Last year, the D.C. City Council threatened to impose regulations that would have effectively barred Uber, the popular sedan-hailing car company, from the D.C. market. In a surprising show of candor, the proposed legislation admitted that the goal was to ensure that the politically powerful taxi lobby didn’t lose any business. Public reaction was swift and negative and the council eventually relented, letting Uber into the market.

While many were celebrating, I played the part of the skeptic, noting that Uber’s gain seemed to have come at the expense of other start-up transportation companies. Writing in the Washington Examiner, I noted:

But when you dig into the legislation, it appears that the council earned Uber’s praise by — you guessed it — finding a way to privilege Uber. That’s because the legislation mandates that “public vehicles-for-hire using a digital dispatch service shall be licensed.”

As tech reporter Ryan Lawler points out, the licensing requirement erects a barrier to entry for other businesses. SideCar, for example, is a West Coast service that, according to its website, “instantly connects people with extra space in their cars with those who need to get from one place to another.” It is, they say, “like a quick and hassle-free carpool.” Since these instant carpoolers are obviously not licensed, they’d be illegal in DC. That’s handy for Uber. The company managed to cross the regulatory velvet rope and, alongside taxis, obtain access to a lucrative market. But once inside, Uber put the rope back up.

I’m sorry to say that my skepticism was warranted. This morning, WAMU’s Martin Di Caro reported:

The commission that regulates all vehicle-for-hire services in the District of Columbia once again finds itself at odds with a tech start-up.  After battling the sedan service Uber in 2012 before creating a sedan class license to allow the company to operate legally in the District, the Taxicab Commission has notified SideCar management that its drivers may not pick up passengers in D.C. without the proper licenses and vehicle tags.

“Individuals who join this rideshare operation must be licensed taxicab or limousine drivers in the District of Columbia and must have vehicles that have L tags,” said Commission Chairman Ron Linton.

You can listen to the full story here.

When scandals erupt, the human tendency is to look for some nefarious person wearing a black hat and blame them. However psychologically satisfying this may be, it is not particularly helpful. It offers no constructive solution to avoid future problems, other than to be “ever-vigilant” against bad behavior.

In contrast, law professor Victor Fleischer’s take on the unfolding IRS scandal is a nice example of a more-useful reaction, one that focuses on the institutional factors that made the scandal likely to happen in the first place:

The root of the problem is poor institutional design, not a political conspiracy. Current law forces the I.R.S. to enforce a vague set of campaign finance laws that have next to nothing to do with raising revenue.

It is constructive to apply Fleischer’s approach to another unfolding scandal. In the past few weeks, the press has reported that the FBI is investigating Virginia Governor McDonnell for his ties to a major donor, Jonnie Williams. Williams, described by McDonnell as a close family friend, paid for the food at McDonnell’s daughter’s wedding reception and loaned the first family his fancy sports car for a day. In the last few years, the governor and the first lady seem to have given Williams’s company, Star Scientific, free promotion. For example, in August of 2011, McDonnell appeared at an event promoting Star Scientific at the Executive Mansion. And in June of 2011, the first lady flew to Florida to tout the company’s product, a dietary supplement.

The inquiry apparently began out of concern for the possibility of a quid pro quo: perhaps the governor and the first lady offered this free promotion in exchange for political and personal favors? For their part, the governor and first lady have maintained that it is their job is to promote Virginia businesses.

Indeed, the state legislature seems to think this is part of the governor’s job. Over the years, legislators have given the governor a host of tools to offer exclusive privileges to particular businesses. For example, the Governor’s Opportunity Fund “is a discretionary incentive available to the Governor to secure a business location or expansion project for Virginia.” There’s also the Governor’s Agriculture and Forestry Industries Development Fund. This too gives grants “at the discretion of the Governor.” You can read about these and other programs at the “business incentives” section of the Virginia Economic Partnership website. There, you will see that privileges include subsidies, matching grants, in-kind donations such as training, corporate and individual income tax credits, sales and use tax exemptions, property tax exemptions, and various financing programs. (In the case of Star Scientific, the governor seems not to have availed himself of any of these programs. Instead, he and his wife seem to have simply talked favorably about the company, just as they frequently talk favorably about other Virginia businesses.)

Presumably legislatures give governors the authority to grant special favors to firms because they believe these favors benefit the state. But the evidence that targeted incentives lead to any sort of widespread prosperity is quite scant. And as my research has emphasized, privileges lead to a host of economic problems because they undermine competition, encourage wasteful privilege-seeking, and put politicians rather than consumers in charge of allocating capital and resources.

