In an article published today at Kansas Liberty, Holly Smith used Show-Me Institute’s newest web tool, IDEAS: Interactive Database for Economic Analysis and Synthesis, to analyze Kansas’ tax burden over time. Smith compares many fiscal figures for Kansas and other states in the Midwest. For example, she found that Kansas generated $104.3 from alcoholic beverages in 2007, which is more than its neighboring states. Missouri, in comparison, generated $32.26 million in 2007.

Using the IDEAS web tool, I restricted the selective tax rates on alcoholic beverages for Missouri and Kansas over time, and then exported this information to Excel to produce the following graphs:

Click graphs to enlarge.

Generally, residents of Missouri are taxed less on alcoholic beverages than residents of Kansas are taxed. Specifically, Missouri assesses lower tax rates on beer and spirits, but as of 2005, the state has higher tax rate on wine.

In an effort to encourage or to protest their economic and social situation, people tend to vote with their feet. This is why I included domestic net migration data for Kansas and Missouri in the second graph. The data show that Kansas has experienced negative net migration every year in the last decade (i.e., people are moving out of the state). Missouri experienced positive net migration during this period, except for 2008 (i.e., people are moving into the state).

Although these trends can be attributed to a combination of factors, it may be possible that the higher taxes on alcohol in Kansas influenced some marginal number of people to move out of the state, and the low taxes on alcohol in Missouri influenced people to move into the state.

I encourage our blog readers to play with the IDEAS web tool and determine to which states they would consider domestically migrating.

Today, the Show-Me Institute launched a new online tool that enables users to research economic aggregates, fiscal policy measures, and demographics across states and time. It’s called IDEAS: Interactive Database for Economic Analysis and Synthesis, and it incorporates the work of Laffer Associates.

Using the web tool, users can create their own charts and tables, and have access to a large comprehensive dataset. The data, formatted in a user-friendly way, includes:

• Individual state tax burden profiles
• A tool that allows the comparison of specific tax rates on items ranging from property to income to the glass of wine you may buy after hours.
• A 50-state ranking tool that allows you to customize your comparison, based on the category being taxed or year (starting from 1977). In other words, compare taxes based on location, type, or time.

I encourage our readers to play with the site, and I hope that they find this information as valuable as I do.

The Washington Post recently carried an article by Reason magazine senior editor Katherine Mangu-Ward on the benefits of online education and its even greater potential. It is worth quoting at some length:

Since the Internet hit the big time in the mid-1990s, Amazon and eBay have changed the way we shop, Google has revolutionized the way we find information, Facebook has superseded other ways to keep track of friends and iTunes has altered how we consume music. But kids remain stuck in analog schools. Part of the reason online education hasn’t taken off is that powerful forces such as teachers unions — which prefer to keep students in traditional classrooms under the supervision of their members — are aligned against it.

So children continue to learn from blackboards and books — the kind made of dead trees! no hyperlinks! — rather than getting lessons the way they consume virtually all other information: online. Putting reading materials and lecture notes on the Internet, like many teachers do today, is just the first step; it’s like when, in the early days of movies, filmmakers pointed a camera at a stage play. Kids are still stuck watching those old-style movies, when they could be enjoying the learning equivalent of “Avatar” in 3-D. Thousands of ninth-grade English teachers are cobbling together yet another lecture on the Globe Theatre in Shakespeare’s day, when YouTube is overflowing with accessible, multimedia presentations from experts on Elizabethan theater construction, not to mention a very nice illustrated series on the Kennedy Center’s ArtsEdge site. [...]

How do we know online education will work? Well, for one thing, it already does. Full-time virtual charter schools are operating in dozens of states. The Florida Virtual School, which offers for-credit online classes to any child enrolled in the state system, has 100,000 students. Teachers are available by phone or e-mail from 8 a.m. to 8 p.m. seven days a week. The state cuts a funding check to the school only when students demonstrate that they have mastered the material, whether it takes them two months or two years. The program is one of the largest in the country. Kids who enroll in Advanced Placement courses — 39 percent of whom are minority students — score an average of 3.05 out of 5, compared with a state average of 2.49 for public school students…

Moving lesson planning and delivery online can provide students with more supervision, not less, says Michael Horn, one of the co-authors of “Disrupting Class.” It would free teachers, Horn says, “to do hand-holding and mentoring, something which is pretty much impossible in the current model.” After all, where is it written that the babysitter, disciplinarian, lecturer and evaluator must all be the same person? Or even that they all have to be in the same building?

