Voice For Liberty

Tag: Kansas legislature

Articles about the Kansas legislature, both the House of Representatives and the Senate.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Monday May 16, 2011

    Wichita City Council this week. This week the Wichita City Council handles several important issues. One is approval of the policies regarding incentives for downtown development. Then, the council will consider approval of the city’s portion of the Hawker Beechcraft deal. In order to persuade Hawker to stay in Kansas rather than move to Louisiana, the State of Kansas offered $40,000 in various form of incentive and subsidy, and it was proposed at the time that the City of Wichita and Sedgwick County each add $2.5 million. Of note is the fact that Hawker’s campus in east Wichita … oops, wait a moment — their campus is not within the boundaries of the city. Like Eastborough, Hawker is surrounded on all four sides by Wichita, but is not part of the city itself. I don’t know if this should have any consideration as to whether the city should give Hawker this grant. … Then, there’s approval of the Industrial Revenue Bonds for the Fairfield Inn in downtown at WaterWalk. The agenda material says that the hotel is now complete, so the construction loan is being refinanced with the IRBs, “which will be initially purchased by the construction loan lender and then later redeemed with the proceeds of a permanent commercial loan insured by the Small Business Administration.” The benefit of the bonds is that the hotel escapes paying $328,945 in sales tax on its furnishings, etc. The city has already issued a letter of intent to do this, so it’s likely this item will pass and someone else will have to pay the sales tax this hotel is escaping. … The complete agenda packet is at Wichita City Council May 17, 2011.

    Wichita as art curator. The controversy over spending $350,000 on a large sculpture at WaterWalk promoted one reader to write and remind me of the city’s past experience as custodian of fine art. In 2004, the city mistakenly sold a sculpture by James Rosati as scrap metal. Realizing its mistake, the city refused to complete the transaction. The buyer sued, the city lost and appealed, losing again. Estimates of the sculpture’s worth ranged up to $30,000. Editorialized Randy Scholfield at the time in The Wichita Eagle: “That the sculpture ended up in an auction of surplus junk in the first place says something about how much the city valued it or exercised proper stewardship.”

    Legislature fails to confront KPERS. This year the Kansas Legislature failed to confront the looming problem of the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System, or KPERS. A small revision was made to the program, and a study commission was created. Neither action comes anywhere near to solving this very serious problem, as described in Economist: KPERS must undergo serious reform.

    Over 30 major news organizations linked to George Soros. Business and Media Institute: “When liberal investor George Soros gave $1.8 million to National Public Radio, it became part of the firestorm of controversy that jeopardized NPR’s federal funding. But that gift only hints at the widespread influence the controversial billionaire has on the mainstream media. Soros, who spent $27 million trying to defeat President Bush in 2004, has ties to more than 30 mainstream news outlets — including The New York Times, Washington Post, the Associated Press, NBC and ABC.” … This is from the first of a four part series.

    Romney seen as candidate of business, not capitalism. Timothy P. Carney in To Mitt Romney, big government is good for business: “Mitt Romney has the strongest business backing of any Republican presidential hopeful, and he carries himself as a technocratic problem solver. … Examine Romney’s dalliances with big government that have caused him such grief, and you’ll see a trend: They all are described as ‘pro-business,’ they all amount to corporate welfare, and they all reflect the technocratic mind-set you’d expect of a business consultant. Romney’s record and rhetoric show how managerialism veers away from the free market and into corporatism.” … Carney discusses Romney’s disastrous health care program in Massachusetts — which is seen as a prototype for Obamacare, his efforts to lure business to the state with subsidies, his support of ethanol subsidies, a national catastrophic insurance fund, and the Troubled Asset Relief Program.

    Programs for elderly must be cut. Robert Samuelson in The Washington Post: “When House Speaker John Boehner calls for trillions of dollars of spending cuts, the message is clear. Any deal to raise the federal debt ceiling must include significant savings in Social Security and Medicare benefits. Subsidizing the elderly is the biggest piece of federal spending (more than two-fifths of the total), but trimming benefits for well-off seniors isn’t just budget arithmetic. It’s also the right thing to do. I have been urging higher eligibility ages and more means-testing for Social Security and Medicare for so long that I forget that many Americans still accept the outdated and propagandistic notion that old age automatically impoverishes people.” … Samuelson goes on to show that many are doing quite well in old age and gets to the heart of the problem: “The blanket defense of existing Social Security and Medicare isn’t ‘liberal’ or ‘progressive.’ It’s simply a political expedient with ruinous consequences. It enlarges budget deficits and forces an unfair share of adjustment — higher taxes, lower spending — on workers and other government programs. This is the morality of the ballot box.” In other words, the elderly, which are a powerful voting bloc, have found they can vote themselves money. Concluding, he writes “Social Security was intended to prevent poverty, not finance recipients’ extra cable channels.”

