Author: Bob Weeks

  • WichitaLiberty.TV November 17, 2013

    In this episode of WichitaLiberty.TV: Mary Theroux, who is Senior Vice President of The Independent Institute, stopped by the WichitaLiberty.TV studio to talk about a new book about her father. The book’s title is “Willard Garvey: An Epic Life,” referring to the well-known Wichita businessman. He was an influential figure in Wichita, and his business interests spanned the globe. Episode 20, broadcast November 17, 2013. View below, or click here to view at YouTube.

    Additional video about this book:
    Willard Garvey: An Epic Life from KAKE-TV “This Week in Kansas”
    Maura McEnaney on Willard Garvey at Wichita Rotary Club

  • Kansas school logic, Goddard-style

    Goddard logic school employment

    Fiscal 2010, according to figures from Kansas State Department of Education, was the recent low in school funding for Goddard, reflecting spending cuts made during the recession of the Sebelius/Parkinson era. Since then, in actual dollars, this has happened:

    State aid per pupil increased from 6,343 to 7,260.
    Federal aid per pupil declined from 720 to 269.
    Local aid per pupil increased from 3,650 to 4,813.
    Total spending increased from 10,713 to 12,342.

    Data from KSDE also shows that the Goddard school district has increased the number of teachers and other certified employees in recent years, and the corresponding ratios of these employees to students has fallen.

  • Wichita economic development, a few issues

    wichita-chamber-commerce-2013-11-05What should we conclude when the incoming chair of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce uses the threat of moving his company out of Wichita to extort tax breaks from the Wichita City Council?

    What lesson should we learn when the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce is likely to recommend higher taxes for Wichitans, but its incoming chair asks to be excused from paying these taxes?

    What example do we establish when the incoming chair of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce asks for tax breaks on office space he will rent, thereby giving him an advantage over other downtown landlords that do pay their full share of taxes?

    Should we ask how Wichita Mayor Carl Brewer will achieve his goal of building the tax base when people ask to be excused from contributing to that base?

    These are some of the issues the council should weigh tomorrow. For more on this matter, see In Wichita, the case for business welfare.

  • Common Core Standards explained

    Dr. Mary Byrne discusses the background, development and implementation of Common Core State Standards at a recent event in Wichita. View below, or click here to view in HD at YouTube.

  • In Wichita, the case for business welfare

    Wichita City HallOn Tuesday the Wichita City Council will consider granting an exemption from paying property and sales tax for High Touch Technologies, a company located in downtown Wichita. Let’s take a look at some of the aspects of this company’s application and the city’s agenda packet material (available here).

    In its application letter, High Touch argues as follows (emphasis added):

    To demonstrate our commitment to Wichita, as well as accommodate our expected growth plans, High Touch Technologies would like to purchase a 106,000 sq. ft. building in Downtown Wichita.

    At this time, High Touch Technologies is requesting your support for the issuance of approximately $2,000,000 City of Wichita, Kansas, Taxable Industrial Revenue Bonds. High Touch greatly appreciates any support we can receive on the purchase of this office building through the City’s participation of Industrial Revenue Bonds and the property tax savings associated with this financing method. We intend to continue our growth and expansion over the next several years and these benefits would be helpful in offsetting the substantial capital requirements associated with this project.

    High Touch Technologies believes in Wichita and support the community and its economy through corporate stewardship programs. We look forward to working with you and Members of the Council on this project and are always available to answer questions regarding this project or any of our business activities.

    Later in the letter:

    The applicant agrees to enter into an agreement for Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT) equal to the ad valorem property tax payment amount for the 2013 tax year. The applicant respectfully requests that the payments be capped at that rate for a period of ten (10) years. The tax abatement will permit the applicant to proceed with the anticipated project, allow for its anticipated growth, and result in the public benefits otherwise outlined herein.

