Voice For Liberty

Tag: Government spending

  • Many want to cut budgets … but

    Last week Sedgwick County Commissioners were unable to come to agreement on a level of funding for Project Access. The county needs to cut spending this year, as Commissioner Karl Peterjohn explains below. Differences in attitudes towards spending were revealed when a motion to keep spending on this program at the same level as the year before failed to advance, with two commissioners wanting to increase spending. It’s not as though Commissioners Peterjohn and Ranzau wanted to cut the program, although since the original county budget contained an increase in funding for the program, some will want to portray level spending as a budget cut.

    Project Access funding

    By Karl Peterjohn, Sedgwick County Commission

    Should Sedgwick County increase property tax funding for expanded local health care spending through the private program Project Access 37.3 percent over last year’s level? That $68,000 spending hike was the question facing county commissioners at their April 20 meeting.

    Last year, one of the reasons I cast the only no vote against the county’s 2011 budget, was it raised spending too much. The 2011 county budget increased spending over the 2010 adopted budget by $13 million taking county spending over $411 million. I warned that if the economic gurus and politicians in Washington were wrong, and the economic recovery did not occur, local governments that are dependent upon property tax would be facing even more difficult fiscal problems than we’ve had since the 2008 economic downturn began.

    That 2011 county budget included raises for county employees that totaled over $2.5 million. Some highly paid county employees received thousands in raises by this action. I voted against this increased spending last December. I was the only no vote at that time too. Neither of these votes got much news or editorial attention last year.

    Sedgwick County is now looking at having to cut $17 million from county spending due to a decline in tax revenues led by the property tax. The county is starting a voluntary early retirement program before looking at layoffs as part of a two year spending reduction effort that the commission approved recently. The tough spending decisions must begin now. This is occurring while we still face the larger challenge of trying to help our local economy and expand jobs and income in these tough times of rapidly soaring inflation.

    The inaccurate commentary on the April 24 Wichita Eagle editorial page stated that Commissioner Richard Ranzau and I were unwilling to increase funding for this program. The Wichita Eagle ran a correction April 22 on this point following their news article that ignored this salient fact and incorrectly stated what happened at this meeting.

    It is a fact that Commissioner Ranzau and I did propose a much smaller increase than the other two commissioners wanted after an initial vote to freeze spending at 2010 levels failed. Commissioner Skelton was absent for this vote and this explains how we repeatedly deadlocked two votes to two.

    The entire commission acknowledged the value of this program. However, there are limits on increasing spending to pay for personnel within Project Access at the same time the county is facing layoffs of employees in the Health Department and other health related areas. I was also concerned that more than half of the $250,000 that was sought would have been for Project Access personnel instead of for medicine.

    At the February commission retreat county staff described our increasingly troubled fiscal outlook. At that meeting I heard several of my commission colleagues express a desire to increase county spending. I asked my colleagues if there was a majority of this commission that had two new members that was willing to raise property taxes to pay for additional spending. The answer I heard at this public meeting was there was no desire by commissioners to raise property taxes.

    If this is still the case, then the Sedgwick County Commission will have to make some tough spending choices. Public Access was one of them. It won’t be the last.

    While Project Access is a small part of the county’s overall spending, if you don’t make the tough decisions with your “nickels and dimes,” you can’t make the much tougher decisions when the big bucks are on the line. That challenge will not end with Project Access but will face this commission and all local governments holding the line on property taxes later this year.

  • Why Washington only cut $38 billion: A public choice perspective

    From LearnLiberty.org: “Why do politicians never seem to cut government spending? Using public choice economics, or the economics of politics, Prof. Ben Powell shows how voters are rationally ignorant of what politicians do. This leads to a phenomenon called ‘concentrated benefits and dispersed costs,’ which favors recipients of government payments at the expense of the average taxpayer.”