    Social Security seen as unwise, financially. A video from LearnLiberty.org, a project of Institute for Humane Studies, explains that apart from the political issues, Social Security is a bad system from a purely financial view. Explained in the video is that 22 year-olds can expect to earn a 1.6 percent rate of return on their “investment” in Social Security contributions. Further, the “investment” is subject to a “100 percent estate tax.”

    Market development in Wichita. From Wichita downtown planning, not trash, is real threat: “While the downtown Wichita planners promote their plan as market-based development, the fact is that we already have market-based development happening all over Wichita. But because this development may not be taking place where some people want it to — downtown is where the visionaries say development should be — they declare a ‘market failure.’ But just because people make decisions that visionaries don’t approve of, that’s not market failure. And this is one of the most important reasons why Wichitans should oppose the downtown plan. It proposes to direct public investment away from where free people trading in free markets want public investment to be. The public investment component of the downtown plan says that people who decided not to live or work downtown are wrong, and they must now pay for others to be downtown. … We have market-based development in Wichita. We don’t need a government plan to have market-based development.”

  • Kansas needs large ending balance

    Negotiations between Kansas House and Senate budget committees are stalled due to differing opinions on how large an ending balance the budget should have, if it should have any balance at all.

    We need to have a large ending balance for two reasons: First, the larger the ending balance, the lower the planned spending. Kansas government needs to spend less. While proponents of a small ending balance (which is the same as wanting to spend more) make their case with images of closed schools and abandoned senior citizens, the state is spending a lot of money that could be shifted to these programs.

    Second, in recent years the legislature has left too small an ending balance, and the governor has had to make allotments, or spending adjustments. This has been the case because revenue incoming to the state was lower than expected. Legislators construct the budget based on forecasts from the state’s consensus revenue estimating group. These forecasts, of course, are subject to error and all sorts of uncertainty that can’t be forecast. The group has had a tendency to overestimate future revenue recently, as shown in the chart below.

    If this trend of overestimating continues — and we don’t know if it will — a budget with a small ending balance will probably force spending cuts to be made mid-year. It would be better if we planned for them now.

    Kansas Consensus Revenue Estimating Group Error

    The chart shows the percent error between the consensus revenue estimating group’s initial estimate of revenue for a year and the actual results. It seems that the group has a tendency to underestimate the magnitude of the swing of actual results, both good and bad. During the recession years of the early 2000s, the group was too high in its estimates (leading to a negative error percentage). Then during the following boom years the group underestimated. For the past two years the group forecast much more revenue than the state actually received, leading to some of its largest errors, in relative terms.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Friday May 6, 2011

    Wichita downtown sites draw little interest. Wichita Business Journal: “Interest from developers in eight city-owned “catalyst” sites in downtown Wichita was minimal — unexpectedly so. ‘I was a little bit surprised how light the response was,’ says Scott Knebel, downtown revitalization manager for the city of Wichita.” With the city soliciting informal proposals for eight sites, only two proposals were received.

    KPERS. It appears that the Kansas Legislature will pass a pension “reform” bill that does not include a shift to a defined-contribution plan for new employees. Instead, the tough decisions that need to be made about the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System have been placed in the hands of a study committee. More information about the seriousness of the KPERS problem is at Economist: KPERS must undergo serious reform and KPERS problems must be confronted. Video is here, with two parts following.

    More flexibility for school funds. Kansas Watchdog reports that Kansas schools will now have more flexibility to spend funds that are presently stashed away in various funds. Of interest in the article is a chart showing the growth in these fund balances. School spending advocates protest that these funds are needed to because revenue doesn’t arrvie at the same time bills do, which is true. But these fund balances have been growing, because schools have not been spending all the money they’ve been given. While this bill is a good idea, schools have always been able to tap into these funds by simply contributing less to them, thereby spending down the balances. But schools have not wanted to to do this.

    Growth in Kansas spendingGrowth in Kansas spending. Click for a larger view.

    Despite “cuts,” spending grows. For all the talk in Kansas of budget cuts, state spending still manages to grow year after year. Kansas Watchdog is again on top of this topic, noting “Each year various adjustments push state spending above the approved budget, but in 2010 that extra spending took a big jump that will require even more spending in the future.” Of particular interest is the chart showing spending rising every year.