But the Virginia story illustrates another cost of privilege: it inevitably invites questions of impropriety. The fact is, it is very difficult to devise objective criteria for dispensing privileges to particular firms. So one doesn’t have to look very hard to find apparently subjective decisions: Was Solyndra awarded half a billion taxpayer dollars because it had a superior business model? Or was it given money because green energy is politically popular and the vice president wanted to host a ribbon-cutting ceremony there? Did the Administration offer trade protection to domestic solar panel makers because the Chinese were engaged in “unfair competition” or because domestic solar panel manufacturers are politically powerful and well-connected?

I don’t see how these questions could possibly be answered definitively. Instead of trying to pretend that they can be, we should change the institutions that inevitably give rise to charges of impropriety. We should stop presuming that an elected official’s job description includes the promotion of particular businesses. If we stop asking politicians to pick winners and losers, there will be no more scandals about whom they pick.

Full disclosure: A few years ago, Governor McDonnell appointed me to serve on Virginia’s Joint Advisory Board of Economists. Once a year I travel to Richmond and offer my opinion on the state’s economic and fiscal forecasts. I am not compensated for my participation.

At The Atlantic Cities, Emily Badger writes about a new program from the Rockefeller Foundation called 100 Resilient Cities, focused on equipping cities with a new employee called a Chief Resiliency Officer. The program states its goals as follows:

Building resilience is about making people, communities and systems better prepared to withstand catastrophic events – both natural and manmade – and able to bounce back more quickly and emerge stronger from these shocks and stresses.

[. . .]

There are some core characteristics that all resilient systems share and demonstrate, both in good times and in times of stress:

• Spare capacity, which ensures that there is a back-up or alternative available when a vital component of a system fails.
• Flexibility, the ability to change, evolve, and adapt in the face of disaster.
• Limited or “safe” failure, which prevents failures from rippling across systems.
• Rapid rebound, the capacity to re-establish function and avoid long-term disruptions.
• Constant learning, with robust feedback loops that sense and allow new solutions as conditions change.

In his book Antifragile: Things that Gain from Disorder, Nassim Taleb defines antifragile as something that not only recovers from shocks, but becomes stronger after recovery, in line with the stated objectives of 100 Resilient Cities. Following its Great Fire of 1871, Chicago demonstrated antifragility. It rebounded rapidly from a disaster that killed 300 people and left one-third of city residents homeless, many without insurance after the fire bankrupted local insurers or the blaze destroyed their paperwork. Despite this great loss, residents of Chicago quickly rebuilt their city using private funding and private charity that was small relative to the amount of damage, but without any government funding. In rebuilding, Chicago developed safer building techniques both through entrepreneurship and with new insurance requirements and  new municipal building codes. The city invested in a better-equipped fire fighting force to lower the risk of fire damage in the future. Despite not having the telecommunications that seem critical to allowing fast disaster recovery today, Chicagoans began building new, safer buildings immediately, investing $50 million in the year after the fire, and tripling the real estate value of the burned blocks within 10 years. Its difficult to imagine a twenty-first century city allowing property owners to move so quickly through the approval process, and its difficult to imagine a Chief Resiliency Officer widening this bottleneck.

A bureaucrat like a Chief Resiliency Officer would not be able to learn the lessons from a natural disaster that the residents of Chicago did in their rebuilding efforts because this knowledge is dispersed, only to be discovered by individuals acting in what they believe to be their own best interest. Taleb describes bureaucrats as fragilistas because they do not suffer from downside risks and therefore cannot learn and grow stronger from shocks. If a disaster strikes a city equipped with a Chief Resiliency Officer and it turns out the city was ill-prepared, he or she will not be held accountable for failing to predict what may have been a very low-probability event. In fact, we often see government efforts toward making cities more resilient introducing fragility contrary to their stated intentions. For example, federal flood insurance minimizes the downside risk of owning flood-prone property. In turn, this encourages more people to live in the highest risk areas, putting them at greater risk when disaster strikes. Cities will not have an opportunity to learn from this to better prepare for future flooding because their rebuilding is subsidized; however, bureaucrats cite this insurance as a success because it facilitates rebuilding without adapting to risk.

The Transportation Security Administration offers a preview of what bureaucratic disaster prevention looks like; top down planning for low-probability events results in attempts to prevent the catastrophic events that we’ve seen in the past without realizing that we’re unlikely to see these same events in the future. As TSA critic Bruce Schneier explains:

Taking off your shoes is next to useless. “It’s like saying, ‘Last time the terrorists wore red shirts, so now we’re going to ban red shirts,’” Schneier says. If the T.S.A. focuses on shoes, terrorists will put their explosives elsewhere. “Focusing on specific threats like shoe bombs or snow-globe bombs simply induces the bad guys to do something else. You end up spending a lot on the screening and you haven’t reduced the total threat.”