    We see this type of behavior every day, in government at all levels. The people who seek subsidy at the public trough are highly motivated to seek it, and they will go to great lengths and expense to obtain it. The bureaucratic and political classes, both of which benefit from the subsidies, are motivated, too. Everyone else is less motivated, because the expense of most programs to them is very small.

    This imbalance in interests is part of the reason why government tends to grow, and why cutting anything at all is very difficult.

    The speaker in the video is Benjamin Powell, professor of economics at Suffolk University and also of The Beacon Hill Institute. He delivered a lecture last year in Kansas.

  • Flentje: Align taxation with spending

    In a recent newspaper column and an appearance on the KAKE Television public affairs program This Week in Kansas, H. Edward Flentje of Wichita State University said that we should seek to align government spending with taxation.

    Presently we have systems where one level of government — say the federal government — collects taxes, and then sends the money back to local governments. Often this is in the form of grants, which local governments must apply for. If successful, the local units must then spend the money in certain ways. Flentje says that this system of money government moving from one level of government to another is the root of “cynicism, distrust, and outright anger at government.”

    Citing Alice Rivlin, Flentje listed a number of programs that the federal government should stop funding. Local government, instead, should take over these programs.

    Flentze mentioned Sedgwick County Commissioner Richard Ranzau, who is not voting for federal grants, one of the ways in which tax money is sent from one level of government to another. Ranzau says he votes against these grants for several reasons. The money is borrowed, he says, and we shouldn’t pass on the cost of current government operations to future generations. Second, accepting grants makes us dependent on federal spending, which, since grants come with strings attached, gives the federal government more control over local governmental bodies. And third, Ranzau sees no constitutional basis or justification for many of these programs.

    While taxing and spending locally is preferred to remote taxation and spending, I would add that many of the programs suggested to be left to local government, particularly education, economic development, and job training, are best left to non-governmental, that is, market solutions.

    Align spending with taxing

    By H. Edward Flentje, Professor at the Hugo Wall School of Urban and Public Affairs at Wichita State University

    “Spending is more responsible when the government that spends is the government that must finance that spending.” As an advisor to the late Robert F. Bennett, during his term as Kansas governor, 1975-79, I heard those words spoken often by him.

    At the time Governor Bennett was being besieged from two sides. On the one hand he faced a barrage from low-level federal bureaucrats dangling dollars with strings designed to tell him what state government should do and how to do it.

    On the other hand, Kansas local officials were demanding that the governor and state lawmakers send a larger portion of state taxes to local coffers.

    More recently, the political philosophy underlying Bennett’s words has led to the demise of much revenue sharing and hundreds of categorical grants across the country. Kansas lawmakers eliminated two sizeable revenue sharing programs aiding cities and counties in the aftermath of 9/11, as other states are doing in the current downturn.

    Still, in the current year, roughly $1 trillion in taxpayer funds will move from one level of government to another, and often from a second to a third level of government, through countless state and national programs. Huge administrative structures and arcane formulas remain in place to carry out these transfers between governments. Most deficit spending and budget battles today at all levels of government are tied to these transfers.

    This behemoth has become incomprehensible to the public breeding cynicism, distrust, and outright anger at government — national, state, and local government.

    One of the clearest and most consistent voices on how to tame this beast is Alice Rivlin, founding director of the Congressional Budget Office, co-author of a recent bi-partisan deficit reduction plan, and long-time advisor to Democrats and Republicans, most recently Paul Ryan, who last week released House Republicans’ budget plan.

    As lawmakers struggle with unsustainable finances, they would be wise to revisit Rivlin’s radical suggestions of nearly twenty years ago on dividing more clearly the jobs of national and state governments, in her words:

    Devolution. The federal government should eliminate most of its programs in education, housing, highways, social services, economic development, and job training.

    The productivity agenda. The states should take charge of the primary public investment needed to increase productivity and raise incomes, especially to improve education and skill training and modernize infrastructure.”

