Voice For Liberty

Author: Bob Weeks

  • Kansas Public Schools: Draconian Cuts?

    As Kansas prepares to make spending cuts to balance the budget in face of declining revenue, special interest groups roll out the horror stories of what funding cuts will do.

    A public school advocacy group in Kansas is sending emails with this message: “A 3-5% cut in school funding will force school districts to make cuts in vital programs. If you remember the cuts that were made prior to the lawsuit included such vital services as foreign language, nurses, counselors, library funding. That was nothing compared to what schools will be forced to make with a 3-5% reduction in funding from the state.”

    A YouTube video produced by this group describes the cuts as “draconian.” An online petition on their website states: “I join with other Kansans and call on you to adopt the Governor’s budget recommendations with regard to school funding. It is imperative that we NOT enact across the board cuts which would negatively impact our schools and our economic future. The Governor’s budget already cuts school funding dramatically. Schools can NOT afford deeper cuts. The Kansas Constitution requires the state to provide funding for our schools.”

    This organization has played fast and loose with figures in the past, as I show in Kansas Families United for Public Education (KFUPE) on State Aid to Schools. Now it appears this organization goes by the name Kansas Families for Education.

    Most Kansans know it’s inconceivable that any organization can’t find some fat to trim, some way to get along on a little less money, and still provide service to its customers. The greed of the education lobby is on full display here.

  • A Few Questions for AFP’s Derrick Sontag

    I and a few others met with Americans For Prosperity’s Kansas state director Derrick Sontag on Friday. Following are a few of the questions I asked, and Derrick’s answers.

    Q. Last year AFP had a model budget. Did that have anything to do with the relatively low increase in spending — compared to previous years — in last year’s budget? And does AFP plan to introduce a model budget this year?

    “Yes. I think AFP in general had a lot to do with that. AFP had a direct impact. We’re probably on the next-to-last draft on a model budget for this year. We’ll bring it out next month in time for the legislature to use it for the 2010 budget.”

    Q. Proposition K — the effort to reform property tax appraisals in Kansas: Who will be the opposition to this?

    “Local units of government. When you think about it, it’s been a nice hidden tax increase for years. They can just rely on the appraisal system to do their dirty work. We stress that it doesn’t take away the local’s right or authority to raise property tax rates. But, they won’t like this, because they wont have the appraisal system to lean on. So they’ll have to ask for an increase in the mill levy. They’re going to fight it, but it will be tough for them to justify it. Citizens will ask “why are you fighting this? You still have the right to raise tax rates.’”

    Q. What about transparency in Kansas government?

    “When you look at budget transparency, we want to look at local units of government as well as at the state level. We have the transparency website [Kanview], which I think is very good. It shows the state expenditures and revenues, and local units of government should have to do the same things. Cities, counties, and school districts should have to list their expenditures.”

    Q. Do you think there will be action on the Holcomb Station expansion, the coal plant, this year?

    “Yes. I’m actually optimistic that it will happen.”

    Q. What about judicial reform?

    “I think judicial reform will get attention, too. I think we need to capitalize on the Dan Biles appointment. Even if Biles turns out to be the kind of justice we all hope for, it still doesn’t change the fact that the questions that came out after the nomination should have been asked before. The kind of questions like what is your relationship with the chair of the state Democratic party? That should be asked in the senate.”

  • A Cautionary Note for Kansas Wind Power

    A piece in the Wall Street Journal contains some useful information that we should keep in mind as we consider the future of energy in Kansas, even though the focus of the column is the debate over wind power on Nantucket Sound. (Blowhards, January 24, 2009).

    One thing is the hypocrisy of “green” power proponents:

    Bill Delahunt, the windy Cape Democrat, also denounced the action as “a $2 billion project that depends on significant taxpayer subsidies while potentially doubling power costs for the region.” … Good to see the Congressman now recognizes the limitations of green tech, such as its tendency to boost consumer electricity prices — but his makeover as taxpayer champion is a bit belated. Green energy has been on the subsidy take for years, including in 2005 when Mr. Delahunt was calling for “an Apollo project for alternative energy sources, for hybrid engines, for biodiesel, for wind and solar and everything else.” The reality is that all such projects are only commercially viable because of political patronage.

    This column informs us of the subsidy that wind power receives.

    Tufts economist Gilbert Metcalf ran the numbers and found that the effective tax rate for wind is minus 163.8%. In other words, every dollar a wind firm spends is subsidized to the tune of 64 cents from the government. The Energy Information Administration estimates that wind receives $23.37 in government benefits per megawatt hour — compared to, say, 44 cents for coal.

