Fixing Government in California, and Elsewhere
California's budget troubles are the most well-known among the states. In the spirit of "As California goes," the Golden State may point the way back to fiscal health in other states. The Performance Institute and the Reason Public Policy Institute have collaborated to produce a Citizens' Budget. It's lengthy (150 pages), and not all of it will apply elsewhere. But it's worth looking at if you are interested in budget issues.
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Leaving Your Car in Idle: A Punishable Offense
Here's a policy question that's unique to the colder sections of the country: should you be punished for letting your car idle, warming up on cold winter days? Some cities make this an offense; Superior, Wisconsin, for example, hands out a $100 fine.

The sheriff for Ironwood ("Big Snow") County, Michigan related to a local newspaper columnist that "if his deputies enforced such a nuisance violation here, he'd never be re-elected, and could possibly be tarred and feathered."

The reasoning is fine: if you leave your keys in the car, you are increasing the risk that your car will be stolen. Asking the police to track down the car in that situation is asking the taxpayers to pay for your own carelessness. So perhaps there should be a way to discourage this practice. Perhaps imposing a fine if your car is stolen would work better, since there is no demand on the public purse if the care isn't stolen--and then the theft is reported.
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Using Credit Scores for Insurance Rates is a Good Thing
... so argues Brooke Leslie Rollins, who comments on a proposal in Texas to ban the use of credit scores in insurance underwriting.
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Education Reform in Illinois Avoids the Obvious
Governor Rod Blagojevich is set to lay out a variety of initiatives in education policy. He gets one part of the diagnosis right: "Forty percent of the third-graders in Illinois today can't read at the third-grade level. Something ain't working." But what about his solutions? Taxpayers should give students one book a month (from what funds?). Mandatory volunteerism (ponder that for a moment) as a condition of obtaining a high school diploma. Put the governor in charge of the State Board of Education. The best idea he offers it to hire more reading specialists--though if they are locked into failed methods, that's just going to be more wasted money.

One interesting proposal: spend a few million dollars on a new initiative to stem the number of students dropping out of school. What's interesting is not the plan itself, but the fact that it would be carried out by the Department of Human Services rather than the Department of Education.

The governor also plans to call for centralization of school purchases, as a cost-savings move.

The biggest improvements in education will probably come from things that are not in the governor's agenda, however: making it easier for mid-career professionals to enter the teaching profession, overhauling the certification process, enacting merit pay, and increasing the meager scope of school choice in the state.
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Michigan Officials Plan for the Worst
While planning for the FY 2005 budget, Michigan officials expect the initial shortfall to be at least $800 million. Jennifer Granholm is resigned to more cuts in spending. But she also says "At some point there's nothing left to cut."

Yes, at some point there is. But the state is hardly at the point, when it is still in the business of operating amusements (two state fairs) and subsidizing industry (the blob known as MEGA, various promotional boards for agriculture), among other things. There's also plenty of room for smart changes to government functions.

UPDATE: Patrick Anderson, principal of Anderson Economic Group, said that the state has many hard choices ahead. ""We didn't do anything of any significance for a whole year. The fact is, we did not address the major structural problem." I don't know if Anderson wants to say that the state ought to re-do its tax system to take in more money. He could just as easily--and in my book, more correctly--say that the state ought to re-do its spending system, by doing less with less.
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Pity Ohio. The Sky is Falling
There's an effort to repeal last year's increase in the state sales tax, and it's leading to an interesting intra-party squabble. In this case, it's the Republicans who are, by and large, the party of tax increases. The Buckeye Institute has some observations.
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Free Speech Allows Prisoners to Taunt Victims' Families
It's bad enough to lose a family member to a murderer. But now, thanks to the Internet, at least one death row inmate has a platform for writing about his deeds--and publishing to the world. Says the mother of one victim, "I'm mad as hell. Those people don't even have a right to speak my name or my child's name. There's got to be a way to keep them from funneling this stuff out of prisons."

Prisoners don't necessarily have net access themselves; rather, they can send these missives--which include lines such as "I would do the whole thing again knowing death row was waiting for me"--to friends outside the prison, who then post them on web sites.

The ACLU argues, and at least one judge has agreed that this is an exercise of free speech.

This makes speech codes on the outside even more twisted and wrong.
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Unemployment Insurance Creates Unemployment: A New Twist
That's the conclusion of the American Institute for Full Employment. The basic premise, of course, is that when people have unemployment insurance payments to fall back on, they face an incentive to be less diligent in searching for a job. In short, people are more likely to find a job when their payments are about to run out.

In their most recent newsletter (not yet online), the AIFE makes a different, more subtle argument against the current system of unemployment insurance.

• Some businesses have only seasonal or cyclical needs for some employees. They will lay off employees in down times. Examples include food processors and construction firms.


• These firms must offer employees higher wages, to make up for the unstable nature of the work.


• Thanks to unemployment insurance, being laid off is less traumatic.


• Unstable employers, as a result, don't have to boost their wages as much as they would have to absent unemployment insurance.


• Employers pay risk-adjusted premiums for unemployment insurance, but the premiums are subject to floors (beyond some point, you can't be such a stable employer that your premium disappears) and ceilings (at some point, it doesn't matter how many more people you lay off--the premium won't go up any further.)

The result of all this? Somewhere from "20 to 30 percent of all temporary layoffs are caused by the unemployment insurance system itself. At the depths of recession, as much as half of all temporary layoffs may be caused by the system's distortion of the normal disincentive to have layoffs."

The institute calls for the elimination "of the tax ceilings and floors" on premiums, as well as individual accounts for unemployment insurance.
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Is Chicago is the Capital City of Illinois?
Capital cities are sometimes the largest cities of the states, but usually not. Some are reasonably close to the state's largest city--think of Lansing, Mich, or Madison, Wisc, or St. Paul, Minn. Others are far away: Sacramento, Calif., or Albany, New York. Others are small towns far from the largest population center(s) of the state. Jefferson City, Missouri, is one. Springfield, Ill., is another.

Now, residents of Springfield, as well as people in what may called "the government industry" (government officials, lobbyists, etc.) are debating whether the de facto capital of Illinois is now Chicago. The reason: heavy amounts of within-the-week commuting by top brass between the nation's 3rd largest metro area and its 168th. This article in Springfield's largest newspaper brings up some interesting questions about finding the right talent to run government agencies, accessibility (for various groups and people), government as an employer, patronage, and other questions.
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