    Rivlin’s proposed reordering of state and national spending is reminiscent of Bennett’s prescription that spending should be aligned with taxing. Her “productivity agenda” also parallels rhetorically at least Governor Brownback’s “growth agenda” for Kansas. To carry out her plan would call for state and local officials to address their broadened obligations and the revenue requirements associated with removal of federal funding in education, skill training, and infrastructure.

    Public disenchantment is challenging as never before the century-long practice of taxing (or borrowing) at one level of government and sending those revenues for another level of government to spend. Aligning spending with taxing offers a guide as national, state, and local lawmakers work to place their respective jurisdictions on a sustainable financial course. This realignment will not happen overnight, but one can hope it will not take another century to complete.

  • Reisman: Social Security, Medicare must end

    Last week George Reisman published an article that should be required reading for all who care about the future of our country. Titled How to Eliminate Social Security and Medicare, it will take more than a few minutes to read, but it holds the type of information we need to know as we consider reform of government entitlements. Reisman is the author of the monumental work Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics.

    Reisman lays out a plan that would gradually, over time, end the Social Security and Medicare systems. It’s a detailed plan, and I don’t pretend to know enough to tell if the plan would work. But it seems like it would, and the important thing is that Reisman’s plan calls for an end to these programs. Most plans call for merely bringing these programs “under control” — whatever that means. And for all the courage attributed to House Budget Committee chair Paul Ryan and his Path to Prosperity Plan, he left the Social Security program for solution some other day.

    What’s important about Reisman’s article is his explanation of the harm that these two programs have caused. Here I take the liberty of rewriting two sentences of his into one: Many of the elderly and infirm are incapable of caring for themselves in large measure simply because they had been promised that the government would care for them and thus that it was not necessary for them to save.

    Social Security has reduced the need to save for one’s old age, Reisman writes: “The effect of Social Security and Medicare has been to remove the apparent need for much of that saving. Not surprisingly, in the conviction that the government was now providing for people’s old age, the rate of saving in the United States has declined precipitously over the years, falling all the way to zero in some years.”

    The saving of individuals for their retirement would greatly increase our capital stock, which is vital for economic competitiveness. In fact, Reisman writes that if American industry had access to greater capital, it would be able to operate with lower costs, allowing it to compete more effectively with foreign countries that pay lower wages. But because government diverted Social Security taxes into consumption rather than saving, that capital has not been accumulated. Instead, our capital stock is becoming depleted.

    It will become worse as young people learn they must pay off the national debt — not only the debt figures we see reported in the media, but the debt implicit in the promise of Social Security and Medicare. This debt, as we see, has been accumulated over the decades as politicians of all stripe have carried out what Reisman accurately calls embezzlement:

    Two major lessons to be learned from the financial disaster constituted by Social Security/Medicare are that the government should be prohibited from incurring any significant national debt and that a governmental promise of pensions or provision of future medical care is a category of national debt. All levels of government should be constitutionally prohibited from incurring significant amounts of debt beyond a very short term, including, above all, pension obligations of any kind.

    Hopefully, there is a special place in Hell reserved for all the political con-men and intellectual shysters of the last generations who endlessly dismissed the significance of national debts with such glib phrases as “we owe it to ourselves” and asserted that national debts need never be paid. These, of course, were the same con-men and shysters who again and again ignorantly denounced saving as cash hoarding and the cause of depressions and mass unemployment.

    And in the case of all the government officials who over a period of decades and decades knowingly used the proceeds of Social Security taxes to finance current government spending, these con-men and shysters descended to the status of major criminals, guilty of the crime of embezzlement on a scale unprecedented in all of human history. They diverted literally trillions of dollars of what people were led to believe were their savings, set aside for their future benefit, into current government spending. The spending was for projects desired by these officials and designed to keep them in office by fostering the illusion that the officials had performed the miracle of providing seemingly valuable current benefits at no corresponding cost. Of course, the reason for the apparent lack of cost was that the costs were covered by the proceeds of embezzlement.