    Sandy Springs a model. Common Sense with Paul Jacob: “Local governments suffer from a big problem: bigness. Too often they expand their scope of services, and, in so doing, progressively fail to cover even the old, core set of services. You know, like fire and police and roads and such. The solution is obvious. Mimic Sandy Springs. This suburban community north of Atlanta, Georgia, had been ill-served by Fulton County. So a few years ago the area incorporated. And, to fend off all the problems associated with the ‘do-it-all-ourselves’ mentality, the city didn’t hire on a huge staff of civil servants. Instead, it contracted out the bulk of those services in chunks. Now, the roads get paved and the streets are cleaned and the waste is removed better as well as cheaper than ever. Reason Foundation, a think tank known for its privatization emphasis, has been on the story from the beginning. A 2005 appraisal predicted that the town would become a ‘model city.’ That prophecy seems to have been on the money, and a Reason TV video emphasizes this with the shocking fact that the town ‘has no long-term liabilities.’ As the rest of the nation’s cities, counties and states lurch into insolvency, Sandy Springs shows a way out.” … The City of Wichita has had success in outsourcing the mowing of parks. Currently, the city has several dozen pieces of commercial mowing equipment at auction.

    States’ war for jobs. Bloomberg Businesweek: “State and local governments eager to recover some of the more than 8 million jobs lost during the recession are giving away $70 billion in annual subsidies to companies, according to calculations by Kenneth Thomas, a political scientist at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. States have long relied on fiscal incentives to lure businesses, or keep existing employers from decamping to other locales. Such largesse is coming under renewed scrutiny during this time of strapped budgets. State deficits could reach a combined $112 billion in the fiscal year starting July 1. ‘The tragic irony of it is that in order to pay for these things, they’re cutting other areas that really are the building blocks of jobs and economic growth,’ says Jon Shure, director of state fiscal strategies for the Washington-based Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. … With the national unemployment rate at 8.8 percent, the threat of a company pulling up stakes is enough to open states’ wallets. ‘States and communities are afraid to play chicken,’ says Jeff Finkle, who heads the International Economic Development Council. … Kansas has offered movie theater chain AMC Entertainment a generous incentives package to move away from Kansas City, Mo., The New York Times reported in April. Officials in Missouri are considering making a counteroffer. Neither the company nor state officials would comment. The bidding war helped prompt an Apr. 5 letter signed by 17 corporate executives asking the governors of the two states to quit offering inducements to lure businesses across state lines. ‘At a time of severe fiscal constraint the effect to the states is that one state loses tax revenue, while the other forgives it,’ the letter said. ‘The only real winner is the business who is ‘incentive shopping’ to reduce costs.’” … Governor Brownback’s economic development plan speaks of “A more uniform business tax policy that treats all businesses equally rather than the current set of rules and laws that give great benefit to a few (through heavily bureaucratic programs) and zero benefit to many.” It will be a while before we know if the state is able to stick to this plan.

    Shale gas to be topic in Wichita. This Friday (may 6) the Wichita Pachyderm Club features Malcolm C. Harris, Sr., Ph.D., Professor of Finance, Division of Business and Information Technology, Friends University, speaking on the topic: “Shale gas: Our energy future?” Harris also blogs at Mammon Among Friends. … “Shale gas” refers to a relatively new method of extracting natural gas, as reported in the Wall Street Journal: “We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag — and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade. I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry — and change the world — in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.” … Critics like the Center for American Progress warn of the dangers: “The process, which involves injecting huge volumes of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground to fracture rock formations and release trapped gas, is becoming increasingly controversial, with concerns about possible contamination of underground drinking water supplies alongside revelations of surface water contamination by the wastewater that is a byproduct of drilling.”

    Economics in one lesson this Monday. On Monday (May 9), four videos based on Henry Hazlitt’s classic work Economics in One Lesson will be shown in Wichita. The four topics included in Monday’s presentation will be The Curse of Machinery, Disbanding Troops & Bureaucrats, Who’s “Protected” by Tariffs?, and “Parity” Prices. The event is Monday (May 9) at 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm at the Lionel D. Alford Library located at 3447 S. Meridian in Wichita. The library is just north of the I-235 exit on Meridian. The event’s sponsor is Americans for Prosperity, Kansas. For more information on this event contact John Todd at john@johntodd.net or 316-312-7335, or Susan Estes, AFP Field Director at sestes@afphq.org or 316-681-4415.

    Voters favor cuts, not tax increases to balance budget. “A survey of Kansas voters conducted on behalf of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce found widespread support for cutting spending rather than raising taxes as the way to balance the Kansas budget. Support was also found for cutting state worker salaries, or reducing the number of state employees.” More at Kansas Chamber finds voters favor cuts, not tax increases to balance budget.