Likewise, preparing for low-probability natural disasters, such as 100-year storms, is not something that can be done from the top down. To the extent an event is foreseeable, some individuals and firms will prepare for it, as we saw with Goldman Sachs’ generator and sand bagging efforts in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy. The disaster revealed successful preparation methods, allowing more individuals and the city as a whole to learn and be better prepared for the next disaster. Chief Resiliency Officers are unlikely to accurately foresee low-probability shocks to their cities. To the extent that they protect cities from these shocks, they will likely take away the learning process that would make cities better able to withstand larger shocks, introducing fragility instead of greater resiliency.

In last month’s publication of Freedom in the 50 States, Will Ruger and Jason Sorens point to net domestic migration as an indicator that Americans demonstrate their preferences for more libertarian states by where they choose to live. They explain, ”

In each case, the bivariate relationship between freedom and migration is positive. However, it is strongest for fiscal freedom and weakest for personal freedom.”

The authors go on to use regression analysis to control for some of the other variables that likely cause people to move from one state to another:

We also try a regression specification including state cost of living from 2000, as estimated by political scientists William D. Berry, Richard C. Fording and Russell L. Hanson.7 This is an index variable linked to a value of 10 for the national average in 2007, the last date for which a value is available. There is some concern that this variable is endogenous to freedom. For instance, it correlates with the Wharton land-use regulation variable at r = 0.67, implying that strict land-use regulation drives up the cost of living. It also correlates with fiscal freedom at −0.35, perhaps implying that taxation can also drive up cost of living.

Finally, we also try including growth in personal income from 2000 to 2007 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis, adjusted for change in state cost of living from Berry, Fording, and Hanson. This variable is even more clearly endogenous to economic freedom, as well as to migration (more workers means more personal income). Nevertheless, we want to put the hypothesis that freedom attracts people to the strictest reasonable tests.

With this more in-depth analysis, the authors find that the three types of freedom they study — fiscal, regulatory, and personal — are all positively associated with net migration (PDF p. 97). In particular, the relationship between land use regulation and migration strikes me as an interesting one. States with the strictest land use regulations prevent in-migration by disallowing new housing development. According to Census data, New York City grew by about 2-percent between 2000 to 2010, including natural growth and foreign immigration. This is a significant slowdown from the 1990s. While the Big Apple wouldn’t be expected to attract new residents through libertarian policies, it does offer many economic and cultural opportunities that people might value. Ed Glaeser explains that by preventing new development, city- and state-level restrictions have prevented more people from being able to move to New York City:

The high prices that persist in New York City suggest that the demand for city living isn’t falling. Case-Shiller data, which captures the metropolitan area rather than the city, shows that the New York area’s prices have risen by 67 percent since 2000 (32 percent in real terms), more than any metropolitan area in the sample except Los Angeles.

But the combination of economic strength and high prices need not lead to population growth if an area doesn’t build many more units. In that case, high housing demand leads only to higher prices — not more people.

[...]

The Bloomberg administration has worked hard to allow more building, but the recent Census numbers seem to suggest that a combination of slow growth and continuing high prices implies that New York’s barriers to building, such as a complex zoning code and ever more Historic Preservation Districts, are still shutting out families that would like to move to the city.

This is just one city-level example, but New York City demonstrates that locations with the strictest land use regulations are not just discouraging in-migration with policies that limit residents’ freedom, they are also preventing people from moving to their jurisdictions by restricting growth in housing stock.

Edward Glaeser of Harvard and Giacomo Ponzetto of Centre de Recerca en Economia Internacional have a new paper on fiscal illusion in state and local public pensions (and they don’t cite James Buchanan?!):

Why are public-sector workers so heavily compensated with pensions and other non-pecuniary benefits? In this paper, we present a political economy model of shrouded compensation in which politicians compete for taxpayers’ and public employees’ votes by promising compensation packages, but some voters cannot evaluate every aspect of compensation. If pension packages are “shrouded,” meaning that public-sector workers better understand their value than ordinary taxpayers, then compensation will be inefficiently back-loaded. In equilibrium, the welfare of public-sector workers could be improved, holding total public sector costs constant, if they received higher wages and lower pensions. Central control over dispersed municipal pensions has two offsetting effects on pension generosity: more state-level media attention helps taxpayers better understand pension costs, which reduces pension generosity; but a larger share of public sector workers will live within the jurisdiction, which increases pension generosity. We discuss pension arrangements in two decentralized states (California and Pennsylvania) and two centralized states (Massachusetts and Ohio) and find that in these cases, centralization appears to have modestly reduced pension arrangements; but, as the model suggests, this finding is unlikely to be universal.

