Missouri Sunshine Law

More money than sense. Or is it just cynical posturing?

Yes.

Show-Me Institute @ShowMe
The taxpaying public should have an unambiguous right to see what’s being taught to their kids, how schools are performing, and how money is being spent.

[….]
7:37 AM · Nov 22, 2021

A few of the responses:

The premise of this “Bill of Rights” is built on the sense of loss of control. Your justification? “I’ve heard stories from concerned parents …” And for those “stories” you propose sweeping changes to a system that already has parental control.

I question your true motive.

How about you be open about your agenda in demanding accessed to things you already have access to? Not hearing anything from you about what motivates your orchestrated effort to undermine faith in public education.

This is 100% just another way to sow division and distrust in public schools so your wealthy donors can get another tax break for their kids’ private school. Of course those private schools cost 2-3x public schools and there’s no facts or data showing they have better outcomes.

Maybe Eric Schmitt (r) would know? Nah, that assumes a fact not in evidence.

What is it with republicans?

Kansas Governor Sam Brownback (r) [2015 file photo].

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback talking tax cuts in Missouri

By JASON HANCOCK

The Star’s Jefferson City correspondent

03/04/2015 1:04 PM 03/04/2015 1:50 PM

JEFFERSON CITY

Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback is taking his tax-slashing message on the road, with two speaking events in Missouri to groups funded by St. Louis billionaire and conservative megadonor Rex Sinquefield.

Wednesday afternoon, Brownback addressed a luncheon sponsored by Grow Missouri, a Sinquefield-funded group founded two years ago to push lawmakers to enact tax cuts for individuals and businesses in the state. The title of the luncheon was “Growing Prosperity for Years to Come,” and Grow Missouri tweeted that Brownback would discuss “his tax policies and how we can adopt them.”

Joining Grow Missouri in sponsoring the luncheon were the Associated Industries of Missouri and the National Federation of Independent Businesses. The event was invitation only, with a representative from Sinquefield’s lobbying firm telling The Star that no media would be allowed. Several lawmakers indicated they planned to attend….

[….]

At least we think it reads like he spoke in Jefferson City.

A comment, via Twitter:

Steven Anthony ‏@scanthony14

Pretty sure Gov. Nixon has never gone to speak in Topeka, so why would Gov. Brownback speak in our capital? #BorderWar #MOLeg 12:51 PM – 4 Mar 2015

Uh, he’s following the money since there isn’t any left in Kansas?

The Reactionary Right hates defined benefit pensions for public employees.  As best as I can tell, they make two arguments: they are a huge unfunded liability and they are more generous than pensions in the private sector.

Show Me Institute, Rex Sinquefield funded “think tank” to provide “research” to defund the private sector and privatize everything, just issued a new report “Missouri Transition Costs And Public Pension Reform”.

This report is written by a grifter at the American Enterprise Institute. (More on that at the end of this posting.)  

If you open up the report on the link above, you find it is a very strange report on Missouri public pensions.  If you do a search, there is no analysis of any public pensions in Missouri.

In the actual text, the report mentions only Missouri four times: one identifying the executive director of MOSERS and three times in a paragraph I will cite after the fold.

The executive director of MOSERS provides a quote on a defined contribution system that the report attempts to refute.  

This paragraph is in that refutation with the three other mentions of Missouri.

One might argue if public pensions were reduced, the lower incomes of retired public employees would cause them to rely on public assistance, thereby transferring costs to the government.  These payments would not be, of course, liabilities, but more important is that these payments are unlikely to be significant in any case.  Full-career public employees in most states retire with benefits far exceeding any level at which public assistance would be payable.  In Missouri,for instance, an average full-career state employee retiring today would receive almost $24,000 annually in pension benefits, based on the Missouri State Employee Retirement System’s annual report, plus another $13,000 or so in Social Security benefits.  Based upon U.S Census data, such a public employee would have a retirement income greater than about 83 percent of new retirees in Missouri. (p. 18 of the PDF file)

Wow!

