Voice For Liberty

Tag: Kansas state government

Articles about Kansas, its government, and public policy in Kansas.

  • No Government Trains, Please

    Part of the Wichita Eagle opinion watch series.

    A writer in the April 2, 2008 Wichita Eagle presses the case for passenger train service in Wichita. But there are several problems with the writer’s argument.

    The writer makes this claim: “With Kansas’ vast wind resource, we could power our trains with no fossil fuels.” Yes, there is a lot of wind in Kansas. But it doesn’t blow continuously. What does the writer suggest we power the trains with at those times? Until there is an economically feasible method of storing the electricity generated by wind, we will be reliant on traditional methods of power generation. Wind can only be a supplement.

    The writer admits that high-speed passenger train service will require a lot of public money. That’s okay, he says, as we presently spend a lot on our roads and traffic systems. The government-built and owned roads are frequently criticized, however. The fact that we’ve spent a lot on them — with often unsatisfactory results — is not an argument in favor of more government involvement in transportation systems. There is, in fact, a small movement towards more private highways, and there are persuasive arguments that all roads and highways should be privately owned.

    If there is in fact a demand for high-speed rail travel in Kansas and the United States, let private entrepreneurs, rather than government, lead its development. That’s the best way to have a system that meets the needs of customers, rather than the needs of politicians and government bureaucrats.

    I wonder if the writer remembers that the government does have a track record of owning and operating a railroad. That’s Amtrak, and having mentioned that, I believe no more needs to be said.

  • Americans For Prosperity Hot Air Tour in Wichita

    On May 1, 2008, the Americans For Prosperity Hot Air Tour made its stop in Wichita, Kansas. It was too windy for the big hot air balloon (who could have guessed that might be the case in the Kansas springtime?) but the speakers spoke as planned, and that’s the important part of this event.

    Some photos that I took may be viewed here.

    Some of the material from AFP:

    Climate alarmists have bombarded citizens with apocalyptic scenarios and pressured them into environmental political correctness. It’s time to tell the other side of the story.

    Climate Schemes Mean Higher Taxes

    • A cap-and-trade system would amount to a $1.19 trillion tax hike over the next ten years, according to the Congressional Budget Office.
    • Energy taxes would drive gas over $8.00 per gallon and more than double electricity bills, according to a study by the American Council for Capital Formation.
    • Revenue from energy taxes or permit sales will be used by bureaucratic central planners to pick politically-favored but horribly ineffective alternatives, like ethanol.

    Cap-and-Trade is a Massive Job-Killer

    • The hundreds of billions of dollars of economic activity destroyed by the cap-and-trade tax scheme translate into millions of lost jobs for American workers.
    • We would trade millions of productive private sector jobs, for a smaller number of jobs created by a government regulatory scheme.

    Climate Alarmism Threatens Freedom

    • The inevitable result of energy regulation is centralized control of the economy and our lives. The government has already banned incandescent light bulbs even though replacements, compact fluorescent bulbs, contain toxic mercury.
    • California wants to place radio control devices in thermostats so the government can set the temperature in homes and businesses.
    • Higher energy costs will increase the price of any product that is transported to market; these effects will ripple through the economy. Food prices have been especially hard hit, with milk prices up 20% in the last year.
    • State climate panels want to return to 55 MPH speed limits.

    Radical Proposals will have Very Little Impact

    • Cap and trade policies are already failing to reduce CO2 emissions in Europe. In fact, emissions covered under their legislation in Europe have gone up according to the think tank, Open Europe.
    • Even if the cap and trade scheme actually reduce emissions in the United States – despite failures in Europe, climate models show that the reductions would have an impact of approximately 0.1 degree Celsius in the year 2100.

    Low-Income Families will be Hit Hardest

    • Low-income families pay a much larger share of their income on goods that will be affected by these policies.
    • Higher energy and food prices are a genuine hardship for low-income Americans, even if they are an affordable indulgence for Al Gore, who already spends tens of thousands of dollars on his home energy bills.

  • Universal Preschool Wastes Money, Imperils the Good Society

    From our friends at the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy in Wichita, Kansas.

    Universal Preschool Wastes Money, Imperils the Good Society
    Short-term benefits, politicization of childhood await public funding

    (WICHITA) – If K-12 schools fail to graduate one in four students on time, does it make much sense to enroll children in public programs at an even younger age? That’s one problem with proposals for universal, taxpayer-funded preschool, as outlined by a new report issued by the Flint Hills Center for Public Policy. Read “Plato’s Republic on the Plains: Should Kansas Really Embrace State-Financed Early Childhood Education?” at www.flinthills.org.

    “On the one hand, you’ve got to applaud the desire to ‘do something’ to improve education,” says John R. LaPlante, Education Policy Fellow of the Kansas-based think tank. “But what we see is that the longer children stay in school, the worse off they do. We should fix the K-12 system through competition and expanded school choice rather than enroll infants and toddlers in public programs that are often run through those same schools.”

    The study reviews the weaknesses of reports used to justify universal preschool programs, including methodological shortcomings. The benefits seen in preschool programs tend to be focused in lower-income children and fade out in a short time-hardly a prescription for a universal program.

    In addition to experimental and economic problems, universal preschool poses a moral question: Do children belong to parents or do they belong to society and the state? Plato called for some children to be reared not by parents but by the collective. The impulse to use government to fix children’s lives for the societal good may have at first a moral foundation, but it violates foundational truths about American society and the meaning of limited government.

  • Hugging Casinos and Banning Power Plants in Kansas

    From Denis Boyles’s column at Kansas Liberty, calling the consistency and judgment of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius into question (admittedly, a small task):

    If there are at least some scientific studies that show gambling’s bad for you, and none that show that carbon dioxide’s bad for you, why is the governor of Kansas hugging casinos and banning power plants?