Gated versions here and here.

Last week was a difficult one. It’s not clear what motivated the heinous acts in Boston but it seems safe to say that intolerance played some role. New research published by Niclas Berggrenn and Therese Nilsson in the journal Kyklos suggests one way to make the world a better, more tolerant place:

Tolerance has the potential to affect both economic growth and wellbeing. It is therefore important to discern its determinants. We contribute to the literature by investigating whether the degree to which economic institutions and policies are market‐oriented is related to different measures of tolerance. Cross‐sectional and first‐difference regression analysis of up to 69 countries reveals that economic freedom is positively related to tolerance towards homosexuals, especially in the longer run, while tolerance towards people of a different race and a willingness to teach kids tolerance are not strongly affected by how free markets are. Stable monetary policy and outcomes is the area of economic freedom most consistently associated with greater tolerance, but the quality of the legal system seems to matter as well. Through instrumental variables and first‐difference results we find indications of a causal relationship.

An un-gated version is here.

Today, the Tax Foundation notes that Americans have worked enough to pay off their 2013 taxes, leaving the rest of the year’s earnings available for private consumption and investment:

Tax Freedom Day is the day when the nation as a whole has earned enough money to pay its total tax bill for the year. A vivid, calendar based illustration of the cost of government, Tax Freedom Day divides all federal, state, and local taxes by the nation’s income. In 2013, Americans will pay $2.76 trillion in federal taxes and $1.45 trillion in state taxes, for a total tax bill of $4.22 trillion, or 29.4 percent of income. April 18 is 29.4 percent, or 108 days, into the year.

Because of the increase in payroll taxes and income taxes on high income earners as part of the fiscal cliff deal, Tax Freedom day falls three days later this year than it did last year. While many limited government advocates will view this tax burden as too large, the Tax Foundation website points out that the $4.22 trillion we will pay in taxes this year will not cover the full cost of government spending. Including this year’s deficit spending, which is a tax on future earnings, would push Tax Freedom Day out to May 9th.

As the Madness of March winds down with this week’s championship games, visions of lucrative professional careers dance in the heads of talented young athletes around the country. Scouts, coaches and owners have their own visions, for any one of these young talents could be the next Kobe or LeBron.

And that makes each player a potential ticket to millions of dollars in public subsidies. Taxpayers, however, should be envisioning a loss; these deals are typically as wasteful as they are scandalous.

That is Christopher Koopman and me, writing over USNews Economic Intelligence blog. The full article is here. John Buhl definitely gets an assist for all of his helpful input on the piece.

Writing in The Wall Street Journal, Andy Kessler, a former hedge fund manager, gets to the heart of the matter on why state and local pension plans are running out of assets (and time): the math is a mess. Economists, financial professionals and some actuaries have been making the case for awhile that the way public sector pension plans value their liabilities is a dangerous fiction.

Today, U.S. governments calculate the present value of plan liabilities based on the returns they expect to earn on plan assets (typically between 7 and 8 percent annually). That’s all wrong. How the assets perform is immaterial to the present value of plan benefits. Instead a public sector worker’s pension should be valued as a risk-free guaranteed payout much like a bond. Unfortunately, when pensions are valued on a “guaranteed payout” basis, unfunded liabilities skyrocket. Some major plans are not just a bit underfunded, they are deeply in the hole.

Many plan managers disregard the discount rate critique of the actuarial assumptions and persist in underestimating the funding shortfalls by an order of magnitude. In conflating expected asset returns with the value of plan benefits, another troubling behavior has ensued: shifting assets into higher-return/higher-risk vehicles to catch up after market downturns, a problem I note in a recent analysis of Delaware (and they are by no means alone in this approach.)

He gives an analogy to what is happening in Stockton and is certain to visit other California cities to his experience watching GM’s pension plan bottom out. The company’s pension shortfall spiked from $14 billion to $22.4 billion between 1992 and 1993. GM got some advice from Morgan Stanley: invest the money in alternatives and watch expected returns double from 8 percent to 16 percent. Make this assumption and the hole will be filled.

But as Kessler notes, “you can’t wish this stuff away.” Instead:

Things didn’t go as planned. The fund put up $170 million in equity and borrowed another $505 million and invested in—I’m not kidding—a northern Missouri farm raising genetically engineered pigs. Meatier pork chops for all! Everything went wrong. In May 1996, the pigs defaulted on $412 million in junk debt. In a perhaps related event, General Motors entered 2012 with its global pension plans underfunded by $25.4 billion.”

 The debate between economists and government accountants continues.