Missouri public workers’ pension along with Social Security provide them with a retirement income ($36,000/year) which is greater than 83% of new retirees in Missouri, so it is no big deal to cut their pensions.  

(I wonder what the average education of those workers are and their income in relation to the population as a whole.)

I always thought that one of the characteristics of being middle class is to be able to retire in some comfort.  I wonder how comfortable anyone is with $36,000/year.  As someone approaching retirement, I could get by on that, but with increasing health care costs, it will not be comfortable.

In a better world, we would be appalled that a retirement income of $36,000/year is greater than 83% of all new retirees in Missouri and we should be thinking about how to raise their retirement income and NOT reducing the pensions of others so everyone who works for a living is equally poor.

Remember this is the “research” from one of the richest Missourians that will be cited by the reactionary right to end defined benefits for state workers.

The author of this report worked in W.’s administration, Andrew Biggs is a real piece of work.  Because this report has next to nothing about Missouri’s public pensions, it reads like something that he has done for other states.  On his website, I couldn’t find one.

However, he does have this report on Federal worker pensions titled “We’re No. 1 – in public employee pay.”. It has a lot of charts comparing Federal workers at various pay grades to governmental workers in countries of “Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, the “rich man’s club” whose membership includes most of the world’s developed, high-income countries.”

The argument he makes is that US federal workers are paid more than in these other “rich man’s club.”. Here is the membership of this “rich Man’s club.”

Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Chile, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Iceland, Ireland, Israel, Italy, Japan, Korea, Luxembourg, Mexico, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Slovak Republic, Slovenia, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, United Kingdom, United States

[Biggs says he compares US worker pay to 18 countries, but never mentions those countries.]

Given how expensive health care is the US, it would be good to know how much health care costs those workers in other countries in relation to what it costs in the US.  Likewise, in those other countries, public universities don’t have the tuition costs in the US.  

The intellectual dishonesty of Biggs is breath taking.

Let’s keep in mind what these “reports” are arguing: These workers are better off than others; therefore, we can (and should) cut their wages and benefits. In other words, because a lot of people are already poor, let’s make that number even bigger.

How much one gets paid to comfort the very, very comfortable by proposing ways to make people poorer.

Does this argument work the other way? American CEOs are paid significantly more than CEOs anywhere else in the world.  Shouldn’t we enact policies to correct this huge inequality, too?

 

In my earlier post on the way that Missouri politicos are tripping over themselves to try to lure Boeing away from Washington, I noted that a few state legislators were resisting the pressure. In the Missouri House 3 of these stalwarts were Democrats and 17 were Republicans. For those of us with a progressive bent, the question is why the imbalance?

We can assume that the objections on the right side of the isle mirror those of several conservative organizations that lobbied against the Governor’s proposed tax breaks:

United for Missouri, a conservative activist group, took to social media on Monday to call on its members to “Stop the Governor’s Proposed Expansion of Corporate Welfare” […] In a post on its website, the group said the legislature should instead reallocate existing tax credits and pass “broad based” tax reform, not targeted tax credit expansion.

“Does all this mean that Missouri should not try to capture the new Boeing plant? Absolutely not,” the group wrote, “[b]ut the legislature should not expand corporate welfare in doing so!”

The Show Me Institute, a conservative think-tank, also voiced their opposition to the proposal, calling it the “definition of cronyism,” and, like United for Missouri, said they were in favor of broader tax changes like they supported in House Bill 253, legislation vetoed by Nixon that would have slashed corporate taxes and provided fractional relief for individuals.

As much as I loathe what these organizations stand for, I applaud their principled stance and that of the 17 House Republicans against corporate welfare when it is applied in such an unfair and discriminatory fashion. They are right that for every Boeing that is able to throw around enough weight to get what it wants from local governments, there are thousands of small businesses that continue to pay full freight.

Nevertheless, the real issue for these folks isn’t really corporate welfare, it’s the way that it is applied. They want to exempt all businesses – and in some cases, all individuals – from taxes, cut government services to a bare minimum, and if we must have taxes, make them regressive consumption taxes. Their real objection is that tax exemptions for Boeing don’t go far enough, but should be the norm for all business and to hell with revenue to support government that serves the needs of actual people. These are rigidly ideological rather than pragmatic thinkers, espousing an ideology that has revealed itself to be rotten to the core time and time again.