    Here’s the Kansas data. “KansasOpenGov.org provides a repository of data about Kansas state and local governments, giving citizens the data they need to hold officials accountable.” More at Kansas OpenGov: Here’s the Kansas data.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Wednesday May 4, 2011

    Stripper bill III Ric Anderson of the Topeka Capital-Journal looks at some of the issues surrounding the “Community Defense Act,” which applies broad regulation to strip clubs. This year the serious issue of human trafficking has been used to promote this bill as necessary. Anderson pokes some large holes in that argument, most notably: “But if authorities know the problem [underage girls stripping] is happening and also know where it’s taking place, why haven’t they been able to stop it?” … The bill has passed the House but not the Senate. … Beside regulation of behavior inside strip clubs, the bill regulates everyone in a way that is unacceptable: “No person shall establish a sexually oriented business within 1,000 feet of any preexisting accredited public or private elementary or secondary school, house of worship, state-licensed day care facility, public library, public park, residence or other sexually oriented business.” These entities don’t have, and should not be given, the right to choose their neighbors. … House Republicans bucking leadership and voting — correctly — against this bill include Clay Aurand, Mike Burgess, Lana Gordon, Willie Prescott, Charles Roth, Sharon Schwartz, Tom Sloan, Kay Wolf, and Ron Worley.

    Arts Commission funding in. It appears that funding for the Kansas Arts Commission will make its way into the budget that will be presented to Kansas Governor Sam Brownback. Now the governor faces a test: will he use his line-item veto power to cancel this funding? Brownback issued an Executive Reorganization Order that would have killed the commission, but the Kansas Senate, using its power to do so, overrode the order. But with the veto pen, the governor can still accomplish the same effect. See Kansas governor should veto arts commission funding.

    Sunshine needed on public pensions and benefits. Investor’s Business Daily: As debates heat up in states across the country over budget shortfalls, more and more focus is being placed upon the runaway growth in health and pension benefits for state and local government workers. These excessive benefits are a major factor behind the exploding costs of government in many states. It is time to bring these costs under control before they completely overwhelm state and local budgets. … negotiations between governments and public sector unions lack transparency and accountability. Taxpayers are rarely made aware of the costly promises that public-sector unions are able to extract from state and local governments. Politicians often find it easier to reward unions with deferred payments for pensions and health care instead of offering salary or wage increases that appear immediately on the budget. Thus they are able to buy peace today by selling out the future.” … In Kansas, news media and editorial writers don’t help citizens learn the full magnitude of the problem, as few refer to the actual unfunded balance in KPERS, the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System.

    Beyond the debt ceiling headlines. Will the country default on its debt if its ability to borrow more is not extended? Bankrupting America looks at the issue in the video Beyond the debt ceiling headlines. … Cutting spending is the key to avoiding default.

  • KPERS editorial a disservice to Kansans

    A recent Wichita Eagle editorial written by Phillip Brownlee urges caution in proceeding with changes to KPERS, the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System. The editorial has two areas that we should be concerned about, as the facts Brownlee provides leave time for proceeding cautiously. The actual facts leave no such margin for maneuvering.

    Brownlee cites $7.7 billion as the shortfall or unfunded liability in KPERS. This is highly misleading. It’s true on a certain technical level, but on an economic level — meaning what really counts — it is dangerously misleading. Neither Brownlee or the KPERS Fiscal Impact Report he refers to mention $1.7 billion in asset value losses that don’t have to be included in reports. (It’s possible with recent rises in financial markets that some of theses loses have been recouped, but we don’t know that at this time.)

    Additionally, the $7.7 billion figure is based on an unrealistic assumption: that KPERS investments can earn an annual return of 8.0 percent. Since most calculations involving retirement plans involve long periods of time, even a small change in the rate of return can produce some large changes in values. KPERS actuaries say that if the rate of return was 7.5 percent instead of 8.0 percent, that small change would cause an additional unfunded liability of $1.3 billion.

    Adding these factors together — the reported unfunded liability, the unrecognized losses, and a more realistic rate of return — and we come up with an unfunded liability of $10.7 billion. And some would say a 7.5 percent assumed rate of return is too high, which adds even more unfunded liability. For example, the Employees Retirement Income Security Act (ERISA) recommends that private employers assume a 6.1 percent return on assets in private pension plans. And with a note of irony, in illustrations of what benefits from a defined contribution plan would look like, the KPERS report uses 7.0 percent return prior to retirement and 5.0 percent return following retirement.

    Growth over time of contributions at different rates of returnIllustration of how the rate of return impacts the growth of a stream of contributions over time: Small changes in rates produce large differences in ending balances. KPERS uses 8.0 percent in its assumptions, while some authorities recommend 6.1 percent.

    What we’re not facing is the fact that the KPERS unfunded liability is much larger than reported by Brownlee and by most of the other news media in Kansas.

