December 2005
Dec. 29, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 26, 2005)Ham by the gallon?
The idea last legislative session was simple.
In Kansas, gasoline is gasoline.
The idea was that Kansas service stations, or filling stations, didn’t have to--as a consumer information item—label pumps to tell consumers that the fuel included ethanol, the corn- or wheat- or milo-based ingredient that is supposed to be good for the environment and good for farmers by providing a new use for their crops.
There had been motorists who didn’t want ethanol for one reason or another, and by removing the stickers on the pumps they couldn’t tell whether the gas had ethanol in it or not. It was supposed to be good for the farmers lawmakers wanted to help. It really didn’t, but it helped sales of ethanol and that was close enough.
So, for the past six months or so in Kansas, gasoline is just gasoline, and what else is in it isn’t really any business of the consumer.
Well, that worked out. And all along the supply chain from oil wells to the ethanol production plant to the place where the gasoline is mixed with ethanol and sent to y our local filling station, there were tax breaks.
While farmers didn’t notice a sharp rise in prices for their crops because it was going to be an ingredient of our gasoline and consumers never knew who was getting the advantage of those federal and state tax breaks, it became clear that a “gas is gas” presumption didn’t provide any benefit at the pump nozzle. In fact, for most of the fall, gas stations that sold ethanol-laced gasoline had maybe seven cents, maybe a dime a gallon, in lower costs than stations that sold just straight gasoline.
But, the signs all up and down the streets of Kansas showed fuel usually within a penny or two a gallon whether it was gasoline or ethanol-blended gasoline.
All those tax breaks really never got down to the folks standing beside their cars or trucks filling it up with fuel. If gas is gas, we never knew whether our station was making about the usual amount of profit, or whether it was making a premium profit based on lower costs of gasohol.
Hmmm…
It makes you wonder why the average motorist should care one way or another whether he’s getting gasoline or gasoline/ethanol blends if the price is the same at the pump. Sorta reminds you of ham. If the Legislature passed a law that said grocery stores didn’t have to mention if water was added to hams--or how much--we figure that stores would be selling hams in milk cartons so you could just pour them.
Not having enough information is a problem for consumers; it removes their ability to make choices.
But, back to gas. A legislative committee is going to take a look at ways to make the numerous tax breaks that never show up at the pump somehow show up at the pump.
Wanting to encourage ethanol use, legislators last session took away the only way most of us have to know whether we’re actually buying the product or not. Oh, and because ethanol is no longer mentioned on most gas pumps, motorists couldn’t intentionally increase demand for ethanol, which might have spurred higher crop prices for farmers.
Now, if consumers could save five or 10 cents a gallon by buying ethanol, they probably would. Which means the Legislature might take a look next session at some way to move the tax breaks for ethanol from the businesses to the consumers where it will spur demand.
Or, we guess, they could just remove the “water added” label from hams, too, so we could start buying ham by the gallon…
Dec. 22, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 19, 2005)It's for the veterans
The Legislature in its upcoming session is going to consider legislation that probably is OK, but just doesn’t feel quite right.
And that’s one of the times that what will actually turn out to be a relatively picayune little bill is going to either be quietly passed or serve as the fulcrum for some moral/ethical discussion.
Here’s the issue. Some employees of the Kansas Commission on Veterans’ Affairs receive a stipend from two veterans’ groups, the Veterans of Foreign Wars and the American Legion. That’s in addition to their state pay for their jobs in providing assistance and such for veterans.
State law is very clear that state employees aren’t supposed to receive or accept non-state compensation for work that they do as a part of their 40-hour work week job assignments. The Governmental Ethics Commission in September was asked about that VFW/American Legion subsidy and flatly said that those Commission of Veterans Affairs employees can’t accept it.
There are many reasons, of course, that the state and probably its citizens don’t want state employees receiving outside compensation for doing their jobs. We’re thinking, of course, of law enforcement people who we don’t want accepting "tips" from people whose weaving cars they stop on the streets and bank examiners who ought not to get stipends from the banks that they regulate. That’s just two examples; you can think of more.
Taking money from veterans’ organizations for doing what the state pays the employees to do anyway doesn’t seem right. The intentions are good, of course, everybody wants veterans to get all the services and all the assistance that they are due. That’s a cultural thing in Kansas. We support veterans who served the nation.
No question there, but it adds a cultural element, a patriotic element, to the issue.
But…the Commission on Veterans Affairs employees work for the state and either the state pays those employees enough money to work for the state or it doesn’t. If the Legislature has a real interest in helping veterans, it ought to pay the people who do that a fair salary. If the salary isn’t fair and Veterans Affairs employees need the veterans’ groups’ stipends to make a reasonable living, then the state really isn’t all that concerned, is it? Or, maybe the state is concerned about the welfare of veterans only if it can do it on the cheap.