Contrast this stance with that articulated by one of the Democrats, Rep. Stephen Webber, who opposed the Boeing package proposed by the Governor. Webber was aware of the fairness issue, declaring that “we have a lot of hard working business owners in Columbia and I don’t see why we should make them pay more than a multibillion dollar corporation.” He also, however, articulated pragmatic concerns. The Columbia Daily Tribune reported:

But for Webber, the bill was weak, had too many loopholes and gave away too much. “We give away billions and say ‘why can’t we fund the schools?’ ” Webber said. “The answer is right there in this bill.”

There you  have it. The difference between conservatives and liberals in a nutshell. On the one hand, rigid ideologues who will always take the “principled” stand regardless of the real-world consequences for the people who stand to loose or gain the most. In this case, they’re willing to work over one of their corporate allies, but they are just as firm – or even firmer – when the entity to be worked over is part of the 99%. On the other hand, however, we have liberals and progressives who perceive and respect issues of principle, but who are more than anything motivated by the overweening principle that they serve the needs of real, live people.

One can also assume that it is the same type of pragmatism that has led other Democrats to support the Governor’s incentive package. Of course, we know that there are always political survival considerations somewhere in the background, but I think it’s safe to assume that in contrast to Webber, most of the Democrats concluded that the possibility of lots of jobs outweighs the loss of tax revenue and the uncertainty about positive outcomes, as well as any reservations they may harbour about the process.

One may or may not agree about the conclusions these folks have drawn or about Rep. Webber’s rationale, but when we’re between the proverbial rock and hard place – and the pros and cons of the Boeing situation looks a lot like a rock and a hard place to me – we’ll definitely do better in the long run if the folks coming to our aid are at least willing to deal with the real world in something approximating a concrete fashion. Before you can clear your backyard of rocks and hard places you have to be able to get yourself out from in between.

 

There was a wonderful article in Saturday’s Post Dispatch about progressive religious leaders meeting to discuss state budget cuts.

Some of my favorite people, like Amy Smoucha of Jobs with Justice, are mentioned in the article.  She came right out and warned attendees to watch out for Rex Sinquefeld, but that’s not a surprise to those of us who read SMP.  She also mentioned the American Legislative Exchange Council.  We learned about ALEC a few yrs ago because of Jane Cunningham’s involvement with it, particularly in regards to defunding public education.

While I was thinking about looking ALEC up again just for old times sake, I came across another article that mentions it.  This one has to do with a lawsuit brought against Massey Energy because of the horrible working conditions in the mine where 29 Americans died two weeks ago. AND how cold-hearted millionaires think widows are just looking for  

“free money.”

I’ve been having a running discussion with an acquaintance out here in Franklin County who is a leader of the local tea party group.  I’m trying to tell him, in the gentlest way possible, that the essential difference between those of us who side with the miners and those who side with the coal company is that we care about other human beings and they don’t.  I could go on about that difference, but that can wait until later.  Just think of it as a mighty oak that has been split by lightning.  The roots are still there.  Some self-surviving new limbs are growing out of the two halves.  But the tree will never be intact again.   If you can’t share another’s pain, you’ll probably never grow up.

(Full Disclosure: I consulted for Margaret Donnelly during her 2008 run for Attorney General.)

Sometimes I’m not sure what world the glibertarians at Show Me Institute live in. Last week, Margaret Donnelly, Missouri Director of the Department of Health and Senior Services, called for Missourians to wear purple on Monday to raise awareness of senior abuse. Sounds innocent enough, right?

In the eyes of Show Me Institute contributor Sarah Brodsky, this constituted leading an official government-sponsored protest against senior abuse. Somehow, this will send us on the slippery slope to official state condemnation of unpopular demonstrations, though she never makes it clear how.