    Besides dim prospects for the young, the mass of old people faces a grim future, too. While it is the individual who has the greatest motivation to see for their provision in old age, government has assured us that it will care for us in our old age. The individual versus the collective, in other words. While nearly every politician insists that the elderly will be cared for (“we’re not going to throw Grandma under the bus”), the political reality may become different some day as demographics shift towards a country with a higher proportion of elderly and fewer young people:

    The actual fact is that while the lives of the elderly are of inestimable value, when taken one at a time, to the individual elderly person concerned, they are of no actual value to politicians and government officials. Indeed, from the perspective of the self-interest of all-powerful officials, contemplating the land and the people of their country as their personal possessions, existing for no purpose other than their — the officials’ — glorification, the existence of the elderly stands as an actual impediment. For the elderly consume substantial amounts of the resources of the collective that the officials control, and at the same time they produce little or nothing, and no longer have any prospect of ever doing so. If they ceased to exist, the officials would have resources available to put to other uses that they would certainly judge to be more important.

    Could this lead to the “death panels” that some fear but ObamaCare supporters deny? Reisman cites a recent New York Times article titled When Ailments Pile Up, Asking Patients to Rethink Free Dialysis. The title is almost self-explanatory.

    This is just scratching the surface of Professor Reisman’s article. Reading it and understanding what government has done under the guise of caring for us, I alternate between anger and depression. For me, the saddest realization is that Social Security and Medicare have not only reduced the motivation of Americans to save, their taxes have reduced the ability of people to save, even if they want. I recommend a full reading so that all may understand what the future looks like.

  • There are a lot of government employees

    Two recent articles — one national in scope, the other covering only Kansas — tell us why our budgets are so bloated and why the private sector is struggling to survive.

    Kansas Watchdog reports “In February more than one in five non-farm employees in Kansas worked for government.” This is government all levels. Why is this a problem? Reporter Paul Soutar explains:

    Malcolm Harris, a professor of finance at Friends University in Wichita, said the level of government employment is an indicator of a bigger problem, “It tells me that we’ve got a lot of our resources going into government.”

    “Government spending squeezes resources that might be available for increasing productivity,” Harris said. “It makes us less competitive.”

    Harris said Kansas and the U.S. need to be more competitive in order to increase exports and reduce our trade imbalance.

    The second article in is the Wall Street Journal, penned by Stephen Moore. Titled We’ve Become a Nation of Takers, Not Makers: More Americans work for the government than in manufacturing, farming, fishing, forestry, mining and utilities combined, it starts off with a startling statistic: “Today in America there are nearly twice as many people working for the government (22.5 million) than in all of manufacturing (11.5 million). This is an almost exact reversal of the situation in 1960, when there were 15 million workers in manufacturing and 8.7 million collecting a paycheck from the government.”

    Later Moore highlights the decline of America’s manufacturing tradition at the expense of more government: “Even Michigan, at one time the auto capital of the world, and Pennsylvania, once the steel capital, have more government bureaucrats than people making things.”

    Moore finds that since government has been hiring, and since rarely is anyone fired or laid off from a government job, many college graduates want to work for government: “Sadly, we could end up with a generation of Americans who want to work at the Department of Motor Vehicles.”

    Moore notes that productivity in government is measured differently than in the private sector: “But education is an industry where we measure performance backwards: We gauge school performance not by outputs, but by inputs. If quality falls, we say we didn’t pay teachers enough or we need smaller class sizes or newer schools. … The same is true of almost all other government services. Mass transit spends more and more every year and yet a much smaller share of Americans use trains and buses today than in past decades. One way that private companies spur productivity is by firing underperforming employees and rewarding excellence. In government employment, tenure for teachers and near lifetime employment for other civil servants shields workers from this basic system of reward and punishment. It is a system that breeds mediocrity, which is what we’ve gotten.”

    Moore also uncovers a paradox of government employees: “Public employees maintain that they are underpaid relative to equally qualified private-sector workers, yet they are deathly afraid of competitive bidding for government services.”