    The issuance of Industrial Revenue Bonds will be used to lower the cost of office space in the acquired building. The lower costs will give High Touch, Inc. incentive to grow its presence in the corporate office in Wichita. New employees will be added to this Wichita office instead of other offices across the U.S. The savings in office space will allow High Touch, Inc. to use those savings for expansion.

    Some remarks:

    To demonstrate our commitment to Wichita: This is ironic because High Touch is asking to be excused from paying the same property taxes that most other people and business firms have to pay. Instead of commitment, this demonstrates hostility to the taxpayers of Wichita, who will have to pay more so that this company can pay less.

    helpful in offsetting the substantial capital requirements: Well. Who wouldn’t appreciate help in offsetting the cost of anything? I think we can categorize this as unpersuasive.

    corporate stewardship programs: Underlying this argument is that because High Touch makes charitable contributions, it should be excused from the same tax burden that most of us face. Here’s a better argument: Be a good corporate citizen by paying your fair share of taxes, don’t ask the city government to force be to subsidize your business, and let me make my own charitable contributions.

    answer questions regarding this project or any of our business activities: This refers to how the members of the city council will make a judgment that this business is worthy of subsidy, and that others may not be. The notion that the City of Wichita can decide which companies are worthy of tax exemptions and investment is an illustration of what economist Frederich Hayek called a “conceit.” It’s so dangerous that his book on the topic is titled “The Fatal Conceit.” The failure of government planning throughout the world has taught that it is through markets and their coordination of dispersed knowledge that we learn where to direct capital investment. It is simply impossible for this city government to effectively decide which companies Wichitans should invest their tax dollars in. It will still make that decision, however.

    Payment in Lieu of Taxes (PILOT): High Touch is not proposing to totally escape its tax burden. Only partially so, through the PILOT. But the proposed payment is quite generous to the company. A few quick (and probably incorrect) calculations shows how small the PILOT is compared to what taxes would be. City documents indicate the proceeds of the IRBs will be used to pay for $2,000,000 of improvements. This amount of commercial property times 25% assessment ratio times 120.602 mill levy rate equals $60,301 in taxes. High Touch, through the PILOT, is proposing to pay $33,250, just a little more than half of what the taxes might be.

    But the true value of the taxes being avoided is probably much higher. As an example, nearby office space is listed for sale at $28 per square foot, and that’s a distress-level price. Applying that price to this building, its value would be almost $3 million. If we look at market capitalization rates, which are generally given as from nine to eleven percent for class A space, we arrive at a much higher value: If we say $10 per square foot rental rate times 106,000 square feet at nine percent cap rate, the value would be almost $12 million. Taxes on that would be about $300,000 per year.

    These are back-of-the-envelope calculations using assumed values that may not be accurate, but this gives an idea of what’s actually happening in this transaction: High Touch is seeking to avoid paying a lot of taxes, year after year.

    payments be capped at that rate for a period of ten (10) years: High Touch proposed that what it’s paying in lieu of taxes not be subject to increases. Everyone else’s property taxes, of course, are subject to increases due to either assessed value increases or mill rate increases, or both. High Touch requests an exemption from these forces that almost everyone else faces.

    lower the cost of office space: Again, who wouldn’t enjoy lower business or personal expenses? The cost of this incentive spreads the cost of government across a smaller tax base than would otherwise be, raising the cost of government for almost everyone else.

    added to this Wichita office instead of other offices across the U.S.: The threat of relocation or expansion elsewhere is routinely used to leverage benefits from frightened local governments. These threats can’t be taken at face value. There is no way to know their validity.

    use those savings for expansion: Implicit in this argument is that Wichita taxes prevent companies from expanding. True or not, this is a problem: If taxes are too high, we’re missing out on economic growth. If taxes are not too high, but some companies seek exemption from paying them nonetheless, that’s a problem too.