One could quibble with the efficacy of a call to wear purple as a tool for raising awareness, but what Brodsky objects to is any and all government intiatives to alter behavior:

But protesting abuse and deciding what color to wear should be left to the private sector, without state influence one way or the other. [I swear, I did not use an Ayn Rand quote generator to make that sentence up. -Clark]

You could just as easily take a page from Brodsky’s book and use a slippery slope argument (otherwise known as a fallacy) to say that following Brodsky’s objection would lead to anarchy and murder.

Either way, it’s a joke. Donnelly wasn’t “protesting” against senior abuse; she was trying to raise awareness about a serious problem. And there’s nothing wrong with government officials calling attention to a cause that private citizens (mostly doctors) organized.

It’s an odd feeling to be cheering Sarah Steelman for doing the right thing. (Though I still have a wary eye out for an ulterior motive in her announcement that she has changed her mind about the ethanol mandate in Missouri.) She now opposes it.

Missouri requires that 10 percent of all gasoline be ethanol, and Steelman chose “a busy Springfield street side for her announcement that ‘within 100 days of being elected Governor, I will do everything in my power to repeal the ethanol mandate in Missouri.'”

She opposes the mandate because “it has produced higher food prices and higher costs for farmers since going into effect January 1.”

The Missouri Corngrowers Association, predictably, disagrees, but let me just say, before I present their side of it, that Mark Twain’s observation is particularly apt here: “Tell me where a man gets his corn pone, and I’ll tell you what his ‘pinions is.” Anyway, here’s the corn growers’ spin:

“Removing the ethanol requirement in Missouri would only increase prices at the pump for already hurting consumers.”

The corngrowers tell us that using ethanol will save Missourians $285 million this year and over $2 billion over the next ten years.

Not so fast, says Steelman:

But Steelman said Tuesday that ethanol doesn’t make traveling any cheaper for drivers. “You don’t get as many miles per gallon burning the blend, the ethanol blend, as you do regular gas. So that if you’re not getting as many miles per gallon, you have to fill up more often at $4 a gallon,” the State Treasurer said.

Marshall [the Corngrowers Association CEO] pointed to a recent analysis by Merrill Lynch that shows that gasoline prices would be 10 to 15 percent higher without the ethanol supply in the marketplace. That translates into ethanol helping hold down gasoline costs to American drivers by 60 to 70 cents per gallon.

60 to 70 cents per gallon sounds impressive, until you hear what another right wing source, Show Me Institute, has to say. It points out that the ethanol industry is subsidized by taxpayers, so not only is Missouri gas not as cheap as it looks on the gas pump monitor, but diverting corn for use as fuel is driving food prices up. The Show Me Institute predicts the opposite of what the corngrowers are telling us: to wit, that ethanol use will cost Missouri consumers a billion dollars over the next decade.

Missourians don’t realize what our cheaper gas is really costing us: more students in every classroom, for example. We taxpayers put the money that should have gone to repair our roads into ethanol plants. Without subsidies, nobody would use the stuff because it’s expensive to produce. It needs huge quantities of nitrogen fertilizer (made from natural gas) as well as petroleum-based pesticides. So ethanol is not only not cheaper than using oil, but producing it uses oil anyway. Furthermore the runoff from the pesticides poisons our groundwater, and the nitrogen fertilizers ride down the Mississippi River to the Gulf of Mexico, where they “fertilize” algae and create a dead zone.

Besides all that, producing ethanol requires monstrous huge amounts of water–3 1/2 to 6 gallons of water per gallon of ethanol. What’s more, “with each gallon of ethanol you get 12 gallons of sewagelike effluent produced by the fermentation/distillation process.”

Now here’s the kicker. Salon.com has this bombshell:

The Bush administration states that corn-based ethanol only accounts for 3 percent of global food price inflation. ….

But now the U.K.’s the Guardian is reporting that it has laid its hot hands on a confidential World Bank report that makes the astonishing claim that 75 percent of the surge in global food prices can be attributed to biofuels.

The figure emphatically contradicts the U.S. government’s claims that plant-derived fuels contribute less than 3 percent to food-price rises. ….