  • Wichita elections a blow for economic freedom

    Results from yesterday’s elections for Wichita mayor and city council members were in contrast to the message voters have sent in recent state and national races. There, voters expressed a preference for smaller government, less government spending, and less debt. For these Wichita city offices, however, voters — with one exception — voted for those who promised more government intervention and less economic freedom.

    The winning candidates, of course, didn’t mention the loss of economic freedom in their campaign pitches. But their promise to grow government means just that. Yes, they promise to carefully scrutinize city spending and incentives on a case-by-case basis, insisting they are wise enough and knowledgeable enough to determine which projects are worthy of taxpayer support, and which aren’t. They all say that, always.

    The winners in yesterday’s election — besides the officeholders — are those who will benefit from having a compliant and emboldened mayor and like-minded council members in office as they seek to earn their fortunes at city hall at taxpayer expense. We see these people and their names on the campaign donation reports of many of the successful candidates. Their interest is not good government, but personal enrichment. They generally contribute to all city council members regardless of political stance. It’s difficult to see how someone who has a consistent political ideology they believe in could contribute to all city council members. But they do.

    The incumbents who won re-election — Mayor Carl Brewer and council member and Vice Mayor Jeff Longwell — have already proven themselves to be totally captured by these special interests. Now the new council members have a decision to make: Do they stand up for limited government and economic freedom in Wichita, or do they join the mayor and other council members on the side of the crony capitalists?

    I’ll be surprised if any council member — excepting Michael O’Donnell — ever votes against any of the projects our city’s crony capitalists bring forward.

    This is not a happy day for the future of Wichita. While today’s Wichita Eagle editorial wrote of the mayor’s “enthusiasm for Wichita and optimism about its future,” we need to question the assumptions underlying his sentiments. Is it “optimistic” when a city feels it must dish out corporate welfare to any company that hints of leaving town for purportedly greener pastures? Is it “enthusiasm” when a government that doesn’t trust its citizens to build, work, and live where they want — instead pushing through a heavy-handed, taxpayer-funded downtown plan?

    The takeaway is that it’s easy for people to succumb to the mayor’s false promise of economic prosperity through government intervention. The message of economic freedom, of free people conducting their affairs with minimal interference, is more difficult to believe in for many people. Unfortunately, Wichita does not have a newspaper that believes in economic freedom and limited government, preferring instead the big-government approach to managing a city and its economy. Unlike in other recent elections, this time voters largely followed recommendations made by the Wichita Eagle editorial board.

    Going forward, we can expect a proposal for a tax increase of some sort soon. Some desire a citywide sales tax for the purposes of economic development. These ideas, along with any others expanding the reach and power of city government, will probably not face much resistance from the new city council.

  • Kansas fiscal policy is stifling the state’s economy

    Dave Trabert of Kansas Policy Institute explains that Kansas economic policies are leading to the growth of government at the expense of private sector economic activity. Separately, KPI released figures showing that it will be very difficult for the state to meet the revenue projections made for the current fiscal year, which ends on June 30, 2011. Kansas tax collections in March were below projections, meaning even more trouble balancing the current year budget.

    State Fiscal Policy is Stifling the Kansas Economy

    By Dave Trabert, Kansas Policy Institute.

    Kansas’ fiscal policy has stifled the state’s economy for more than a decade and the effects are now being severely felt. Policy debates are often thought of in terms of party identification but the dividing line in Kansas is about the size and role of government; specifically, limited government versus large, expanding government. Most major policy debates really come down to whether government or taxpayer interests take precedent.

    For example, last year’s 19 percent sales tax increase was designed to allow government spending to increase by more than $200 million. Efforts to instead have government operate more efficiently were rebuffed by the demand for higher revenues, even though both academic studies of the proposed sales tax increase concluded it would cost thousands of jobs. The February employment report from the Kansas Department of Labor confirms those predictions.

