What would we do without politicians’ help? Whether they are members of Congress, state legislators, mayors or prosecutors, our politicians are selfless public servants willing to do whatever it takes to solve any problem we might have in our homes or our neighborhoods.

Take Shelby County Prosecutor Bill Gibbons for instance. Gibbons was briefly a Republican candidate for governor, but he dropped out of the race early – probably because he had more important problems to tackle – a dangerous crime wave by Tennessee four-year-olds.

Click here to read the entire “Ralph Rant.” Then, catch Tennessee Center for Policy Research president Justin Owen on Ralph’s show this Thursday morning at 8:08 am to discuss our state’s pre-K crime problem. You can listen live at this link.

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“We are extremely proud of Justin’s work to advance liberty and limited government in Tennessee,” said TCPR Chairman John Cerasuolo. “He is the right person to lead this organization at a time when those principles are under attack on multiple fronts.”

Owen has served as acting executive director since the departure of Clint Brewer in June, who became the political editor of the Tennessean. In his new role, Owen will be charged with expanding TCPR’s influence as the state’s leading voice for free market policy solutions.

“I am honored to take the reins of a growing organization at this crucial time. I look forward to fighting for Tennesseans’ right to earn an honest living and provide for their families without onerous government interference,” said Owen.

Aside from managing the day-to-day operations of the organization, Owen will continue to represent TCPR on television and radio, and will maintain his regular guest columns in newspapers across the state.

Owen obtained his law degree from the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law at the University of Memphis and his undergraduate degree from Middle Tennessee State University. In addition to his work at TCPR, Owen serves on the board of the Nashville Junior Chamber and is a Young Leaders Council board intern with Junior Achievement of Middle Tennessee. He was also recently profiled as a “Nashville Rising Star” by the Tennessean.

TCPR is an independent, nonprofit, and nonpartisan organization committed to providing free market solutions to public policy issues in Tennessee. Through research, advocacy, and investigative reporting, TCPR advances ideas grounded in the principles of free markets, individual liberty, and limited government.

###

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by Justin Owen

You know how to tell when people really want something? They are willing to pay full value for it. This holds true for most goods and services, but not for high-speed rail.

While calls for laying new track across America are robust, the future riders of these trains are not the ones leading the charge. That’s because there just aren’t that many future rail riders, just like there aren’t that many now.

Look at the new cries to build a high-speed train between Atlanta and Chattanooga and eventually on to Nashville. Proponents argue that we need to force people out of their cars by offering them alternative forms of transportation such as train travel. The only problem is that no one wants to pay the full price to climb aboard. That is precisely why those that yearn for rail transit need taxpayers to foot a significant portion of the bill in order to turn their dream into a reality.

Unlike most other modes of transportation, rail transit relies heavily on government subsidies. Contrary to the claims of rail transit advocates, subsidies received by other forms of travel pale in comparison to trains.

The subsidy per 1,000 passenger miles for rail transit is a whopping $166. Conversely, air travel subsidies are a meager $4.23 for the same passenger miles traveled. Automobile travel actually brings in money, because highway funding received from gasoline taxes paid by automobile drivers is frequently diverted to non-automobile and even non-transportation purposes.

In fact, motorists pay the bulk of transit subsidies. About 75 percent of all federal rail transit subsidies come from automobile drivers, with general taxpayers covering the rest.

As the facts clearly show, the high cost of rail transit, which most riders refuse to pay themselves, has to come from taxpayers’ pockets even if they are not riding. It’s unsurprising, then, that the Georgia Department of Transportation is seeking $34 million from the federal government to pay for the Atlanta-Chattanooga-Nashville rail line.

This is in addition to the $14 million already secured from Washington for the project by U.S. Rep. Zach Wamp of Chattanooga. And it’s likely nowhere near the total amount the project will cost taxpayers before the first train ever leaves the station.

A good comparison to the Atlanta to Nashville excursion would be Amtrak’s “Lincoln Service” line between Memphis and St. Louis. The 284-mile train ride costs $80 and takes more than seven hours. Driving the same distance would take under four hours, with gas costing less than half the price. Even after heavy subsidies, train ticket prices rival the high cost of flying, while often taking longer to make the trip than driving. Thus, even after millions of taxpayer dollars are dumped into the proposed high-speed rail project, most people will still choose to fly or drive.