    A prosperous company, establishing the template for seeking business welfare

    In a December 2011 interview with the Wichita Eagle, the High Touch CEO bragged of how well the company is doing. The newspaper reported “Ask Wayne Chambers how business is, and he’s going to tell you it’s good. Very good. … Chambers said this week that after two years of robust growth, he’s looking for another one in 2012. ‘We have every reason to believe we’ll continue that growth pattern,’ he said.”

    In February 2013 the Wichita Business Journal reported “It should be a great year for High Touch Inc. That’s the initial prediction of CEO Wayne Chambers, who says actions the company took during and leading up to 2012 have positioned High Touch to become a true ‘IT solutions provider.’”

    If we take Chambers at his word, why does High Touch need this business welfare? Economic necessity is usually given as the justification of these incentives. Companies argue that there is no way the proposed investment is economic without taxpayer participation and subsidy. I don’t see this argument being advanced in this case.

    Wichita and peer per capita income, Visioneering

    Interestingly, Chambers is currently co-chair of Visioneering Wichita, which advocates for greater government involvement in just about everything, including the management of the local economy. One of the benchmarks of Visioneering is “Exceed the highest of the annual percentage job growth rate of the U.S., Omaha, Tulsa, Kansas City and Oklahoma City.” As shown in this article and this video, Wichita badly lags the nation and our Visioneering peer cities on this benchmark. Visioneering officials didn’t want to present these results to government officials this year, perhaps on the theory that it’s better to ignore problems that to confront them.

    Now Chambers is slated to be the next chair of the Wichita Metro Chamber of Commerce. It’s quite likely that the Chamber, under his leadership, will soon recommend that Wichitans pay higher sales and/or property taxes to support the Chamber’s goals.

    These are the same taxes that Chambers’ company is asking to be excused from paying. Will this blatant cronyism be the template for next year’s management of economic development in Wichita? Let’s hope not, as the working people of Wichita can’t tolerate much more of our sub-par economic growth.

  • Government-funded arts, again

    city-council-chambers-sign-smallWith the Wichita City Council pondering the future of Century II, it’s time to take a look at the desirability of government-funded convention centers and arts.

    Convention centers, as shown in Should Wichita expand its convention facilities?, are losers as far as providing economic benefit to the cities that build them. Government, too, ought to stay out of the funding and management of arts, if it respects its citizens.

    Reading between the lines, it seems like the fate of Century II is sealed. I’d say its future is dim, as hinted at in this material from the agenda packet for Tuesday’s meeting of the city council:

    Century II, a multi-purpose convention and performing arts venue was originally completed in 1969, with convention space added in 1985. Century II has served the community well and has provided a venue for a wide variety of events. The building is beginning to show signs of being outdated, as well as losing some of its functionality as a convention center due to the changing needs and requirements of convention clientele, causing the need for a planning and design study to determine current and future feasibility of possible renovations.

    On Tuesday the council will consider spending up to $240,000 on what is described as “the initial phase of the design study.” We can anticipate that this contract will eventually cost much more.

    Why does government feel it must provide arts to its citizens? The arguments that supporters of government-funded art use generally fall into two categories: That arts funding is good economics, and that since arts are good for life and culture, government must be involved.

    The economic case for government art funding

    Supporters of government art funding make the case that government-funded art is good for business and the economy. They have an impressive-looking study titled Arts & Economic Prosperity III: The Economic Impact of the Nonprofit Arts and Culture Industry in the State of Kansas, which makes the case that “communities that invest in the arts reap the additional benefit of jobs, economic growth, and a quality of life that positions those communities to compete in our 21st century creative economy.” Its single greatest defect is that it makes a simplistic and naive analysis of government spending.

    As an example, the report concludes that the return on dollars spent on the arts is “a spectacular 7-to-1 return on investment that would even thrill Wall Street veterans.” It hardly merits mention that there aren’t legitimate investments that generate this type of return in any short time frame. If these returns were in fact true and valid, we should invest more — not less — in the arts. But as we shall see, these returns are not valid in any meaningful economic sense.