    This directly contradicts an incoherent comment left on this blog a while ago, which claimed that coal power received huge subsidies compare to wind.

    Background: The subsidy report referred to is TAXING ENERGY IN THE UNITED STATES: Which Fuels Does the Tax Code Favor?

  • Kansas has the appearance, without the reality, of judicial accountability

    Friday’s Wichita Eagle contained an op-ed by a University of Kansas law professor that discussed the method of selecting supreme court justices in Kansas. (Stephen J. Ware: Open up Process of Picking Judges, January 23, 2009)

    A Kansas blogger (The Kansas Jackass) noticed this piece and attempted to take Prof. Ware to task. But it seems like the Jackass is unable to grasp the meaning of one of Prof. Ware’s central points: that in a judicial retention election, there is no opposition candidate. Equating judicial retention elections with contested races for, say, a seat in the legislature ignores political reality.

    That’s one of the things that makes the Jackass argument seem reasonable. There are, in fact, retention elections — the Jackass is correct on this. But political reality is different, and Prof. Ware provides plenty of evidence of this. It’s summarized in his assessment that the current system gives the “appearance, without the reality, of judicial accountability to the citizenry.”

    The Jackass also presses her case by alleging a subtext in Prof. Ware’s article that doesn’t exist.

    I don’t know why the Jackass is so adamant in her support of a system that is at the extreme end of the spectrum of 50 states in giving a voice to the people. Except: the Jackass is an anonymous blogger. Perhaps she has a personal connection to one of the Kansas Supreme Court Justices, or maybe to the current system that selects these justices. There’s no other reasonable explanation as to why someone would be so enamored with this system. Except for being, well, you know the name of her blog.

    To learn more about the selection of justices in Kansas and why we need to change our method of selection, see Kansas Must Change Its Judicial Selection Method.

    Here’s Prof. Ware’s expansion of his op-ed:

    I thank the Jackass for calling attention to my op-ed in the Wichita Eagle. Of course, a short op-ed cannot go into as much depth as a longer article or blog so I appreciate this chance to correct some misunderstandings.

    First, scholars routinely distinguish between judicial selection (how a judge initially gets on the court) and judicial retention (how the judge stays on the court) because selection and retention raise very different issues. My op-ed’s statement about selection is absolutely correct: “All the power in selecting the justices of the [Kansas] Supreme Court belongs to the governor and the bar (the state’s lawyers). So if the governor and bar want to push the state’s courts in a particular direction, there are no checks and balances in the judicial-selection process to stop them.”

    When it comes to retention, reasonable people can disagree about how hard it should be to remove a judge. What reasonable people cannot dispute, however, is that a system of retention elections make it extremely hard to remove a judge. As my op-ed said “these ‘elections’ lack rival candidates and thus rarely include any public debate over the direction of the courts. In fact, a retention election is nearly always a rubber stamp, and no Kansas justice has ever lost one. With these judges so entrenched once they are on the court, the process for initially selecting them is all the more decisive.”

    Retention elections are nearly always rubber stamps, not just in Kansas, but in the other states that use them as well. Professor Brian Fitzpatrick points out that, nationwide, sitting judges win retention over 98% of the time. This rubber-stamp aspect is intentional. As Professor Charles Geyh puts it, “Retention elections are designed to minimize the risk of non-retention, by stripping elections of features that might inspire voters to become interested enough to oust incumbents.”

    Professor Michael Dimino explains: “retention elections protect incumbency in multiple, related ways: They minimize the incentives for opposing forces to wage antiretention campaigns by preventing any individual from opposing the incumbent directly; they eliminate indications of partisanship that allow voters to translate their policy preferences cost-effectively into votes; and they increase voter fears of uncertainty by forcing a choice of retaining or rejecting the incumbent before the voter knows the names of potential replacements.” Prof. Dimino concludes that “retention elections seek to have the benefit of appearing to involve the public, but in actuality function as a way of blessing the appointed judge with a false aura of electoral legitimacy.”

    In other words, the lawyer groups who designed and pushed for retention elections did so to create the appearance, without the reality, of judicial accountability to the citizenry. Very sneaky of them because it fools some people into being distracted by rarely-meaningful retention elections, rather than focusing on the real action: initial selection of judges.

  • Wichita City and School District Campaign Events and Announcements

    I’ve started a page of announcements and events for local campaigns.

    The link is Wichita City and School District Campaign Events and Announcements. Send notice of events and announcements to me at bob.weeks@gmail.com.