The main problem with the proposed rail line is that it—like every other rail transit system in America—is based on a “build it and they will come” premise. But unlike in Field of Dreams, Shoeless Joe Jackson won’t be showing up. Nor will anyone else.

The few riders that do climb aboard will only do so because their fellow taxpayers will be paying most of their fare.

Justin Owen is the acting executive director at the Tennessee Center for Policy Research, an independent, nonprofit and nonpartisan research organization.

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2. Public Transit Proves Costly to Taxpayers and the Environment
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“No one likes what has happened to our economy recently, but we should never forget that wealth is created by individuals and businesses — not government. Our systems of economic freedom, innovation and entrepreneurship will continue to generate powerful, long-term growth — as long as we don’t mess it up.”

Read the entire article, titled “Let the free market live,” on the City Paper website.

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invites you to join us as we welcome Mr. Joe Scarlett to our Board of Directors

featuring Fox News contributor and managing member of Capitalist Pig hedge fund

Jonathan Hoenig

“End Business as Usual: Stand Up and Defend Free Markets”

Wednesday, September 22, 2010
6:30 p.m.

Hampton Inn & Suites-Green Hills
(2324 Crestmoor Road, Nashville)

While it is free to attend, space is limited, so please RSVP to Suzanne Michel at (615) 383-6431 or suzanne@tennesseepolicy.org by Monday, September 20th.

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by Elizabeth Cook

As sum­mer comes to an end, stu­dents across Ten­nessee are head­ing off to their first day of school. This year, many par­ents will be send­ing their chil­dren to pre-kindergarten for the first time, as Gov. Phil Bre­desen announced on Aug. 3 that preschool pro­grams are now avail­able — on a vol­un­tary basis — in all of Tennessee’s 95 counties.

Soon, this may also be the case nationally.

Pres­i­dent Barack Obama has pledged $10 bil­lion toward early child­hood edu­ca­tion. Many cit­i­zens con­sider uni­ver­sal pre-K a great accom­plish­ment, but Amer­i­cans should not be so quick to embrace the idea. Pre-K sim­ply does not live up to its hype and may even pro­duce harm­ful results.

This is not to argue against the well-being of Amer­i­can chil­dren, nor is it an argu­ment against pub­lic edu­ca­tion — the value of which is undeniable.

It is easy to see why, at first glance, many Amer­i­cans judge pre-K pro­grams to be wholly ben­e­fi­cial. How­ever, uni­ver­sal, insti­tu­tion­al­ized pre-K pro­grams are not the solu­tion they claim to be.

A 2010 report on Tennessee’s pre-K pro­gram, recently released by the Comptroller’s Office of Research and Edu­ca­tion Account­abil­ity, rein­forced pre­vi­ous years’ con­clu­sions: Pre-K has no long-lasting effects on stu­dent aca­d­e­mic performance.

Although pre-K seems to lead to some pos­i­tive effects on stu­dent per­for­mance in kinder­garten and first grade, this occurs, to quote the study, “pri­mar­ily among eco­nom­i­cally dis­ad­van­taged students.” Fur­ther­more, “by sec­ond grade, the dif­fer­ence between pre-K stu­dents and a rea­son­ably com­pa­ra­ble group of non-pre-K stu­dents is negligible.”

This means that after a few years of school­ing, there are no iden­ti­fi­able dif­fer­ences in aca­d­e­mic per­for­mance between stu­dents who did and did not attend pre-K. So while some argue that pre-K pro­grams offer long-term ben­e­fits to soci­ety, in real­ity the pro­gram does not offer chil­dren any sig­nif­i­cant advantage.

Not only is the pro­gram a waste of tax­payer funds, pre-K may neg­a­tively affect chil­dren who enroll. For exam­ple, a 2007 study by the National Insti­tute of Child Health and Human Devel­op­ment con­cluded that chil­dren who attended pre-K were more likely than chil­dren who did not to engage in bul­ly­ing and aggres­sion through the sixth grade. Also, will pre-K soon become manda­tory, like kindergarten?

Although atten­dance is not cur­rently oblig­a­tory, if past prece­dent tells us any­thing, it may very well soon be. As par­ents feel social pres­sure to enroll their chil­dren in these pro­grams rather than keep them at home, fam­i­lies lose the oppor­tu­nity to impart their cul­tural iden­ti­ties, val­ues and morals on their chil­dren, which could have very real consequences.