    Read the entire column here: Feedlot Environmentalism.

    By the way, the new book Superior, Nebraska: The Common Sense Values of America’s Heartland by Denis Boyles is wonderful. I recommend it to all with an interest in Kansas politics.

  • Kansas must change its judicial selection method

    From our friends at Kansas Liberty:

    The Kansas Supreme Court is a private club filled with people you’ve never heard of until they pass some tax you have to pay or invent some law you don’t want. There is a way to fix this, but you won’t like it, says Denis Boyles.

    Read the full story at Kansas Liberty.

    Professor Stephen J. Ware of the Kansas University School of Law writes this in a Lawrence Journal-World editorial:

    What makes the Kansas Supreme Court selection process unusual is not that it’s political, but that it gives so much political power to the bar (the state’s lawyers). Kansas is the only state that gives its bar majority control over the commission that nominates Supreme Court justices. It’s no surprise that members of the Kansas bar are happy with the current system because it gives them more power than the bar has in any of the other 49 states and allows them to exercise that power in secret, without any accountability to the public.

    His research paper may be read by clicking on www.fed-soc.org/kansaspaper.

  • Holcomb, Kansas Coal Plant Water Usage in Perspective

    An argument opponents of the proposed Holcomb Station coal-fired electricity generation plant make is that its water usage is excessive and will lead to, depending on who is speaking, little water left for other uses. Even drinking water, according to some critics, could be threatened.

    Together, the proposed plants will use 16,000 acre-feet of water — about 5.2 billion gallons – annually. While that seems like a tremendous amount of water, especially in dry western Kansas, we should put that water usage in context before making judgments.

    According to the Kansas Water Office, in 2006, 3,496,586 acre-feet of water was used to irrigate 3,066,602 acres, a rate of 1.14 acre-feet of water per acre. In Finney county, where the Holcomb plant is located, water use for irrigation is a little higher. The average usage for 2002 to 2006 was 1.31 acre-feet per acre.

    Using the Finney county rates, we find that the 16,000 acre-feet of water usage by the proposed power plants is enough to irrigate 12,215 acres of crops.

    While 12,215 acres of crops may seem like a lot, Finney county alone had 227,297 acres under irrigation in 2006. So the water usage by the proposed plants amounts to 5.4% of just Finney county’s water use for irrigation. For the entire state of Kansas, it’s less than one-half of one percent of the water used for irrigation.

    So while 5.2 billion gallons of water seems like a lot, it’s not much more than a few drops in the bucket, figuratively speaking, of water use for irrigation in Kansas. The economic value of the electricity the Holcomb plant expansion will generate, however, is large.

  • Franking Abuse by Kansas Democratic Legislative Leadership

    The Kansas Meadowlark reports on Franking Abuse by Kansas Democratic Legislative Leadership:

    Recently both the Kansas House Minority Leader, Dennis McKinney, and Kansas Senate Minority Leader, Anthony Hensley, abused their nearly unlimited budget to mail items to Kansas voters. These mailings had less to do with helping inform constituents about what is going on in the Kansas legislature, and more to do with getting certain Democrats re-elected this year.

    A reliable source tells the Meadowlark that House Minority Leader Mckinney will reimburse the State for postage for his recent mailings. However, the Senate Minority Leader has not made a pledge to repay taxpayers for his franking abuse, even though taxpayers paid a hefty sum for his recent needless mailings.

    Actual amounts for these mailings will be published here when available.

    Read the entire story here at The Kansas Meadowlark website: Franking Abuse by Kansas Democratic Legislative Leadership

  • Open records in Kansas follow-up

    I have been recruited to participate in the Sunshine Blogger Project, an effort to gauge the compliance of the nations’ governors with open records laws as they exist in each state. I wrote about my experience with the office of Kansas Governor Kathleen Sebelius in this article: Open Records in Kansas.

    The letter I received from JaLynn Copp, the Assistant Chief Counsel to Governor Sebelius, was so confusing that I wrote back requesting clarification. I had to communicate this request by writing on the processed fibers of dead trees, which were then delivered to Topeka by carbon-spewing trucks operated by the United States Postal Service, as Ms. Copp did not share an email address with me.

    My records request had specifically asked that the email records I was requesting be delivered to me electronically. That seemed to make a lot of sense, as email is nothing if not electronic. But the governor’s office won’t comply with that request.

    The governor’s office, legitimately, must review the emails to determine whether any fall under the exceptions to the open records act. The office will do that by reading the emails on a computer. Then, if an email is judged not to fall under one of the exemptions, it will be printed and sent to me, at a cost of $.25 per page.

    There seems to be no interest at the governor’s office in providing the records in any other form. I could wind up spending thousands of dollars to print thousands of pages of spam.

    The Wichita Eagle wrote a story about this, and a few of the comments left by readers on the newspaper’s website were alarming. One comment read: “The request was irresponsible! If there was a legitimate need for particular information, that would be one thing, but to demand all of the emails the Governor received across any given four days is ludicrous, and wasteful. … If there was a specific issue needing verified or researched, and a public need or good, then the fees would be onerous.”

    I might ask this writer these questions: Who determines what qualifies as a “legitimate need?” How would I know if there was a specific issue needing research, without seeing all the emails? Should we rely on government agencies to judge which records will satisfy our interests?

    Another reader left a comment that made a charge of hypocrisy for the media wanting government records to be open, but refusing to open their own records. This reader has forgotten the difference between the government and a private institution.

  • KanView: A New, Online Database of Revenues and Expenditures in Kansas

    The Kansas Meadowlark reports on the debut of Kanview, and wonders “Why did the Kansas press give this new information resource such little coverage?”

    Read the excellent report at http://www.kansasmeadowlark.com/2008/03-02/index.htm.