In the Pathology of Privilege, I had this to say about “accelerated depreciation,” an artifact of the corporate tax code that many consider to be a loophole:

If income is the base of taxation, it makes sense to allow firms to “write off” expenses necessary to earn that income. For capital items that wear out over time, expenses should be written off as the items wear out. Some provisions of the tax code, however, permit firms to write off big capital expenses in one year rather than gradually as the items depreciate. These provisions privilege those firms that happen to make large capital purchases.

The idea that “accelerated” depreciation is a loophole can be traced back to Stanley Surrey, the Harvard law professor whose work in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s influenced many tax reformers, including Senator Bill Bradley and officials in the Reagan Treasury Department. When the Congressional Joint Committee on Taxation began cataloguing loopholes in their annual “tax expenditure” list in 1972, they too called accelerated depreciation a loophole. Here is how Leonard Berman and Joel Slemrod describe the issue in Taxes in America:

Why not let businesses write off their investments right away? It would make the process of determining taxable income easier, as businesses would no longer have to keep track of depreciation schedules for long-lived capital goods. The problem is that it would mean abandoning the attempt to tax business income, or at least part of it. Only a small fraction of the cost of a factory that will last twenty years is really a cost of earning income this year. (p. 72, emphasis original).

This thinking persuaded me to list accelerated depreciation alongside other tax loopholes as a privilege. In conversations with friends and colleagues over the last few weeks, however, I’ve come to change my mind on this one. Why?

To begin with, it is not obvious that generality requires corporate taxation at all. Though much maligned, Mitt Romney’s famous statement that “corporations are people” is—in some form or another—taught in just about every economics 101 course. When a government levies a tax on a corporation, some combination of the following three groups pay it: customers, investors, or employees. All three, it goes without saying, are humans. Moreover, as every student of economics knows, the statutory incidence of a tax is not the same as its economic incidence. Even if legislators earnestly want investors (or managers) to bear 100 percent of the tax, it is supply and demand, and not legislator intent which ultimately determines who pays. Each of these groups is already taxed in some other way, through sales, payroll, income, or capital gains taxes. So when a government levies a corporate income tax, it is imposing an additional levy on someone and this, by itself, is a violation of generality.

Second, if we are going to tax businesses, it isn’t clear that the tax base should be corporate income. Note that Berman and Slemrod say that immediate expensing would mean abandoning “the attempt to tax business income.” That’s because it would essentially turn the corporate income tax into a corporate consumption tax. And that may be a good thing. Capital taxation is notoriously inefficient. This is one reason why Robert Hall and Alvin Rabushka permitted immediate 100 percent expensing in their famous flat consumption tax (which, by the way, would apply to all businesses, not just corporations).

Setting these concerns aside, doesn’t accelerated depreciation privilege capital-intensive firms over labor-intensive firms? This is an argument often made against accelerated depreciation. But if you think this through, it’s not a particularly strong argument. Labor-intensive firms (appropriately) get to write off the salaries that they pay their employees as they make payroll. That makes sense. So long as we are taxing income, we shouldn’t penalize those that have to incur expenses in order to earn that income. Why shouldn’t capital-intensive firms also get to expense equipment when they cut the check for the equipment? The rate at which equipment breaks down bears no relation to the expense of buying it. In fact, one could go a step further and argue that any measure requiring capital-intensive firms to write off their expenses over a long period of time amounts to a privilege to labor-intensive firms.

I am always open to new arguments and in light of my changed view, I’ve decided to update the paper and remove these lines.

On Monday Reuters reported that a federal judge has found Stockton, CA to be eligible for bankruptcy protection. This decision came despite protests from Wall Street arguing that the city had options available that would have allowed it to pay its creditors in full, such as raising taxes or cutting benefits for city employees:

Creditors have claimed a lack of good faith by Stockton in its decision to fully pay its obligation to the $254 billion Calpers system but impose losses on bondholders and bond insurers.

The expected move by the California city of 300,000 – along with Jefferson County in Alabama and San Bernardino in California – breaks with a long-standing tradition to fully repay bondholders the principal in most major municipal bankruptcies.

While both the judge and city manager Bob Deis have harshly criticized bondholders who refused to negotiate with the city before bankruptcy proceedings began, other cities have taken a very different approach to their creditors in the bankruptcy process. In 2011, the Rhode Island policymakers adopted a law that puts municipal creditors at the head of the line in municipal bankruptcy proceedings. In the state’s  Central Falls bankruptcy, the requirement to pay bondholders 100 cents on the dollar has meant that the city’s pensioners have taken steep benefit cuts, in some cases losing nearly half of their defined benefit pensions.

After Rhode Island enacted this law, the Wall Street Journal explained:

Despite the financial failure, Central Falls suddenly is attractive to some investors because the law makes them more confident about getting paid.