Some online learning models eliminate human interaction, but the vast majority do not. Instead, they connect students and teachers via polls, video, chat, text and good old-fashioned phone calls. The Virtual Virginia program focuses on offering Advanced Placement classes to every student in the state, bringing college-level courses to rural districts and inner-city Richmond, where high-level instruction is difficult to get. Rocketship Education, in San Jose, Calif., brings at-risk elementary students together in a safe, cheap, modular space along with a small staff and hands their studies over to online curriculum for part of each day.

Online education has already become a boon for kids with special needs, the students least served by the traditional system. Education entrepreneur Tom Vander Ark launched Internet Academy, the first online K-12 establishment, in 1995 in part to serve kids with unorthodox education requirements, from serious athletes to children with health problems or learning disabilities.

One of the most successful areas of online education so far is helping kids who have fallen off the educational grid. Companies such as AdvancePath Academics scoop up students classified as unrecoverable by traditional schools and help them complete their education. Some dropout-recovery programs can be found in shopping malls and gyms.

Online education is no silver bullet for Missouri’s educational problems because there is no such thing. Each student is different, and although the traditional models may work well for most (a point I think is debatable), others may experience far more success in a more structured online program that still allows students to move at their own pace. Others could benefit from more independent learning styles like Montessori schools. All these options have their places, and we will be most successful when we allow parents and students find the pedagogical methods that work best for them instead of trying to force hundreds of thousands of individuals into the same boxes.

Sarah Brodsky has written about online schooling several times, and Caitlin Hartsell has also blogged about the issue.

Now that the Missouri Virtual Instruction Program has lost state funding and is charging tuition, it’s an opportune time for the St. Louis Public School District to expand its Virtual School.

Enrollment in the SLPS Virtual School is constrained by the district’s rule that online students spend one or more days a week in a classroom, working with Virtual School teachers in person. This policy is unusual for an online school; most such schools allow children to talk to teachers through video conferencing or by telephone, and require less frequent meetings. If SLPS made weekly in-person meetings optional, it could open enrollment to students who live far from St. Louis.

Another factor that has limited the Virtual School’s growth is its policy that elementary students must be enrolled full-time. Permitting young students to enroll in individual classes would give more children the ability to participate.

The U.S. Postal Service doesn’t want to deliver mail on Saturday anymore. Facing a large budget gap, the USPS is lobbying Congress to allow the agency to deliver mail only five days per week, a cost-cutting measure it has advanced for more than a year.

As I said back in August, the Postal Service’s decline seems to be inevitable. USPS is subsidized not by tax dollars but by regulatory capture: The Private Express Statutes limit private mail carriers from delivering mail to mailboxes and from charging less than $3 to deliver a letter.

Luckily for the USPS, it doesn’t have to compete in a free market, where its work schedule would be drastically insufficient to compete successfully with others. UPS and FedEx don’t have the same regulatory luxury, and consequently have some locations that are open 24 hours a day and on weekends, because that is what customers want. Private delivery companies also price shipments based on distance traveled, which makes more sense than the flat rate that the USPS levies for first-class letters. Mailing a letter to one’s landlord in the next town over has a lower marginal cost for a postal service than mailing a letter to a cousin across the country, but first-class USPS prices don’t reflect that.

Unlike private delivery services, the USPS does not face direct competitive pressure, and so has found it difficult to adjust to changing technology and market conditions. This has left the agency well past its prime, if that prime ever really existed. James Bovard pointed out in a review of USPS history that government-provided postal services were originally conceived as revenue generators, and that regulators had to actively stamp out competitors who were providing more reliable, trustworthy services at lower prices:

The early colonists inherited the tradition of government postal monopoly from Britain. In sixteenth-century England, the Tudor monarch outlawed private post in order to hinder communication between potentially rebellious subjects. Later, the monopoly was justified as a revenue raiser for the Crown. But even 270 years ago, private carriers were breaking the law and providing the public with better service than the government:

In 1709, Charles Povey used bell ringers to collect letters, which he delivered anywhere in London for a halfpenny. The Post Office prosecuted Povey, who was convicted and fined, and then it adopted his system for the government service.[2]

Since 1709, not much has changed in how governments run their postal monopolies.

In 1789 the Constitution granted the federal government the right to set up a post office, but it did not prohibit competition from private services. However, the first postal act, in 1792, did effectively outlaw private competition.