Practically, the issue just never came up until the Veterans Affairs executive director posed the question to the Ethics Commission, and got the unpleasant answer.
But the issue is alive now and is going to have to be dealt with. It’s probably one of those questions that was better-left un-asked, but it’s there now.
The simplest answer, of course, is what is being suggested to the Legislature, that it just exempt the Veterans Affairs folks from the law that the rest of the state’s employees have to live by. It’s the cheapest solution, and, well, it has a lot of the same ring that has been used to sell programs to the state for several years. Just bend "it’s for the children" into "it’s for the veterans" and you have what is probably a politically sellable slogan.
You have to feel a little uncomfortable about those people who work for the Commission on Veterans Affairs, whose lives and probably house and car payments are suddenly dragged into public view. They were just doing their jobs to assist veterans we all want them to help. It is a little unpleasant, we expect, to be suddenly injected into a legislative decision.
We’ll see how the Legislature deals with the issue. It’s one of those issues, a small one, of course, but one that raises questions.
Dec. 15, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 12, 2005)The earth will shake
Expect the earth to shake slightly across Kansas on Jan. 4.
The shudder will start in the morning in the Kansas Statehouse. By mid–afternoon, most of the state will have felt it.
What’s the quake about? It’s when the Kansas Division of Legislative Post Audit presents the results of two audits on public schools in Kansas. One audit will demonstrate and pin down in hard numbers how wisely school districts are spending state money to provide state-mandated programs for schoolchildren. The other will speculate on how much money the state should be spending to produce the smartest schoolchildren it can.
That first audit is a hard paper trail. The second is more speculative. Look for the first audit to create a rattling that will be heard from border to border.
Key is that Post Audit folks, well, they’re auditors, so they are going to be looking at the most efficient, lowest-cost way to provide the education that state law and the fiats of the State Board of Education require. The upshot of that audit will demonstrate how efficient schools spend money to provide the classes and progress and programs that law requires.
Now, it’s going to be complicated because school districts vary widely in size, in class size, and in the cost per pupil to provide education. That’s understandable. If a teacher can teach 20 children, say, long division, but there are only five children in the class because there just aren’t that many children available to teach, that teacher is probably teaching well, just not at peak efficiency.
Post Audit figured a way to compensate for that, by creating hypothetical school district sizes and numbers of pupils that ought to about cover the spectrum from big to little school districts.
But what’s going to be the shocker is that Post Audit isn’t going to compare district spending, and decide that the spending per program at the 50th percentile (half spend more, half spend less) is the ideal. Instead, Post Audit is basing its findings on spending at the 33rd percentile.
That’s probably more shocking than it appears, but probably also very reasonable. If school districts that spend less on a state-required program get the job done, then they’ve done an exemplary job.
Unfortunately, it’s also going to create more "losers" than winners. Which means many legislators are going to have to go home and tell their school folks and constituents that their districts are spending too much on programs. Hmmm...if about a third of districts spend some amount of money on programs, and about two-thirds spend more, well, there’s going to be more bad news for districts...
The targets that audit is going to set will be debated, of course, but Post Audit essentially will be setting the bar on spending for programs that school districts are required by law to provide.
Along with that bar, the audit will determine how much state money is needed if districts are to efficiently provide an education...and the presumption is going to be that the state will have met its responsibility for funding education if the amount of state dollars handed to school districts covers the tab. Inefficiencies? Those can be made up with local taxpayer dollars, that Local Option Budget.
Look for some legislators to make the case that if school districts were very efficient, they’d have enough state-provided dollars that they might not need a Local Option Budget, or maybe just a smaller local property tax levy for schools.
All of a sudden, for at least some legislators and for school districts across the state, the earth begins to shake just a little.
Dec. 8, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Dec. 5, 2005)High ground?
What if, among the turmoil, debate and acrimony over elementary and secondary schools in the upcoming session, someone came up with just one school-related issue that nearly everyone could agree on?
What if, somewhat out of the mainstream battle over whether schools get too much money or not enough money or just aren’t spending their money right, there was an issue that dealt with schools that seemed so logical, so basic, that whoever proposed it gets to claim the moral high ground and use that popular advantage to color other public school proposals?
Well, that’s a possibility in the 2006 Kansas legislative session.
What’s that out-of-the-mainstream concept? Obscenity in public schools, from kindergarten through high school graduation. There is a group that is against obscenity in public schools, and yes, obscenity is one of those squishy concepts–hard to define, but you know it when you see it sort of thing.
Kansas Republicans are considering a plank in the party platform that would prohibit obscenity in K-12 schools, basically by repealing a statutory defense for persons charged with promoting obscenity to minors if the obscene material is presented as part of a school course.