    Kansas employmentKansas employment

    Kansas continues to lose private sector jobs, while government jobs increase. The adjacent table shows a loss of 12,100 private sector jobs over the last year; you have to go back to 1997 to find fewer jobs in February. To fairly compare February employment to the July implementation of the sales tax, we have to use seasonally adjusted data from the U.S. Department of Labor. On that basis, there are 23,200 fewer private sector jobs since the sales tax increase.

    There’s been talk of repealing the sales tax but opponents say it would make it harder to balance the state budget. That’s true, but it can be done by having government operate more efficiently, eliminating programs no longer deemed effective, and treating government employees the same as all other taxpayers. Others oppose repealing the sales tax because they’d rather retain it and use the revenue to begin reducing income tax rates. The March to Economic Growth Act (MEGA) would restrict the growth in state revenue and ease the tax burden but opponents are concerned about the impact on government. Never mind that Kansas has one of the highest state and local tax burdens in the country (number 19 according to the Tax Foundation and getting worse) and that jobs and population are migrating to states with lower tax burdens.

    Last year’s smoking ban was another fine example of putting government interests first, with state-owned casinos getting an exemption. Opponents of an effort to remove that exemption say it would cost state-owned casinos millions of dollars in lost revenue and reduce state tax revenues. Bar owners said the same thing last year but their concerns were dismissed.

    And then there’s the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS). The debate over resolving a KPERS deficit of at least $9.3 billion is perhaps the most egregious example of fiscal policy favoring government growth. KPERS is one of the worst funded plans in the country and provides benefits many times greater than received by most private sector workers. Fully funding it will have catastrophic impact on taxpayers and the economy, but even minor benefit reductions are vehemently opposed. Even a proposal to reduce benefits for employees not yet hired can’t get off the ground.

    Continuing to strip taxpayers of their economic freedom so that we can sustain and grow government will eventually cause the state’s economy to implode, as governments in California, Illinois and many nations are currently experiencing. This isn’t theory, it’s history — and we should avoid repeating it.

  • Latest public pension fund data show taxpayers still on hook for trillions

    By Frank Keegan

    Despite pension fund investment gains in 2010, taxpayers still owe state and municipal workers trillions of dollars for promised benefits no matter how much funds earn during the next 30 years.

    According to data for the 4th Quarter released Thursday by the U.S. Census, cash and security holdings of the top 100 public pension plans gained 7.6 percent in 2009, the fifth consecutive quarterly year-over-year increase.

    Census reported the funds reached “the highest level since the second quarter of 2008.”

    Unfortunately, pension fund managers promise taxpayers and workers they will earn about 8 percent a year every year forever, and a loss of about 28 percent at the bottom of the recession would require a 62.5 percent gain the next year to fulfill their promise.

    Spread across 20 to 30 years, funds would have to gain 9 percent to 11 percent every year to achieve their goal. That means no investment market ever could have another downturn for decades. It would require risk-free investments with the highest returns in history. Good luck.

    Even if fund managers could achieve that, taxpayers during intervening years would have to come up with about $1 trillion to $1.5 trillion every year to fill intermittent funding gaps.

    This Census survey “comprised 89.4 percent of financial activity among such entities.”

    On that basis, the total immediate investment cash and security holdings shortfall is more than $1 trillion just for pensions, which will compound to $16 trillion to $34 trillion in additional hits to taxpayers during 20 to 30 years even if fund investments realize unprecedented gains.

    Guaranteed pension costs continue to grow, and government must put taxpayer money into them every year whether investments produce promised returns or not.

    Politicians’ false promise of retiree health care benefits adds more than $530 billion to the debt as of 2008, according to the Government Accountability Office, because “most of these governments do not have any assets set aside to fund them.”

    Other estimates of the total retirement promise gap range from $1 trillion using old data and official assumptions from the Pew Center on the States, to $3 trillion to $5 trillion based on other accounting standards.

    An update of the Pew study that includes data from the beginning of the recession is due out next week. No matter what the actual number is, experts agree it will continue to grow and require more contributions from spending cuts and tax increases now.