    A second problem is the largely successful attempt by state employee unions to convince Kansans that the KPERS unfunded liability can be paid off only if the present defined-benefit system is maintained. Supporters of the present system say that if a defined-contribution plan is established for new employees, it will be too expensive to pay off the unfunded liability.

    But the fact is that unless the state wishes to renege on its promises, the unfunded liability must be paid off. It doesn’t matter whether it’s paid off as part of a reformed defined-benefit or new defined-contribution plan, or even if the state were to appropriate funds apart from payroll contributions. The bill must be paid.

    And since the Kansas Legislature has shown itself incapable or unwilling to funding the promises it has made, its vital that we stop enrolling new employees in the present defined-benefit plan.

    While the present legislature seems intent on solving the problem, it’s hard to place much faith and trust in their seriousness. Consider the motives and incentives of legislators: If legislators were to give state employees raises, that would require them to raise taxes or cut services. But granting generous retirement benefits is another matter. The bill for these benefits doesn’t come due until many years later — as we are now painfully aware. Except, of course, that the legislature should be paying, on an annual basis, the amount necessary to provide the promised benefits. The Kansas Legislature hasn’t done this for a long time, and that’s part of the reason why KPERS is in a mess.

    Promises by lawmakers to behave well in the future must be discounted. The present defined-benefit retirement plan allows them to make promises they don’t have to pay for. With the discipline of a defined-contribution plan — the 401(k)-type plans that almost all private sector workers have — we don’t have to worry about present legislators heaping debt on yet another future generation.

    Note: Today’s editorial by Brownlee holds this conclusion: “The state may also need to make additional reforms to limit future liabilities for new employees, such as reducing plan benefits or possibly switching to a 401(k)-like plan. Climbing out of this hole will be a struggle. But the sooner the state starts, the better. At the very least, it needs to stop digging the hole even deeper.” Canceling the defined-benefit plan for new employees is the best way to “stop digging.”

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Monday May 2, 2011

    Shale gas to be topic in Wichita. This Friday (May 6) the Wichita Pachyderm Club features Malcolm C. Harris, Sr., Ph.D., Professor of Finance, Division of Business and Information Technology, Friends University, speaking on the topic: “Shale gas: Our energy future?” Harris also blogs at Mammon Among Friends. … “Shale gas” refers to a relatively new method of extracting natural gas, as reported in the Wall Street Journal: “We’ve always known the potential of shale; we just didn’t have the technology to get to it at a low enough cost. Now new techniques have driven down the price tag — and set the stage for shale gas to become what will be the game-changing resource of the decade. I have been studying the energy markets for 30 years, and I am convinced that shale gas will revolutionize the industry — and change the world — in the coming decades. It will prevent the rise of any new cartels. It will alter geopolitics. And it will slow the transition to renewable energy.” … Critics like the Center for American Progress warn of the dangers: “The process, which involves injecting huge volumes of water mixed with sand and chemicals deep underground to fracture rock formations and release trapped gas, is becoming increasingly controversial, with concerns about possible contamination of underground drinking water supplies alongside revelations of surface water contamination by the wastewater that is a byproduct of drilling.” … Upcoming speakers: On May 13, Craig Burns and Glenn Edwards of Security 1st Title Co. on the topic “Real Estate Transactions, Ownership, Title, and Tales From the Trenches.” On May 20, Rob Siedleckie, Secretary, Kansas Social Rehabilitation Services (SRS) on the topic “The SRS and Initiatives.” On May 27, Todd Tiahrt, Former 4th District Congressman on the topic “Outsourcing our National Security — How the Pentagon is Working Against Us”.

    Wichita City Council this week. On Tuesday the Wichita City Council will decide whether to spend $316,000 on capital improvements to the Wichita Ice Center. Improvements will include “HVAC system upgrades, new flooring, signage, interior and exterior painting, upgrades to the locker room facilities, ice skates, and a new point of sale system that will track program revenues and attendance.” This spending was already agreed to in a contract with the new managers of the facility, so approval seems certain. … On the consent agendas one item proposes to spend $36,087 on study, design and bid services to replace the passenger loading bridges at the Wichita airport. In 2003 the city budgeted $4 million for this project, but it was put on hold due to plans for a new terminal building. Now the city wants to go ahead and replace the existing bridges. Being on a consent agenda, this item will receive no discussion unless a council members wants to “pull” it for individual discussion.

