comments about the InBev deal deserve some response:

“I was very upfront,” McCaskill said of her discussion with [InBev's CEO Carlos] Brito. After offering him a Budweiser and sipping one herself, she told him she would “do everything I could to stop this sale from going through … It’s a bad idea. I don’t want you to buy it. The people of Missouri don’t want you to buy it.”

Politicians never seem to understand how capitalism works. The InBev deal is not the government’s decision or the people of Missouri’s decision. It is the decision of the shareholders of Anheuser-Busch. If shareholders reject the InBev deal, AB stock will plummet. But that is the shareholders’ decision, not ours.

More from the article:

Speaking to reporters after, McCaskill blasted the proposal as a “premium profit for hedge fund investors” and said A-B is a strong company that has provided thousands of good middle class American jobs.

Anheuser-Busch displaced thousands of good middle class American jobs last year when it bought out Pennsylvania’s Rolling Rock. And despite a website that looks very familiar to another local website, there was no outcry (or even a tear) from Missouri public officials.

“We do not have a ‘For Sale’ sign on our front lawn in America,” she said.

Well, then maybe the government shouldn’t have gotten to the point where the American people owe $9.2 trillion dollars (of which about a third was accumulated under President Clinton, and another third under President Bush). If I owed trillions of dollars in debt, I might have to sell off a few possessions, too.

The Post-Dispatch (surprisingly) ran a pretty good reality check on the AB deal. And yours truly did, too.

The Joplin Globe ran a comprehensive review of "Show-Me: The Grades" in a series of articles and editorials published over the weekend.

The institutional criticism stated by these editorials was that school rankings in general are a "crude tool for measuring [school] improvement" and that the Show-Me Institute’s ranking methodology was "overly simplistic."

As the creator of "Show-Me: The Grades," I understand these criticisms, but that doesn’t mean that our rankings are meaningless or uninformative. A cursory glance of the schools and districts appearing at the top and bottom of our lists confirms anecdotal opinions about many of the state’s best-performing and worst-performing public school systems. And the "report card generator" application is a great tool for graphically comparing test scores by school, district, and state averages. The state should have created such an application for parents and teachers to use years ago.

I would also like to reiterate that the rankings used in "Show-Me: The Grades" are computed by using the state’s own data, which is reported somewhat ambiguously in the news coverage. So any criticism of the MAP index score methodology must ultimately be a criticism of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education, rather than the Show-Me Institute’s "agenda." There will always be critics of ranking systems, regardless of methodology. For example, had the Show-Me Institute included No Child Left Behind (NCLB) data instead of MAP scores, critics of NCLB would point out that such performance numbers are suspect and easy to distort. In fact, in a congressional review of NCLB, Missouri admitted as much, stating that officials had actually lowered academic standards in order to "game the system" and report significant academic improvement. And may I remind Missourians of the problems inherent in even the most scientific of rankings.

The Show-Me Institute has not taken a particular position on the quality of Missouri’s public school system based on MAP index rankings. But, in the interest of public transparency, we wanted to make this data readily available to the public. We believe we have done this, and that "Show-Me: The Grades" is ultimately a tool to help Missourians make informed choices. Some parents will value standardized test scores more than others. If parents are happy with the educations their children are receiving at a particular public school, then we are happy too.

As I stated in my interview with the Joplin Globe, this is really about giving parents a greater choice in finding schools that meet their children’s needs:

"If a parent finds from this ranking that their school is not meeting their children’s needs, then why force them to remain in substandard schools?" Hauke said. "But if a parent is happy with where their children are going and that the teachers and staff are doing a good job, by all means it’s a good school."

Isn’t that what education should really be about?

One of the creators of the “SaveAB” website posted the following commentary on the Columbia Daily Tribune’s blog:

“Americans don’t want the Statue of Liberty bought by the Saudis or the Washington Monument purchased by the Chinese. Shareholders should resist choosing dollars over American jobs. Selling out to the Belgians is not worth it – because this is about more than beer: it’s about our jobs and our nation.”

While I certainly appreciate the sentiment and nostalgia surrounding the Anheuser-Busch drama, I cannot agree with the author’s logic. The InBev bid is a perfect example of what capitalism is all about — the migration of capital to the places where it can be used most productively. It is this free flow of capital that has powered the U.S. economy since its inception.