    A report released Thursday by Standard & Poor’s confirms that despite recent gains, “The funded ratios of U.S. states’ pension funds continue decline ….”

    Credit analyst Gabriel Petek wrote in “U.S. States’ Pension Funded Ratios Drift Downward” that “Without exception, reduced pension asset values relative to estimated liabilities is placing upward pressure on the annual required contributions of state governments, compounding what is already a difficult budget cycle for most states.”

    S&P focuses on whether states will be able to pay their debts, not whether taxpayers can bleed more for the hidden tab politicians have run up. The report says:

    • Pension liabilities and current contributions are not presently jeopardizing any state’s capacity to meet its debt service obligations;
    • There is general upward pressure on recommended contributions (actuarially determined) to pension funds due to the phasing-in of market losses in 2008;
    • Pension reform efforts could help contain the rate at which some estimated long-term pension liabilities are growing. The significance of near-term fiscal relief generated from these reforms in most cases remains to be seen; and,
    • Early indications in 2011 suggest that deteriorating pension funded ratios — when coupled with a lack of full actuarial contributions — could serve as a source of potential credit pressure for some states.”

    That all adds up to major service cuts and tax increases now to make sure public workers get their pension benefits and bondholders get their principal and interest payments.

    With states facing billions in operating deficits despite revenue higher than pre-recession levels, coming up with the money they must invest now to avoid certain catastrophe in the future is going to be tough.

    Especially on beleaguered taxpayers who now know state government puts them last on the priority list behind public workers and bondholders.

    Frank Keegan is a national editor for The Franklin Center for Government and Public Integrity, watchdog.org and statehousenewsonline.com. Any disgusted public employee, journalist, activist organization or citizen watchdog who wants help exposing government waste, fraud and abuse may contact him at: frank.keegan@franklincenterhq.org.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Friday March 25, 2011

    Elections coming up. On Tuesday April 5 voters across Kansas will vote in city and school board elections. Voting has been underway for about a week through the advance voting process. For those who haven’t yet decided, here’s the Wichita Eagle voter guide. You can get a list of the candidates, along with their responses to questions, customized for your address.

    Campaign signs. The placement of political campaign signs can be an issue. Here is a City of Wichita letter describing placement rules, and a diagram. … If you live in a neighborhood with covenants prohibiting campaign signs, the covenants don’t apply at election time. See In Kansas, political signs are okay, despite covenants.

    In Kansas, cutting unnecessary spending can avoid service cuts. Following up on Kansas state agency spending, Kansas Policy Institute finds examples of spending on overtime, advertising, cell phones, and dues, memberships and subscriptions totaling $50 million. KPI president Dave Trabert remarked: “Hardly a day goes by that we don’t see some group or state agency saying they will have to cut necessary services if their funding is reduced, but it’s pretty clear that there are lots of other ways to reduce spending. Some degree of spending in these categories is understandable, but the data clearly show that large amounts of taxpayer money are being spent unnecessarily.” Other examples uncovered by KPI: “The Legislature spent $144,408 to join the National Council of State Legislators and also spent $107,022 to join the Council of State Governments. The Governor’s office bought memberships in three governors’ associations: the National Governor’s Association ($83,800), the Western Governors’ Association ($36,000) and the Midwestern Governors’ Association ($10,000).” More is in the KPI press release K-State #1 in Cell Phone Spending: Cutting unnecessary spending can avoid service cuts.

    March to Economic Growth stalled. The Kansas House of Representatives has passed a bill that would gradually reduce Kansas personal and corporate income tax rates. The so-called MEGA bill wold create a mechanism where if revenue flowing to the state increases, income tax rates would be reduced proportionally, after adjusting for inflation. Besides lowering these tax rates, which would make Kansas more attractive to business and jobs, the bill would also decrease the rate of growth of spending. But Senate leadership, namely its president, doesn’t care for the bill, so it appears it is dead this year. Last year Senate President Stephen Morris was strongly in favor of the statewide sales tax increase. Despite being a member of the Republican Party, he is part of the Senate’s liberal wing, according to the Kansas Economic Freedom Index and other legislative ratings.