  • Government Spending Is No Free Lunch

    Robert J. Barro, an economics professor at Harvard University and a senior fellow at Stanford University’s Hoover Institution, has an excellent commentary in The Wall Street Journal. This piece explains the problems with the multiplier that backers of government stimulus programs count on to make the government spending work. Here’s an excerpt:

    Back in the 1980s, many commentators ridiculed as voodoo economics the extreme supply-side view that across-the-board cuts in income-tax rates might raise overall tax revenues. Now we have the extreme demand-side view that the so-called “multiplier” effect of government spending on economic output is greater than one — Team Obama is reportedly using a number around 1.5.

    To think about what this means, first assume that the multiplier was 1.0. In this case, an increase by one unit in government purchases and, thereby, in the aggregate demand for goods would lead to an increase by one unit in real gross domestic product (GDP). Thus, the added public goods are essentially free to society. If the government buys another airplane or bridge, the economy’s total output expands by enough to create the airplane or bridge without requiring a cut in anyone’s consumption or investment.

    The explanation for this magic is that idle resources — unemployed labor and capital — are put to work to produce the added goods and services.

    If the multiplier is greater than 1.0, as is apparently assumed by Team Obama, the process is even more wonderful. In this case, real GDP rises by more than the increase in government purchases. Thus, in addition to the free airplane or bridge, we also have more goods and services left over to raise private consumption or investment. In this scenario, the added government spending is a good idea even if the bridge goes to nowhere, or if public employees are just filling useless holes. Of course, if this mechanism is genuine, one might ask why the government should stop with only $1 trillion of added purchases.

    The full article is Government Spending Is No Free Lunch .

  • Kansas Senator Chris Steineger on Redesigning Kansas Government

    On January 10, 2009, Kansas Senator Chris Steineger, Democrat from Kansas City, spoke to some 300 citizens at Americans For Prosperity‘s Defending the American Dream Summit in Wichita.

    Steineger said that we should look at the current budget crisis in Kansas as an opportunity to redesign and reinvent Kansas government.

    He asked “why do we have 105 counties?” The answer is that made Kansas counties small enough that everyone could have a one-day horseback ride — the mode of travel in 1861 when Kansas was formed — to the county seat. But today, we have cars, highways, telephones, cell phones, airplanes — a lot of things have changed. But we still have the same administrative structure.

    Businesses change their products and management structure to adapt to the times, he said. Government should do the same thing.

    Based on his 13 years in the Kansas Senate, Steineger said he’s learned that government doesn’t change itself a whole lot. “We don’t change the underlying design structure, the underlying management structure, the underlying administrative structure. We still have 105 counties, and that was based on horseback riding.”

    Steineger told of how in his home county (Wyandotte County), the county and the city of Kansas City formed a unified government. It hasn’t saved much money, he said, but government has become much more effective. Consolidation can work.

    He went on to say that we could also downsize the Kansas legislature. Kansas has 40 senators and 125 representatives. “We really don’t need that many people to make decisions in Topeka.”

    Summing up, he said that we should consider reducing the number of counties and downsize the legislature. There is a window of opportunity of about two years to make these changes. After this, revenue will probably start flowing in again, and people won’t want to change.

  • Walking Door-to-Door with Marcey — ummm — Lavonta?

    Wichita city council member Lavonta Williams just launched the website that supports her campaign for re-election.

    It’s a nice website, but it has a little mistake that gives us a clue as to who might be running Williams’ campaign.

    Her “Get involved” page lists this as one of the ways you can help Williams: “Walking door-to-door with Marcey.”

    Marcey? Who is this Marcey? How could someone make the mistake of using the name “Marcey” when it should be “Lavonta?”

    I don’t know, but last year the campaign for Sedgwick County Commissioner of Marcey Gregory, mayor of Goddard, was managed by Wichita public relations personality Beth King. Could there be a connection?

  • Invisible Kansans Tell Their Stories

    It’s one of the toughest issues for advocates of limited government to address — the plight of those who truly aren’t in a position to help themselves. The website InvisibleKansans.org tells some stories of people in these situations.

    But is the solution for these people more government? As it is, these people are — at least according to this website — not receiving all the services they need. So government isn’t providing them with what they need to lead full lives.

    The problem with relying on government in these situations is that at its core, government is based on coercion. The only way government can acquire resources to help these people is to take from someone else. It would be better for everyone — both giver and recipient — if help was provided voluntarily. But with government in the way, and with government consuming so much already, many people have the attitude of “I already gave — to the tax collector.”