“If we can find someone selling, we will be a buyer” of Central Falls bonds, says Matt Dalton, chief executive of Belle Haven Investments, a White Plains, N.Y., firm with $800 million in municipal-bond investments under management.

The difference in legal climates for bondholders in Rhode Island and California unsurprisingly fosters different attitudes from creditors.  Former Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan explains the dangers of cutting off a city’s access to credit by failing to pay bondholders in full:

“I think the unions ought to be scared stiff. This could be a lot worse than just the pensions. What about government bonds? If government bonds can also be restructured, who will buy them?

“The city and the state all issue tax anticipation bonds to meet their payrolls, but if those can be restructured, no one will buy them. Think about what that means for libraries, parks, street paving, police. It will all be on the line.

While cities on both coasts are facing insolvency in their efforts to meet their obligations to their employees and their creditors, they vary in their approaches as to who is first in line for scarce tax dollars.

Today the Mercatus Center released the third edition of Freedom in the 50 States by Will Ruger and Jason Sorens. In this new edition, the authors score states on over 200 policy variables. Additionally, they have collected data from 2001 to measure how states’ freedom rankings have changed over the past decade. While several organizations publish state freedom rankings, Freedom in the 50 States is the only one that measures both economic and personal freedoms.

Ruger and Sorens have implemented a new methodology for measuring freedom. While previously the authors developed a subjective weighting system in which they sought to determine how significantly policies limited the freedom of how many people, in this edition they have use a victim-cost method, assigning a dollar value to each variable that restricts freedom measuring the cost of restricting freedom for potential victims. The authors’ cost calculations are designed to measure the value of the states’ freedom for the average resident. Since individuals measure the cost of policies differently, readers can put their own price on each freedom variable on the website to find the states that best match their subjective policy preference.

In addition to an overall freedom ranking, Freedom in the 50 States includes a breakdown of states’ Fiscal Policy Ranking, Regulatory Ranking, and Personal Freedom Ranking. On the overall freedom ranking, North Dakota comes in first followed by South Dakota, Tennessee, New Hampshire, and Oklahoma.  At the bottom of the ranking, New York ranks worst by a significant margin, with rent control and burdensome insurance regulations dragging down its regulatory freedom score. New York is behind California at 49th, then New Jersey, Hawaii, and Rhode Island.

The authors note that residents respond to the costs of freedom-reducing policies by voting with their feet. Between 2000 and 2011, New York lost 9% of its population to out-migration. In addition to all types of freedom being associated with domestic migration, the authors find that regulatory freedom in particular is associated with states’ growth in personal income. They conclude:

Freedom is not the only determinant of personal satisfaction and fulfillment, but as our analysis of migration patterns shows, it makes a tangible difference for people’s decisions about where to live. Moreover, we fully expect people in the freer states to develop and benefit from the kinds of institutions (such as symphonies and museums) and amenities (such as better restaurants and cultural attractions) seen in some of the older cities on the coasts.

[...]

These things take time, but the same kind of dynamic freedom enjoyed in Chicago or New York in the 19th century — that led to their rise — might propel places in the middle of the country to be a bit more hip to those with urbane tastes.

State and local governments know their transportation needs better than Washington D.C. But that doesn’t mean that state and local governments are necessarily more efficient or less prone to public choice problems when it comes to funding projects, and some of that is due to the intertwined funding streams that make up a transportation budget.

Emily Goff at The Heritage Foundation finds two such examples in the recent transportation bills passed in Virginia and Maryland.

Both Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell and Maryland Governor Martin O’Malley propose raising taxes to fund new transit projects. In Virginia the state will eliminate the gas tax and replace it with an increase in the sales tax. This is a move away from a user-based tax to a more general source of taxation, severing the connection between those who use the roads and those who pay. The gas tax is related to road use; sales taxes are barely related. There is a much greater chance of political diversion of sales tax revenues to subsidized transit projects: trolleys, trains and bike paths, rather than using revenues for road improvements.

Maryland reduces the gas tax by five cents to 18.5 cents per gallon and imposes a new wholesale tax on motor fuels.

How’s the money being spent? In Virginia 42 percent of the new sales tax revenues will go to mass transit with the rest going to highway maintenance. As Goff notes this means lower -income southwestern Virginians will subsidize transit for affluent northern Virginians every time they make a nonfood purchase.

As an example, consider Arlington’s $1 million dollar bus stop. Arlingtonians chipped in $200,000 and the rest came from the Virginia Department of Transportation (VDOT). It’s likely with a move to the sales tax, we’ll see more of this. And indeed, according to Arlington Now, there’s a plan for 24 more bus stops to compliment the proposed Columbia Pike streetcar, a light rail project that is the subject of a lively local debate.