In addi­tion, tax­pay­ers, already shelling out more than $83 mil­lion a year on pre-K, will be on the hook for even more funding.

Edu­ca­tion reform should con­cen­trate on rem­e­dy­ing our nation’s fail­ing K-12 pub­lic school sys­tem, rather than expand­ing it by adding pre-K pro­grams. Uni­ver­sal pre-K merely bur­dens this already-stressed system.

Spend­ing bil­lions of tax­payer dol­lars to pro­vide stu­dents with one addi­tional year of school­ing before dump­ing them into fail­ing schools does no good at all.

Eliz­a­beth Cook is a research asso­ciate at the Ten­nessee Cen­ter for Pol­icy Research, an inde­pen­dent, non­profit and non­par­ti­san research organization.

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by Dr. Richard Grant

“That which gets mea­sured, gets man­aged,” is a com­mon apho­rism taught to man­agers. It cer­tainly does help in many cases to be able to gauge one’s progress toward a goal and to com­pare that to what is done. Per­ceiv­ing a link between one’s actions and the results is a pos­i­tive guide and motivator.

A dark corol­lary to this apho­rism might be stated, “That which gets mea­sured, gets man­aged even when you don’t want it to be.” This often hap­pens in cor­po­ra­tions and admin­is­tra­tive bureau­cra­cies but is par­tic­u­larly glar­ing in the use of macro­eco­nomic data.

Data, such as gross domes­tic prod­uct and unem­ploy­ment rates, are arbi­trary in their con­struc­tion and never bet­ter than esti­mates of amor­phous con­cepts. But their real prob­lem arises when they are politi­cized and mar­ried with the dubi­ous the­o­ries of wannabe eco­nomic planners.

When politi­cians imag­ine that con­sump­tion is too low to sup­port their desired level of GDP growth, the result is “stim­u­lus” spend­ing, explod­ing bud­get deficits, arti­fi­cially low inter­est rates, and sub­si­dies for com­pa­nies and projects that waste resources. Need­ing a quick fix before an elec­tion, politi­cians and their advis­ers imag­ine that they can micro­man­age the macroeconomy.

Since the col­lapse of the post-war, fixed exchange rate mon­e­tary sys­tem in the early ’70s, the Inter­na­tional Mon­e­tary Fund has tried to jus­tify its exis­tence by act­ing as the com­piler of inter­na­tional eco­nomic sta­tis­tics and dis­penser of advice.

Recently the IMF sug­gested that the People’s Repub­lic of China should main­tain “the fis­cal stim­u­lus through 2010 while, on the mar­gin, reori­ent­ing fur­ther toward fis­cal mea­sures that will spur con­sump­tion.”
China’s GDP growth rate has tended to be in the high sin­gle dig­its and was 11.1 per­cent in the sec­ond quar­ter of 2010. That’s not reces­sion, but appar­ently the IMF imag­ines that growth should be faster or that it might slow with­out gov­ern­ment tak­ing on more spending.

The IMF wants Chi­nese pri­vate con­sump­tion to increase in order to achieve “a more bal­anced econ­omy” but never spec­i­fies exactly what a “more bal­anced” econ­omy is. If the stan­dard is the same as that exhib­ited by the Obama admin­is­tra­tion, then no level of con­sump­tion is high enough. If we don’t spend, then the gov­ern­ment will try to spend for us — or despite us.

Even the big-spending Bush (II) admin­is­tra­tion wanted Chi­nese res­i­dents to spend more, but at least Pres­i­dent Bush revealed his true motive of pro­mot­ing U.S. exports.

Those who mar­vel at high Chi­nese growth rates should con­sider the link between that and the high level of sav­ings and investment.

China pros­pers as its econ­omy is freed rel­a­tively from gov­ern­ment con­trol and inter­fer­ence. China is still under­de­vel­oped, but its growth rate has soared as own­er­ship and decision-making have been decentralized.

Chi­nese com­mu­nists could not ignore the les­son pro­vided by Hong Kong as it grew from post-war poverty to the top tier of pros­per­ity in just a few decades. As a British colony with not much of an econ­omy after the Japan­ese occu­pa­tion ended, Hong Kong escaped the atten­tion of the social­ist plan­ners that were unleashed on the United King­dom itself.