Senior development sources believe that the report, completed in April, has not been published to avoid embarrassing President George Bush. “It would put the World Bank in a political hot-spot with the White House,” said one yesterday.

The Salon.com writer calls biofuel mandates a “crime against humanity.”

So, Ms. Steelman, on this issue, I agree with you.

The motto of school voucher advocates in Missouri must be, “If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again, because big money donors to state legislators who favor vouchers have already given more campaign contributions–fourteen months before the elections!–than they did in 2004 and 2006. 

In 2004, $385,340 was donated.  Last year, even though it was an off year election, contributions went up; pro-voucher candidates received $403,840.  So far in this election cycle, $483,850 has already been given.  Of course, a major reason the contributions are so high this cycle is that between January and June there were no caps on contributions. 

Indeed, now that the Supreme Court has put the kibosh on that travesty, Jay Nixon is returning all his over-the-limit contributions.  But the big honcho in the pro-voucher camp, Rex Sinquefield (pictured),  filed a legal argument with the Supreme Court asking that none of his donations be returned to him.  His brief, almost but not quite, said:  I bought ’em fair and square.  Okay, what he actually said was that his political groups gave money early in the cycle because that’s when it helps the most, and he doesn’t want it back.  For whatever that argument is worth.

Which brings us to Sinquefield’s two groups:  All Children Matter and the infamous Show Me Institute.

All Children Matter exists in only ten states, and we’re among the lucky ones to be targeted.  Most of the money for it comes from out-of-state, with less than a third coming from actual Missourians.  Make that Missourian, singular, as in Rex Sinquefield.  Ninety-five percent of the in-state contributions come from him.

The Show Me Institute, on the other hand, is based in St. Louis.  The ProVote website tells us that:

Their work “is rooted in the American tradition of free markets and individual liberty” and “seeks to move beyond the 20th-century mindset that every problem has a government.”

These groups and their legislative supporters want Missouri tax money going to private schools.  They have a problem, though:  the Missouri constitution forbids that.  So they have come up with an ingenious shell game to circumvent the law.  It’s called tax credits, and here’s how it works.  Say I want to send my child to a Catholic parochial school.  If a tax credit law were passed, I could get the Missouri taxpayers to foot most of the bill if I donated to a scholarship fund at that school.  I would give the fund $1000, and–this is if the pro-voucher people could ever get the law they want passed–the state would tell me that I get an eighty percent tax credit.  In other words, I would get to take $800 of that $1000  off my Missouri taxes.  Then the school conveniently would happen to award that $1000 scholarship to my child!  Can you imagine such a coincidence?  What are the odds?

That way, you see, Missouri wouldn’t have to give any money at all to a private school.  The state would still be out $800, but technically it wouldn’t be supporting a religious school.  So far, each attempt to pass this law has been resoundingly defeated.  Thank goodness, because if it had passed, it would have cost Missouri $40 million dollars this year. 

A few of the legislators voting for this shell game are doing so in good conscience.  Rodney Hubbard, Talibdin El-Amin, and Ted Hoskins, for example, are concerned about the plight of students in the St. Louis City Schools.  Most of the legislators who voted for it, however, are hypocrites.  They claim to be worried about poor children stuck in bad schools, but almost without exception they voted for Blunt’s Medicaid cuts. 

And anyway, the poor children aren’t very likely to be helped by these tax credits.  Even if parents of children in inner city schools could afford their share of the tuition, the religious schools reject two out of three children who apply.  They take the cream of the crop. 

No, the push for tuition tax credits is aimed at helping the affluent.  Erlaine Eltoomi mentioned at the recent West County Dems meeting that some churches have contrived another back door voucher plan.  Impatient that no tuition tax credits have been passed, some churches are declaring that any money a parishioner gives above a certain amount can be directed toward tuition at that church’s school.  Church donations, you see, are tax deductible.  That’s one more reason I’d favor doing away with tax deductions for church donations.

Look, if we’re going to get stuck with an extra forty million bill for education, let’s invest that money in the public schools, the poorest ones, and see if we can actually solve some of the problems.

Thanks go to Fired Up! for the photo of Rex Sinquefield.