The first postage rates were extremely high, as Congress tried to force easterners to subsidize the more expensive service to outlying settlements on the western frontier. As the Postal Service’s official history notes, “Until 1851, the cost of sending a single sheet letter 40 miles was either 6› or 8›. When the letter traveled over 400 miles, it cost 25›. These prices doubled, tripled, or quadrupled with each additional sheet.”[3] In 1843, “it cost 18 1/2› to send a letter from New York City to Troy, New York, but only 12 1/2› to send a barrel of flour the same distance.”[4] The government charged 25› to deliver a letter from Philadelphia to New York.

Henry Wells (later of Wells-Fargo fame) entered the market, charged 6› a letter, and delivered faster.[5] In the Boston area alone, over a hundred private express companies carried the mail. Private companies delivered letters directly to addressees’ homes, while the government still required people to pick up their mail at the nearest post office.

As private business flourished, government postal revenues declined. The postmaster general admitted in 1843 that many people thought the government’s monopoly was “odious,” but insisted that it had to be preserved for the good of the country.[6] In 1845, Congress tightened the laws prohibiting competition and increased the penalties for violators. In 1851, Congress lowered postal rates and began providing a direct subsidy for postal operations.

An 1844 competitor, the American Letter Mail Company, was founded and operated by notable proto-libertarian Lysander Spooner. This competition was so effective and efficient that “The end result was that in 1851 Congress again had to lower the postal rates to a uniform 3 cents” from previous prices “of 18 3/4 cents or 25 cents.” Lawmakers simultaneously put Spooner out of business for good by strengthening the USPS monopoly laws.

The notion that government postal services may have been necessary to provide a crucial public service in the absence of trustworthy private alternatives doesn’t stand up to the historical record, and is even less justifiable in today’s electronic information age, in which private companies are the primary means by which most people send and receive sensitive communication.

Missourians — and the United States in general — would greatly benefit if the USPS lost its monopoly protection so that costs could be reduced through the efficiency of competitive pressure, rather than through elimination of services.

A member of a school board in Madison, Wis., has noticed that it pays for districts to set up online schools. The board member deplores the fact that these schools enroll students from outside districts (an act he refers to as “poaching”):

The legislature has created a system that sets up very strong incentives for a school district to contract with some corporate on-line operation, open up a virtual charter school, and set about trying to poach other districts’ students.

He then compares the ACT scores of his district’s students with the scores of an online school’s students. Fewer of the online school’s students took the ACT, and the average score of those who did was about one point lower than the district’s average.

The board member’s use of the word “poach” brings to mind hunters entering a forest illegally and shooting deer. That can’t be what he means, so lets look at the second definition. According to Dictionary.com, “poaching” can also mean “any encroachment on another’s property, rights, ideas, or the like.” Unless the board member has his own definition of the word, it seems that he views students as his district’s property and thinks other schools need permission to educate them anywhere else.

I’m sure the students who attend online schools don’t see themselves as being poached. They know they don’t belong to any school district. Taking online courses is their decision. And while the board member won’t acknowledge that online schools give students a choice, if it weren’t true, there would be no point in comparing test scores as he does in his essay. Telling people that your district has better scores than a competitor makes sense only if students can act on that knowledge and choose for themselves.

The complaints about poaching make the district look defensive and vulnerable. Districts that are doing well don’t panic when someone else offers online education. St. Louis County districts aren’t accusing SLPS of foul play because it enrolls a few of their students in its Virtual School. It would be silly for the districts to get upset when the vast majority of families prefer their brick-and-mortar schools to the SLPS Virtual School.

The board member’s emotional response may indicate that his district is threatened by the online option. Instead of pointing fingers, the Madison Metropolitan School District should consider opening an online school of its own.

A school district in Florida found itself on the Drudge Report after it used stimulus funds to buy iPods. The iPods, which the district will give to parents in exchange for completing a survey, cost $350,000.

That’s a small sum compared to the $1.25 million the Jennings School District spent on hand-held computers for students. Most of those computers ended up in storage. Jennings is now selling some of the devices for a fraction of what it paid, and it plans to distribute others to graduating students over the course of a few years.

It would be wiser for Jennings to emulate the Florida district and give away whatever computers it can’t sell, as soon as possible. If the district gives them all out at once, recipients may be able to find some use for them. If it waits to hand them out to graduates in a couple of years, they’ll be completely obsolete. By then, graduates won’t want to do anything with the computers — except maybe to display them with their caps and gowns as mementos.

There’s no need to attach a survey; just get rid of the devices. But if Jennings does give them to survey participants, I can imagine what a common response will be: “Stop wasting money on gadgets that students don’t use!”