    Williams on the role of race in economics. Thomas Sowell reviewing a new book by Walter E. Williams, Race and Economics: How Much Can Be Blamed on Discrimination?: “Walter Williams fans are in for a treat — and people who are not Walter Williams fans are in for a shock – when they read his latest book, Race and Economics. It is a demolition derby on paper, as Professor Williams destroys one after another of the popular fallacies about the role of race in the American economy. … In recent times, we have gotten so used to young blacks having sky-high unemployment rates that it will be a shock to many readers of Walter Williams’ Race and Economics to discover that the unemployment rate of young blacks was once only a fraction of what it has been in recent decades. And, in earlier times, it was not very different from the unemployment rate of young whites. The factors that cause the most noise in the media are not the ones that have the most impact on minorities. This book will be eye-opening for those who want their eyes opened. But those with the liberal vision of the world are unlikely to read it at all.” … An interview with the author is available at Lew Rockwell interviews Walter Williams on his two new books.

    Spending cuts preferred to taxes. A survey of Kansas voters conducted on behalf of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce found widespread support for cutting spending rather than raising taxes as the way to balance the Kansas budget. Support was also found for cutting state worker salaries, or reducing the number of state employees. See Kansas Chamber finds voters favor cuts, not tax increases to balance budget.

    Except some prefer taxes. A coalition of groups is advocating for more revenue so that Kansas government can spend more. Some of the groups in the coalition advocate for those who truly can’t help themselves. But it’s no coincidence that the spokesman for the group is Mark Desetti, who is the lobbyist for Kansas National Education Association (KNEA), the state’s teachers union. Other school spending advocacy groups are prominent members of this coalition. Fortunately, many are starting to realize that the aims of school spending advocates like the teachers unions are not in the best interest of students, as shown below.

    Teacher evaluation systems. Brookings Institution: “Of all the things that are under the control of policymakers and schools, teacher quality is at the top of the list in terms of impact on student achievement, and so there is a great interest in evaluating teacher performance.” Says Russ Whitehurst, director of the Brown Center on Education Policy: “If you’re unlucky enough to get a bad teacher three years in a row, you’re basically ruined — that’s 30 percentile points, it’s hard to recover from that. So we know that teachers are important, and we know that for the first time for reasons other than intuition.” Brookings is working on systems to evaluate the systems that school districts use to evaluate teachers, so that state and federal money can be distributed fairly, as a way to incentivize good teacher evaluation systems. … According to National Council on Teacher Quality, Kansas ranks very low among the states in policies relating to teacher effectiveness. For example, the report states: “Fails to make evidence of student learning the preponderant criterion in teacher evaluations.” … The prospects for reform in teacher evaluation and quality in Kansas are not good. Proposals that would improve Kansas in this regard have not been discussed — at least meaningfully — in this year’s session of the Kansas legislature. For example, this year the Legislature spent quite a bit of time on a policy where the period before teachers are awarded tenure could be increased from three to five years in certain circumstances. This is what qualifies as “school reform” in Kansas. Remember, Kansas ranks very low in policies that promote teacher quality. Tinkering with the policy on teacher tenure is not going to improve our teacher quality, as tenure is a system that ought to be eliminated. In Kansas the teachers union is Kansas National Education Association (KNEA), and it works overtime to block meaningful reform of our state’s schools.

    Misguided efforts to improve capitalism. From Eamonn Butler: Ludwig von Mises — A Primer on how efforts by government to intervene in markets fail: Indeed, our efforts to manipulate the market economy, and make it conform to a particular vision, are invariably damaging. Capitalism is superbly good at boosting the general standard of living by encouraging people to specialise and build up the capital goods that raise the productivity of human effort. But when we tax or regulate this system, and make it less worthwhile to invest in and own capital goods, then capitalism can falter. But that is not a “crisis of capitalism,” explains Mises. It is a crisis of interventionism: a failure of policies that are intended to “improve” capitalism but in fact strangle it. One common political ideal, for example, is “economic democracy” — the idea that everyone should count in the production and allocation of economic goods, not just a few capitalist producers. But according to Mises, we already have economic democracy. In competitive markets, producers are necessarily ruled by the wishes of consumers. Unless they satisfy the demands of consumers, they will lose trade and go out of business. If we interfere in this popular choice, we will end up satisfying only the agenda of some particular political group. A more modest notion is that producers’ profits should be taxed so that they can be distributed more widely throughout the population. But while this shares out the rewards of success, says Mises, it leaves business burdened with the whole cost of failure. That is an imbalance that can only depress people’s willingness to take business risks and must thereby depress economic life itself.

  • Kansas and Wichita quick takes: Friday April 29, 2011

    George Soros: Not just sinister; also stupid. Thomas E. Woods, Jr. gives us another reason to ignore George Soros. Commenting upon an article in which Soros placed Friedrich Hayek in the “Chicago school” of economists, Woods wrote: “If you think Hayek was a member of the Chicago School, you are not entitled to an opinion on matters of economic thought, period. Hayek was of course an Austrian [economist]. The Austrians are not the same as the Chicago economists, differing in method, capital theory, monopoly theory, monetary theory, policy implications, and quite a bit more. … That is a freshman mistake, one that nobody who knew anything about Hayek or either of the relevant schools would have come within a million miles of making.” … An introduction to Austrian economics is Economics for Real People: An Introduction to the Austrian School by Gene Callahan, available to read at no cost.