Revenue diversions to big-ticket transit projects are also incentivized by the states trying to come up with enough money to secure federal grants for Metrorail extensions (Virginia’s Silver Line to Dulles Airport and Maryland’s Purple Line to New Carrolton).

Truly modernizing and improving roads and mass transit could be better achieved by following a few principles.

• First, phase out federal transit grants which encourage states to pursue politically-influenced and costly projects that don’t always address commuters’ needs. (See the rapid bus versus light rail debate).
• Secondly, Virginia and Maryland should move their revenue system back towards user-fees for road improvements. This is increasingly possible with technology and a Vehicle Miles Tax (VMT), which the GAO finds is “more equitable and efficient” than the gas tax.
• And lastly, improve transit funding. One way this can be done is through increasing farebox recovery rates. The idea is to get transit fares in line with the rest of the world.

Interestingly, Paris, Madrid, and Tokyo have built rail systems at a fraction of the cost of heavily-subsidized projects in New York, Boston, and San Francisco. Stephen Smith, writing at Bloomberg, highlights that a big part of the problem in the U.S. are antiquated procurement laws that limit bidders on transit projects and push up costs. These legal restrictions amount to real money. French rail operator SNCF estimated it could cut $30 billion off of the proposed $68 billion California light rail project. California rejected the offer and is sticking with the pricier lead contractor.

This post originally appeared at Market Urbanism, a blog about free-market urban development.

After receiving years of praise for its work in post-Katrina recovery, Brad Pitt’s home building organization, Make It Right, is receiving some media criticism. At the New Republic, Lydia Depillis points out that the Make It Right homes built in the Lower Ninth Ward have resulted in scarce city dollars going to this neighborhood with questionable results. While some residents have been able to return to the Lower Ninth Ward through non-profit and private investment, the population hasn’t reached the level necessary to bring the commercial services to the neighborhood that it needs to be a comfortable place to live.

After Hurricane Katrina, the Mercatus Center conducted extensive field research in the Gulf Coast, interviewing people who decided to return and rebuild in the city and those who decided to permanently relocate. They discussed the events that unfolded immediately after the storm as well as the rebuilding process. They interviewed many people in the New Orleans neighborhood surrounding the Mary Queen of Vietnam Church. This neighborhood rebounded exceptionally well after Hurricane Katrina, despite experiencing some of the city’s worst flooding 5-12-feet-deep and being a low-income neighborhood. As Emily Chamlee-Wright and Virgil Storr found [pdf]:

Within a year of the storm, more than 3,000 residents had returned [of the neighborhood's 4,000 residents when the storm hit]. By the summer of 2007, approximately 90% of the MQVN residents were back while the rate of return in New Orleans overall remained at only 45%. Further, within a year of the storm, 70 of the 75 Vietnamese-owned businesses in the MQVN neighborhood were up and running.

Virgil and Emily attribute some of MQVN’s rebuilding success to the club goods that neighborhood residents shared. Club goods share some characteristics with public goods in that they are non-rivalrous — one person using the pool at a swim club doesn’t impede others from doing so — but club goods are excludable, so that non-members can be banned from using them. Adam has written about club goods previously, using the example of mass transit. The turnstile acts as a method of exclusion, and one person riding the subway doesn’t prevent other passengers from doing so as well. In the diagram below, a subway would fall into the “Low-congestion Goods” category:

In the case of MQVN, the neighborhood’s sense of community and shared culture provided a club good that encouraged residents to return after the storm. The church provided food and supplies to the first neighborhood residents to return after the storm. Church leadership worked with Entergy, the city’s power company, to demonstrate that the neighborhood had 500 residents ready to pay their bills with the restoration of power, making them one of the city’s first outer neighborhoods to get power back after the storm.

While resources have poured into the Lower Ninth Ward from outside groups in the form of $400,000 homes from Make It Right $65 million  in city money for a school, police station, and recreation center, the neighborhood has not seen the success that MQVN achieved from the bottom up. This isn’t to say that large non-profits don’t have an important role to play in disaster recovery. Social entrepreneurs face strong incentives to work well toward their objectives because their donors hold them accountable and they typically are involved in a cause because of their passion for it. Large organizations from Wal-Mart to the American Red Cross provided key resources to New Orleans residents in the days and months after Hurricane Katrina.

The post-Katrina success of MQVN relative to many other neighborhoods in the city does demonstrates the effectiveness of voluntary cooperation at the community level and the importance of bottom-up participation for long-term neighborhood stability. While people throughout the city expressed their love for New Orleans and desire to return in their conversations with Mercatus interviewers, many faced coordination problems in their efforts to rebuild. In the case of MQVN, club goods and voluntary cooperation permitted the quick and near-complete return of residents.