For example, during the past decade Toyota has created 36,632 new American jobs. Is Toyota destroying U.S. culture? No. It has been fundamental in fueling innovation in the automobile industry and ensuring that those 30-some-odd thousand families have a home to live in and food on their plates, and are able to contribute to the growth of the U.S. economy. In fact, there are currently more than 5.1 million Americans (4.4 percent of the entire labor force) employed by non-U.S. companies. If we deny Anheuser-Busch shareholders the right to choose whether to accept InBev’s bid, what are we saying about the long-term prospects of millions of Americans’ jobs?

Moreover, if foreign investment is such an “affront to democracy,” then why is the Missouri legislature paying Bombardier Aerospace (a Canadian airplane manufacturer) millions (of taxpayer money, no less!) to build a factory in Kansas City? If we rely on nationalistic sentiment, shouldn’t we demand that those jobs remain in Toronto? Or shouldn’t we demand that Anheuser-Busch bring back the jobs of the nearly 24,000 people it employs outside of the Saint Louis area? If we were to follow this kind of protectionist sentiment to its logical extreme, we would simply revert back to an economy of sustenance farmers, completely dependent upon our local economies for our entire means of production.

How “American” is that?

Claire McCaskill wants Congress to pass a windfall profits tax on oil companies.

What would be the effects?

Well, first of all, gas prices would be higher, not lower. Demand for gasoline is inelastic, at least in the short run. Gas station owners are already squeezing out a mere two cents in profit per gallon of gasoline sold. Therefore, with no real retail markup, the higher wholesale gasoline costs incurred by distributors would have to fall on consumers at the pump in order for the retailers to break even. So we’re worse off here. If you like paying $4.00 per gallon, how about if we add another 20 cents or so to that?

And which investors will pay for the tax — the rich or the broad middle class? Robert Shapiro, President Clinton’s former undersecretary of commerce, argues that ownership of industry shares is "broadly middle-class," with the majority represented by institutional investments in mutual funds, pension funds, and individual retirement accounts that are held on behalf of millions of ordinary Americans. This coincides with my previous post about energy investors and who benefits from oil profits.

And, lastly, the early 1980s experiment with a windfall profits tax suggests that tax revenues would be significantly lower than expected. When Congress passed the windfall profit tax in 1980, the Congressional Budget Office projected that it would raise $393 billion in tax revenues. According to Congressional Research Services, it only raised $80 billion. That would be enough revenue to run the government for about 10 days, based on the 2008 fiscal budget.

Remember, gas prices are about three times as high in Germany and other European countries, where combined excise taxes, fuel taxes, windfall profits taxes, and VAT taxes are passed on by oil companies to the consumers. Oh, and if you factor in the exchange rate, they’re about 4.5 times higher.

So why are we debating this, again?

Last summer, Ethan Cory, a six-year-old boy from the Joplin area, drowned at a small private water park called “The Swimmin’ Hole.”

His devastated parents petitioned the General Assembly to regulate the state’s water parks to make them safer, in order to help prevent future tragedies like the one that led to their son’s death. On Friday, the governor signed HB 1341 (popularly known as “Ethan’s Law”), which requires private, for-profit water parks to maintain liability insurance of at least $1 million in the event of an injury or the death of a patron. The sponsor of this legislation, during the governor’s prepared remarks, declared that “hopefully [this bill] will prevent other such tragedies around Missouri.”

Will it? Water parks have existed for more than 100 years in Missouri, so why wait until 2008 to pass this legislation if it’s so integral to their patrons’ safety? I certainly sympathize with the Cory family, but the state’s reaction is once again inappropriate. If the water park was negligent, the Cory family is entitled to a huge settlement. But bringing in the government to punish every other water park is not the answer.

Which is the greater incentive to carry liability insurance: a government mandate, or the risk of losing your entire business in a lawsuit in the event that negligence or faulty equipment results in an accident? Legislators forget the law of unintended consequences. Why set the liability level at $1 million? Why not $10 million? Or why not let the individual businesses decide what level of insurance they need? If we set it too high, do we needlessly destroy small businesses and neighborhood pools, and put people out of work?

This type of legislation is well-intentioned, but ultimately irresponsible. It justifies more government intrusion in our lives without doing anything to protect customers or to make them any safer. And now we have two more people (the owners of the Swimmin’ Hole) eligible for welfare.