That statute was probably enacted in an academic freedom debate, in which in more moderate times, Kansas legislators decided that it’s probably not going to rend the moral fiber of Kansas students to see a bare-breasted statue or read a relatively adult-nuanced novel to get an understanding of art.
But, the law applies from kindergarten through college, and while there’s not a lot of racy show-and-tell going on in elementary and secondary schools, a majority of Kansans would probably figure that any—at least at public schools—is too much. Kids can wait for college, or at least until they’re out of the house for that sort of stuff, many Kansans would probably agree.
So, is obscenity in K-12 schools a big deal? Not really. There have been some parent groups primarily in Johnson County that have challenged including some coming-of-age books in classes and whether those books belong in public school libraries.
The parent groups have been overridden by school officials. By the way, it’s relatively easy to take one page out of nearly any book, decorate a few passages with one of those yellow highlighter pens, and out of context, make whatever is yellow-tinted look inappropriate for schoolchildren.
But that’s the real world. While few people are going to read those books, the concept of obscenity is bigger and nastier, and brings to mind all sorts of things that you don’t want a child or grandchild to be bringing home from school, or explaining at the dinner table.
It turns into one of those questions where a lot of Kansans are going to decide, well, there probably isn’t a lot of obscene material being taught in elementary and secondary schools, and some of it might be artistic or something, but just to be on the safe side, let’s not allow it. It’s like snakes. You can live a long healthy life by not sorting out the good ones from the bad ones, but just staying away from all of them.
What’s worth watching is whether those anti-obscenity folks really have to make much of a case about just how much obscenity there is in elementary and secondary schools, and whether they can generate the political heat over it to make those who don’t see it as a big deal look, well, soft on obscene material purchased with tax dollars and shown to children.
If that happens, then the moral conservatives get listened to on other education issues ranging from funding to vouchers to... whatever.
Dec. 1, 2005
(Distributed to Kansas newspapers Nov. 28, 2005)Republican enough?
Kansas Republicans, already in a bunch of interesting little fights over whether you have to be solidly pro-life, anti-stem cell, maybe even pro-creationism to be a Real Republican, are quietly working on a party platform plank that will finally, irrevocably split the party into two groups.
The platform plank? It’s essentially a signature line, on which candidates running for public office as a Republican have to pledge to support every last sentence of whatever platform the party adopts at its January Republican State Committee meeting.
If social conservatives in the party have their way--and there is a decent chance they will--it means that you are either a Real Republican or something less–what the conservatives call a "RINO" or Republican In Name Only.
The key will be whether conservatives on the state party’s governing committee can actually get that language into the platform.
Party platforms are generally not well read, or read at all by the general public, many of whom are Republicans because their parents are or their friends are or because they can hum along with the basic themes of the party: lower taxes, less government, less government intrusion to individual lives, and that sort of thing.
Party platforms are generally considered a buffet. You don’t have to pledge to believe everything, but if you agree with most of the array of political positions set out there, you can consider yourself a Republican. You can skip the creamed corn and still be a Republican.
But what if that changes?
What if, say, a candidate running as a Republican doesn’t agree with every plank of the party’s platform?
Well, then they are not really full-immersion Republicans, say some conservatives, and shouldn’t be campaigning as members of the Republican Party.
That might be a real problem for Republicans. See, most members of the Republican State Committee who will vote on the party platform aren’t seeking elective office and many never have or will.
They got on the policymaking committee because they were active in their local Republican organizations, but most haven’t had to face an opponent and woo large numbers of the public in order to take office. There are probably lots of leaders of the Elks Lodge or Junior League or the Shrine who are adept politicians at something quite a bit smaller and more intimate than a public election. Those are essentially the people who will be writing and adopting the platform for the Republican Party. (Oh, and the same goes generally for Democrats, too.)
But if the party platform becomes the litmus test for whether one is a Republican or not, well, it’s going to cause a lot of angst. The Secretary of State’s office, where candidates for public office register their candidacies, doesn’t have a rule about just what makes a Republican or a Democrat. You choose, and if you’re not registered with another party, you are, for purposes of getting on the primary election ballot, whatever you say you are. Nobody at the Secretary of State’s office is going to conduct a quiz for candidates to see if they are true believers or not.
Which means conservative Republicans who want all their candidates to believe in every word of the party platform are going to see a lot of candidates on the ballot who don’t. And nobody’s going to put an asterisk beside the name of a "RINO" on the primary election ballot.
Republicans might actually fracture their party over something that the majority of Republican primary voters won’t ever see or hear about. And what if a "RINO" makes it through the primary and gets on the general election ballot? What are Real Republicans to do then? Refuse to vote?
The generally not-a-big-deal Republican Party platform might just become a big deal.