Sir John Cow­perth­waite, who was the finan­cial sec­re­tary of Hong Kong from 1961 to 1971, resisted requests from White­hall bureau­crats for eco­nomic data. When later asked what his best reform was, he replied, “I abol­ished the col­lec­tion of sta­tis­tics.” Cow­perth­waite knew the dan­ger of hand­ing such sta­tis­tics to social engineers.

Hong Kong had vir­tu­ally no restric­tions on trade, min­i­mal reg­u­la­tion, and a flat per­sonal income-tax rate of 15 per­cent. Cowperthwaite’s pol­icy of “pos­i­tive non-intervention” con­sisted of ensur­ing that gov­ern­ment did very few things, but did them well. The peo­ple were free to pro­duce, trade, and pros­per — which they did. By the end of British rule, Hong Kong had a per capita income that was slightly higher than Britain’s.

Hong Kong might never again have another John Cow­perth­waite, and it will decline accord­ingly. The United States could do worse than copy Cowperthwaite’s exam­ple, and it has.

Richard J. Grant is a pro­fes­sor of finance and eco­nom­ics at Lip­scomb Uni­ver­sity and a scholar at the Ten­nessee Cen­ter for Pol­icy Research. His col­umn appears on Sun­days.

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by Justin Owen

Over the past year, President Obama has sought to take on yet another sector of the economy: energy. The overreaching goal of what has become known as cap-and-trade legislation is to place a price on carbon, making it easier for government to tax and regulate emissions.

Facing a tough election cycle and growing public opposition to more regulation and taxation, Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid recently abandoned the grand energy scheme in favor of a less comprehensive bill. Although cap-and-trade has lost its vigor, the watered-down plan poses its own threats.

Reid’s new bill increases the oil spill liability faced by companies from $75 million to $10 billion and imposes new safety requirements on oil rigs. It also provides homeowners with a financial “incentive” to adorn their homes with energy efficient products.

Lifting the economic cap on oil spill liability is inherently free market, though in this case it amounts to nothing more than shallow political retaliation. Right now, companies like BP are only on the hook for $75 million regardless of the damage they cause, leaving taxpayers to foot the rest of the bill in catastrophic situations. If BP and other companies cause severe economic damage, taxpayers should not be forced to bail them out. That said, the measure will likely force out smaller oil companies unable to afford insurance to cover their vastly expanded liability. Some experts estimate this could lead to 289,000 lost jobs over the next five years.

The new drilling regulations will undoubtedly drive up oil prices by entangling companies in unnecessary red tape. It could also propel oil companies to relocate their rigs elsewhere around the world, making the U.S. even more dependent on foreign oil.

Offering homeowners incentives to buy energy efficient products resembles the recently expired first-time homebuyer tax credit. To recover from a housing bubble prompted by lenders giving loans to people who had no business buying homes, the government spent billions of dollars encouraging home ownership by people, many of whom still had no business buying homes.

Government incentives alter consumer demand, almost always to those consumers’ detriment. They also favor certain manufacturers over others, inhibiting competition, the cornerstone of any free market.

Despite the new scaled-back approach, cap-and-trade might not be gone for good. The Environmental Protection Agency has asserted its authority to regulate carbon emissions even without official congressional action.

The new plan also doesn’t mean that Reid & Co. have forever abandoned more comprehensive energy legislation. When Democrats lose their unchecked command of Congress in November (they’re likely to lose the House and will almost certainly fail to retain enough Senate seats to overcome a filibuster), they will be determined to spend the waning days of the session ramming through legislation.

Many predict that Democrats will reserve this lame duck session for a full-scale assault on the energy industry. Between Democrats who lived to fight another day and those who were just handed the pink slip, congressional leaders may be able to muster the votes they currently lack to pass cap-and-trade before the new Congress takes over.

Nonetheless, cap-and-trade’s election-induced coma is at least a temporary victory for those interested in less government. It’s not, as some progressives shriek, a sign that big business has flexed its muscle. Recall that the very target of Reid’s new bill — BP — supported cap-and-trade, as did other energy companies. Of course, their incentive was not to “be green,” but rather to hamstring their chief rival, the coal industry, as well as to benefit from massive government subsidies.

If anything, the fact that cap-and-trade has been placed on life support is a sign that collusion between big business and big government doesn’t always prevail over the will of the American people.

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