    Legislators at work for you 372 days a year. At least according to the way their annualized pay is calculated for the purpose of Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS). Mary Clarkin of the Hutchinson News reports on a method of calculating KPERS benefits for legislators that goes out of its way to calculate a large benefit for legislators. For example, legislators, when calculating their salaries for the purposes of KPERS, are treated as through they receive their daily legislative pay every day of the year, and then a few on top of that. Also, their subsistence pay, which is intended to cover the expenses of being in Topeka, is also included in salary calculations.

    Kansas doesn’t benefit from alternative certification. This excerpt from Death Grip: Loosening the Law’s Stranglehold over Economic Liberty by Clint Bolick illustrates the harm that excessive regulation of occupational licensure works against economic freedom and the public schoolchildren of Kansas. “Equally pernicious are teacher certification schemes. As a certified teacher, I can attest that none of my required classroom instruction (all of which was state-required) enhanced my core subject-matter competence. Despite the fact that they often turn out ill-trained teachers, schools of education fiercely defend their monopoly status over teacher certification, resisting alternative certification and entry into teacher ranks by professionals who are demonstrably competent in their subject matter. The scheme ensures that many bad teachers enter the school system while many good teachers are kept out. Licensing is not a proxy for competence, neither in teaching nor in many other professions. However, because licensing typically requires many hours of prescribed training, it is an effective means of limiting entry into professions. Licensing requirements are lucrative for schools that teach the prescribed courses and insulate licensed practitioners from competition. But they result in higher prices and fewer choices for consumers and destroy economic opportunities.” … According to National Council on Teacher Quality, alternative teacher certification policy in Kansas is among the most restrictive in the nation. These policies, as Bolick writes, give the state’s low-functioning schools of education a monopoly over the production of teachers, and deprives schoolchildren of many excellent would-be teachers.

  • KPERS solution not likely this session

    With little time left for the Kansas Legislature to meet this year, and with the budget still not passed, it’s not very likely that action will be taken to reform the Kansas Public Employees Retirement System (KPERS). Especially when there’s a study commission waiting in the wings to take the pressure off lawmakers to take action now. It should be noted that the “best” plan, in terms of making a start on the reforms KPERS needs, still falls short of making the fundamental reforms that are required. Below, Kansas Reporter provides details of the political wrangling.

    Lawmakers spar over Kansas pension proposal

    By Gene Meyer
    April 28, 2011

    (KansasReporter) TOPEKA, Kan. — Kansas House and Senate negotiators offered sharply differing approaches Thursday to one of the biggest changes proposed for the state’s underfunded government employees pensions plans.

    House negotiators, led by state Rep. Mitch Holmes, a St. John Republican and chairman of that chamber’s Pension and Benefits Committee, are adamantly backing a House proposal that would convert what now is a traditional pension plan for Kansas teachers, state employees and local government workers into what’s known as a defined contribution plan for workers hired after July 1, 2013.

    Such plans, including the 401(k) plan versions many private employers offer, provide retiring workers with pools of savings with which to supplement Social Security or other resources, but not guaranteed lifetime pensions. That would limit future exposure of Kansas taxpayers — who pay the employers’ current contributions equal to 8 percent or more of each workers’ salary into the system — to rising pension plan costs. Those costs, according to Kansas Public Employees Retirement Systems projections presented in February, could rise to equal more than 21 percent of some workers’ paychecks in two decades and still leave one group of penson funds, for Kansas teachers, out of balance.

    “What my colleagues in the House, and even some Senators, are telling me is, ‘don’t back down,’” Holmes said after negotiators met Thursday to define the broad outlines of differences between the House and Senate plans.

    “The Senate rejects defined contributions,” said state Sen. Jeff King, an Independence Republican and vice chair of the Senate Select Committee on KPERS, who is leading the Senate negotiators.

    Senate negotiators want a special KPERS commission to study the defined contribution idea along with other potential solutions between now and the end of next year’s legislative session. Critics of the defined contribution proposal worry that such a plan would worsen the cash bind to which KPERS appears to be heading because it would reduce what is paid into the plan for traditional pension benefits current workers would continue to earn for another few decades.

    “Defined contributions are a non starter as far as the Senate is concerned,” King said.

    But that is just for 2013 as the House has proposed, he said; “Everything would be on the table for the study commission.”