The Jennings School District bought more than 2,500 hand-held computers back in 2006. Now, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reports, the district is getting rid of them. They were purchased with high hopes:

Students could use them to graph math equations, take notes, draw charts, and even, coupled with external probes, measure temperature and pH.

The north St. Louis County school district, now with about 3,100 students, bought one machine for each third- through 12th-grader.

Jennings made two mistakes when it bought all those devices. First, it didn’t have a specific purpose for the technology. The things students could have done with the computers, like taking notes and studying equations, were tasks they could do already with pencils or calculators. Teachers aren’t going to adopt new technology when the old technology does the job just as well. It’s no wonder most teachers said they didn’t use the computers and don’t intend to use them.

Second, the district bought the computers for too many students. It would have made more sense to introduce the devices to one grade, and wait for results before giving them to other grades.

Districts can easily get carried away by dreams of quick technological fixes, so I don’t blame Jennings for being so ambitious. What’s puzzling is that Jennings doesn’t seem to have learned from what happened. The district plans to get rid of the devices by giving them away to graduating students over the course of several years, even though the devices are almost obsolete and will probably be worthless in a year or two. It’s like Jennings can’t give up on its expectation that students will use the computers — if not in school, then after they graduate.

Jennings should sell the computers once and for all. And remember the moral of the story: More gadgets aren’t always better.

Here’s something to celebrate in the Missouri budget: The governor cut $24 million that would have subsidized broadband Internet in rural areas.

As state officials have noticed, living in a rural community is different from living in an urban environment. You don’t have all the traffic, noise, and light pollution you’d find in a big city. The flip side is that you don’t have your choice of restaurants just around the corner, or the same opportunities to access the Internet.

The state shouldn’t try to smooth out those differences and give rural residents the benefits of city life. It would be silly to open a state-funded Starbucks on every gravel road so that rural areas would have better access to coffee. Broadband subsidies are an equally bad idea.

Anyone following the cyberbullying issue should read this article in the Columbia Missourian. (Thanks to Combest for the link.) The article reports on a proposed bill that would require all public school districts to write policies about online bullying.

The bill’s sponsor doesn’t see any drawbacks to it:

“I feel like this bill has the support of everybody,” Wilson said. “It’s simple, and it’s the right thing to do.”

The sponsor’s intentions are unimpeachable, but her bill still deserves to be challenged and debated. In particular, I see one potential down side to it: Passing such a bill could make people feel like the government had fixed something, when in reality little would change.

For one thing, the bill would apply only to public districts. I wouldn’t suggest expanding its reach; the state should not tell private schools which policies to adopt. But what if a student from a private school bullies a student from a public school, or vice versa? Or, what if someone’s cousin comes for a visit from out of state and bullies the neighborhood kids? How would districts’ anti-bullying policies help in those situations? Many instances of bullying wouldn’t fall under any district’s policy.

Furthermore, the bill just tells districts to write something down on a piece of paper. It’s not guaranteed that districts will enforce their policies well enough to prevent online bullying. Bullying can be difficult to detect and stop, because bullies usually harass their victims away from adults’ supervision. A district can’t track down all the emails and text messages that students send to each other, so the new policies probably wouldn’t affect communications between students as much as districts might want them to.

Missouri’s law against young people sending text messages while driving is only the beginning. Regulators want to make sure drivers can think about nothing but the road in front of them:

Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood called distracted driving a “hot button” issue for state legislatures and said he’s against all distracted driving, not just cell phone use.

“I don’t care what the distraction is,” he said. “We’re going to set the highest bar possible. There should be no distractions.”

An obvious problem with outlawing all distractions is that we could never enforce such broad controls on drivers’ behavior. That doesn’t dissuade the texting ban’s supporters, who say that whether anyone is ever found to be in violation of a law doesn’t matter. Here’s how an AAA spokesman puts it:

“The benefit of having it in the statute is voluntary compliance, sort of like every other law.”

Perhaps the roads are safer because drivers willingly cooperate with texting bans, but, if so, texting bans are the exception. Most laws are effective because we can prosecute people for breaking them, and thereby deter people from breaking them in the future.

The more laws we write restricting drivers’ activities, the less we’ll be able to depend on their voluntary compliance. Drivers won’t pay attention to a laundry list forbidding every activity they could engage in while behind the wheel.

Missouri intends to give only half of its Race to the Top grant, should it receive one, to districts. The rest would pay for expanding high-speed Internet access.

When a state plans to spend a large portion of Race to the Top grant money outside of schools, that’s a sign that the Department of Education is offering too much money.