    Where do these fabulous returns come from? Here’s a passage from the report that government art spending promoters rely on:

    A theater company purchases a gallon of paint from the local hardware store for $20, generating the direct economic impact of the expenditure. The hardware store then uses a portion of the aforementioned $20 to pay the sales clerk’s salary; the sales clerk respends some of the money for groceries; the grocery store uses some of the money to pay its cashier; the cashier then spends some for the utility bill; and so on. The subsequent rounds of spending are the indirect economic impacts.

    Thus, the initial expenditure by the theater company was followed by four additional rounds of spending (by the hardware store, sales clerk, grocery store, and the cashier). The effect of the theater company’s initial expenditure is the direct economic impact. The subsequent rounds of spending are all of the indirect impacts. The total impact is the sum of the direct and indirect impacts.

    This is all true. But there’s a problem with this reasoning. It ignores the unseen effects of economic action. What the authors of this study fail to see is that anyone who buys a gallon of paint for any reason sets off the same chain of economic activity. There is no difference — except that a homeowner buying the paint is doing so voluntarily, while an arts organization using taxpayer-supplied money to buy the paint is using someone else’s money.

    When the theater company spends $20 of taxpayer-provided money to buy paint: Where did that $20 come from? Isn’t it possible that a homeowner might have bought the same gallon of paint, but now is not able to because he must pay taxes to support the theater company? It’s easy to see the theater production with its taxpayer-funded painted set. It’s not easy to see the house that sits unpainted for a year to pay for the theater company’s paint. That is the seen and unseen.

    The study also pumps up the return on government spending on arts by noting all the other spending that arts patrons do on things like dinner before and desert after arts events. But if people kept their own money instead of being taxed to support the arts, they would spend this money on other things, and those things might include restaurant meals, too. People would spend their money as they think best benefits them, not how someone else thinks they should.

    This report — like most of its type that attempt to justify and promote government “investment” in someone’s pet program — focuses only on the benefits without considering secondary consequences or how these benefits are paid for. Henry Hazlitt, in his masterful book Economics in One Lesson explains:

    While every group has certain economic interests identical with those of all groups, every group has also, as we shall see, interests antagonistic to those of all other groups. While certain public policies would in the long run benefit everybody, other policies would benefit one group only at the expense of all other groups. The group that would benefit by such policies, having such a direct interest in them, will argue for them plausibly and persistently. It will hire the best buyable minds to devote their whole time to presenting its case. And it will finally either convince the general public that its case is sound, or so befuddle it that clear thinking on the subject becomes next to impossible.

    It is, as Hazlitt terms it, “the special pleading of selfish interests” that drive much of the desire for government spending on the arts. Government-funded arts advocates can promote their case with economic fallacies all they want, but in the end that’s what their case relies on: “the special pleading of selfish interests.”

    Government art means, well, government art

    Is anyone else offended, as I am, that government taxes us to provide for us the art that politicians, bureaucrats, and their sycophants think we should consume? What type of personality feels entitled to forcibly make these personal decisions for others?

    Arts organizations need to survive on their own merits. They need to produce a product or service that satisfies their customers and patrons just as any other business or human endeavor must. This is especially true and important with something so personal as art. David Boaz, in his book The Politics of Freedom: Taking on The Left, The Right and Threats to Our Liberties writes this in a chapter titled “The Separation of Art and State”:

    It is precisely because art has power, because it deals with basic human truths, that it must be kept separate from government. Government, as I noted earlier, involves the organization of coercion. In a free society coercion should be reserved only for such essential functions of government as protecting rights and punishing criminals. People should not be forced to contribute money to artistic endeavors that they may not approve, nor should artists be forced to trim their sails to meet government standards.

    Government funding of anything involves government control. That insight, of course, is part of our folk wisdom: “He who pays the piper calls the tune.” “Who takes the king’s shilling sings the king’s song.”