    Open records under attack. CommonSense with Paul Jacob reports on efforts underway in Utah to reduce citizens’ ability to learn about their government: “House Bill 477 changes the core of the GRAMA law, mandating that citizens must prove they deserve access to records, rather than the previous rule requiring government officials to show cause for why a document should not be released. The legislation also exempts text messages, emails and voicemails from being disclosed, the better to keep lobbyists and special interests out of the limelight.” The Daily Herald wrote: “The principle of open government now would apply only when ‘the public interest favoring access to the record outweighs the interest favoring restriction of access to the record,’ in the opinion of the government.” … This bill actually became law, but so much public opinion was roused that it is likely the Utah legislature will overturn the act, according to reports. … Jacob’s email on this matter was subtitled “Paul Jacob notices nearly absolute power corrupting GOP legislators in Utah.”

    Ignorant or just ill-informed? L. Brent Bozell in Investor’s Business Daily: “Anyone who’s ever seen Jay Leno do one of his ‘Jaywalking’ segments on NBC, locating average Americans and asking them factual questions on street corners, knows there are far too many Americans who know next to nothing about just about everything. They can’t name our first president or don’t know what the phrase ‘Founding Fathers’ means. Ask them to name our current vice president and watch the brain waves flat line. Newsweek magazine recently announced its disgust after it offered the government’s official citizenship test (the one we require immigrants to pass before being naturalized) to 1,000 Americans. Thirty-eight percent of the sample failed. Newsweek worried in its headline: ‘The country’s future is imperiled by our ignorance.’” Locally, I am reminded of the Kansas Policy Institute and its survey of Kansans and their knowledge of school spending. Regarding that, I reported: “When talking about Kansas school spending, few Kansans have accurate information. Those with children in the public school system are even more likely to be uninformed regarding accurate figures.”

    Government spending overrides privates spending. The last two days have featured readings from Robert P. Murphy’s book Lessons for the Young Economist on the importance of profits and loses in guiding investment, and how government is unable to calculate its profit or loss. Today, Murphy explains government spending and the political process: For example, suppose the government decides to build a public library in order to make books and internet access free to the community. Because the government only has a limited budget, it won’t do something ridiculously wasteful such as coating the library with gold, or stocking the shelves with extremely rare first editions of Steinbeck and Hemingway novels. Suppose the government tries to be conscientious, puts out bids to several reputable contractors, and has a modest library constructed for $400,000. Yet even if outside auditors or investigative journalists could find nothing corrupt or shocking about the process, the question would still remain: Was it worth it to spend $400,000 on building this particular library, in this particular location? The crucial point is that we know one thing for certain: No entrepreneur thought that he could earn enough revenues from charging for book borrowing to make such an enterprise worthwhile. We know this because the library didn’t exist until the government used its own funds to build it! One way to think about government expenditures is that they necessarily call forth the creation of goods and services that people in the private sector did not deem worth producing. When the government spends money, it directs resources away from where private spending decisions would have steered them, and into projects that would not be profitable if private entrepreneurs had produced them relying on voluntary funding. Thus the political authorities in an interventionist economy face one-half of the socialist calculation problem. … The government in essence is a giant distributor of charitable donations. Even those citizens who welcome the concept should ask themselves: Why do we need to route our donations through the political process? Why not decentralize the decisions and allow each person to donate his or her funds to the various charities that seem most worthy? … Regardless of its possible benefits, government spending suffers from the calculation problem afflicting socialism. The system allows a select group of political authorities to override the input of private individuals in how (some of) their property should be used to steer resources into various projects. This is a very serious drawback for anyone who favors interventionism as a way to increase the “general welfare,” however defined.

    Kansas income is growing. While still lower than its peak in 2008, wage and salary income in Kansas is on the way up, and has been throughout 2010.

    iPhone screen