    The proposed commission is the brainchild of state Senate President Steve Morris, a Hugoton Republican who Kansas Gov. Sam Brownback last winter named as point man for legislative efforts to deal with the pension funding gap. Brownback has been quoted as saying he thinks some version of a defined contribution plan is inevitable for KPERS, whether it’s a relatively pure version such as private employers offer or a hybrid plan that would include some pension-like guarantees.

    The funding hole that legislators are trying to fill is an officially projected $7.7 billion gap between benefits that KPERS has promised to pay its approximately 250,000 members over the next few decades and the money it is projected to have by then to pay those benefits. Unofficial estimates put the gap in the $9 billion to $12 billion range, based on a combination of lower market level of rates of investment returns than KPERS presumes for planning purposes and longer recovery times that will be needed to recoup market setbacks.

    House and Senate negotiators were agreed Thursday on a few broad ideas for closing the gap. Both broadly agree to offer employees a choice between increasing workers contributions to maintain current formulas for calculating retirement benefits or leaving contribution rates unchanged and reducing the formulas for future benefit calculations. Some of these proposed changes would require Internal Revenue Service approval.

    Both also broadly agree to accelerate the rate at which taxpayer contributions are increased — now capped at 0.6 percent per year — to at least 1.2 percent by 2017.

  • Kansas Chamber finds voters favor cuts, not tax increases to balance budget

    A survey of Kansas voters conducted on behalf of the Kansas Chamber of Commerce found widespread support for cutting spending rather than raising taxes as the way to balance the Kansas budget. Support was also found for cutting state worker salaries, or reducing the number of state employees.

    The survey was conducted on April 21 and 25 by Cole Hargrave Snodgrass & Associates, Inc. of Oklahoma City. 500 registered voters participated. The survey margin of error is given as 4.3 percent. The company says respondents were balanced for geographic region, gender, and partisan registration.

    One question asked respondents’ opinion of the general course of the state: “Generally speaking, do you think that things in Kansas are going in the right direction or do you think that things have pretty seriously gotten off on the wrong track?” 31 percent responded “right track,” while 47 percent said “wrong track” with the remainder undecided.

    As a point of comparison, a recent Rasmussen poll asked a similar question of voters across the country. 71 percent said the country is heading down the wrong track, with 21 percent saying the country is headed in the right direction.

    When presented with the fact that Kansas is faced with a $500 million budget shortfall, 13 percent said the state should raise taxes, 69 percent said to cut spending, and 18 percent were undecided among these options.

    The survey found widespread support for cutting spending across demographic groups. Among self-identified liberals, 56 percent said to cut spending, with 27 percent wanting to raise taxes. Of those in homes with less than $40,000 income, 75 percent said cut spending, with nine percent in favor of raising taxes. For respondents who favored reelecting President Barack Obama, cutting spending was favored by 48 percent, with only 28 percent of those in favor of tax increases. For those who disapprove of the job Governor Sam Brownback is doing, the numbers were similar, with spending cuts favored 43 percent to 33 percent wanting tax hikes.

    The issue of possible pay cuts for state employees has been considered by the Legislature and has been in the news. The survey asked this question with the following results:

    It has been discussed that state employees may be forced
to take a pay cut in order to balance the budget.
Which of the following best describes how you 
think the state deal with this situation?
State emp. salaries should not be cut            13%
State emp. salaries should be cut up to 3%       17%
State emp. salaries should be cut 3 to 5%        16%
State emp. salaries should be cut 5 to 10%        3%
State emp. salaries should be cut more than 10%   2%
Instead of cutting salaries, we should cut the
number of state employees                        31%
Undecided (vol.)                                 18%

    In its analysis of the responses to this question, Cole Hargrave wrote “Kansas voters also demonstrate a desire to make real cuts and are not just reacting with an anti-tax sentiment. When asked about how much the salaries of state employees should be cut, only 13% said they should not be cut. Most remarkable is that 31% of voters said that instead of cutting salaries, the total number of state employees should be reduced. Fully 67% of Kansas voters support either elimination of employee positions are at least a 3% cut.”

    The governor’s budget calls for not filling some 2,000 vacant state jobs.

    The survey also asked about attitudes toward state government competing with private sector provision of a service when the private sector is doing a good job. 73 percent of respondents agreed strongly or somewhat that the state should not compete, with 12 percent disagreeing and 16 percent undecided. The survey did not provide respondents with an example of a competitive situation.

    Respondents showed disapproval of the job President Obama is doing, with 28 percent favoring his reelection, and 57 percent desiring someone else to be elected. Governor Brownback fared better, with 49 percent approving to some degree the job he has been doing. 21 percent disapproved to some degree, with 29 percent undecided.