    IMG_1956

    Government art. Is this not a sterling example of an oxymoron? Must government weasel its way into every aspect of our lives? And the fact that government arts funding means tax dollars taken through coercion — don’t the government arts promoters realize this? How better to crush the human spirit — the same spirit that the arts are meant to uplift and enrich.

    The more important to our culture we believe the arts to be, the stronger the case for getting government out of its funding. The “leveraging” or “seed” effect of government money is why. In a statement opposing the elimination of the Kansas Arts Commission in 2011, executive director Llewellyn Crain explained that “The Kansas Arts Commission provides valuable seed money that leverages private funds …”

    This “seed money” effect is precisely why government should not be funding arts. David Boaz explains:

    Defenders of arts funding seem blithely unaware of this danger when they praise the role of the national endowments as an imprimatur or seal of approval on artists and arts groups. Jane Alexander says, “The Federal role is small but very vital. We are a stimulus for leveraging state, local and private money. We are a linchpin for the puzzle of arts funding, a remarkably efficient way of stimulating private money.” Drama critic Robert Brustein asks, “How could the [National Endowment for the Arts] be ‘privatized’ and still retain its purpose as a funding agency functioning as a stamp of approval for deserving art?” … I suggest that that is just the kind of power no government in a free society should have.

    We give up a lot when we turn over this power to government bureaucrats and arts commission cronies.

    Government arts funding means that artists and arts organizations are distanced from their customers. Instead of having to continuously meet the test of the market, they must please government bureaucrats and politicians to get their funding. Instead of producing what the great unwashed mass of people want, they produce what they think will get government funding.

    Without government funding, organizations that provide culture and art will have to satisfy their customers by providing products that people really want. That is, products that people are willing to pay for themselves, not what people say they want when someone else is paying the bill. With government funding, these organizations don’t have to face the discipline of the market. They can largely ignore what their customers really want. They can provide what they think their customers want, or, as I suspect is the case, what they believe the people should want, if only we were as enlightened as the elitists that staff arts commissions.

    Without the discipline of the market, arts organizations will never know how their customers truly value their product. The safety net of government funding allows them to escape this reality. We have seen this many times in Wichita and Sedgwick County, as organizations fail to generate enough revenue to cover their costs, only to be bailed out by the government. Other businesses learn very quickly what their customers really want — that is, what their customers are willing to pay for — or they go out of business. That’s the profit and loss system. It provides all the feedback we need to determine whether an organization is meeting its customers’ desires. The arts are no different.

    Some say that without government support there wouldn’t be any arts or museums. They say that art shouldn’t be subject to the harsh discipline of markets. Personally, I believe there is little doubt that art improves our lives. If we had more art and music, I feel we would have a better state. But asking government commissions to judge how much art and which art we should have is not the way to provide it. Instead, let the people tell us, through the mechanism of markets, what art and culture they really want.

    It might turn out that what people want is different than from what government arts commission members believe the people should want. Would that be a surprise? Not to me. In the name of the people, we should disband government arts councils and government funding and let people decide on their own — without government intervention — how to spend their personal arts budgets on what they really value.

    (The material by David Boaz is from a speech which may be read here: The Separation of Art and State.)

  • Kansas school spending, by district

    visualization-example-smallThere’s new data available from Kansas State Department of Education on school spending. I’ve gathered the data, adjusted it for the consumer price index, and now present it in this interactive visualization.

    For each school district (and state totals) you can see the trend in each of the three sources of school funding (state, federal, and local) along with the total. A few observations:

    State aid per pupil for 2013 ($6,984) is approximately the same as it was in 2006 ($6,941). (All figures are inflation-adjusted, per pupil.)

    Total spending per pupil for 2013 ($12,781) is higher than it was in 2007 ($12,991).

    You may use the visualization below, or click here to open it in a new window, which may work better.

    Data is from KSDE; visualizations created by myself using Tableau Public.