As the month of March draws to a close, most governors have, by this point, taken to the podiums of their respective states and outlined their priorities for the next legislative year in their State of the State addresses. Mike Maciag at Governing magazine painstakingly reviewed the transcripts of all 49 State of the State addresses delivered so far (Louisiana, for some reason, takes a leisurely approach to this tradition) and tallied the most popular initiatives in a helpful summary. While there were some small state trends in addressing hot-button social issues like climate change (7 governors), gay rights (7 governors), and marijuana decriminalization (2 states), the biggest areas of overlap from state governors concerned Medicaid spending and state pension obligations.

Medicaid Spending

Judging from their addresses, the most common concern facing governors this year is the expansion of state Medicaid financing prompted by the Supreme Court’s ruling on the Affordable Care Act last year. While the ACA originally required states to raise their eligibility standards to cover everyone below 138 percent of the federal poverty level, the Supreme Court overturned this requirement and left up to the states whether or not they wanted to participate in the expansion in exchange for federal funding or politely decline to partake.  The governors of a whopping 30 states referenced the Medicaid issue at least once during their speech. Some of the governors, like Gov. Phil Bryant of Mississippi, brought up the issue to explain why they made the decision to become one of the 14 states that decided not to participate in the expansion. Others took to defending their decision to participate in the expansion, like Gov. John Kasich of Ohio, who outlined how his state’s participation would benefit fellow Buckeyes suffering from mental illness and addiction.

Neither the considerable amount of concern nor the markedly divergent positions of the governors are especially shocking. A recent Mercatus Research paper conducted by senior fellow Charles Blahous addresses the nebulous options facing state governments in their decision on whether to participate in the expansion. This decision is not one to make lightly: in 2011, state Medicaid spending accounted for almost 24 percent of all state budget expenditures and these costs are expected to rise by upwards of 150 percent in the next decade. The answer to whether a given state should opt in or opt out of the expansion is not a straightforward one and depends on the unique financial situations of each state. Participating in the Medicaid expansion may indeed make sense for Ohioans while at the same time being a terrible deal for Mississippi. However, what is optimal for an individual state may not be good for the country as a whole. Ohio’s decision to participate in the expansion may end up hurting residents of Mississippi and other states who forgo participating in the expansion because of the unintended effects of cost shifting among the federal and state governments. It is very difficult to project exactly who will be the winners or losers in the Medicaid expansion at this point in time, but is very likely that states will fall into one of either category.

Pensions

Another pressing concern for state governors is the health (or lack thereof) of their state pension systems. The governors of 20 states, including the man who brought us “Squeezy the Pension Python” himself, Illinois Gov. Pat Quinn, tackled the issue during their State of the State addresses. Among these states are a few to which Eileen has given testimony on this very issue within the past year.

In Montana, for instance, Gov. Steve Bullock promised a “detailed plan that will shore up [his state's] retirement systems and do so without raising taxes.” While I was unable to find this plan on the governor’s website, two dueling reform proposals–one to amend the current defined benefit system, another to replace it with a defined contribution system–are currently duking it out in the Montana state legislature. While it is unclear which of the two proposals will make it onto the law books, let’s hope that the Montana Joint Select Committee on Pensions heeds Eileen’s suggestions from her testimony to them last month, and only makes changes to their pension system that are “based on an accurate accounting of the value of the benefits due to employees.”

Michigan’s Governor Rick Synder may be greeted by protestors when he arrives for a meeting today on Detroit’s financial condition. His recent appointment of Kevyn Orr as the city’s emergency financial manager has angered many of Detroit’s residents who are afraid he has powers that are far too sweeping and is thereby destroying local control. The purpose of the financial manager law is to help the city stave off bankruptcy and allows the emergency manager the ability to renegotiate labor contracts and potentially sell city assets. The last recession has worsened the already-struggling city’s financial outlook. Detroit has a $327 million budget deficit and $14 billion in long-term debt and has shown very little willingness to make the kind of structural changes it needs in order to stay solvent.

Detroit’s problems are acute. The city’s population has fallen from 1.8 million to 700,000, giving the city, “a look and feel that rivals post World War II Europe.” But as Public Sector Inc’s Steve Eide writes, the real problem is that local leaders have proven unable to deal with fiscal realities for far too long. His chart shows the consequences. The gap between estimated revenues and expenditures over time is striking. In sum, Detroit overestimates its revenues and underestimates its spending, by a lot, when it plans for the budget. That is a governance and administration crisis and one that the state has decided needs outside intervention to set straight.

Standard & Poors likes the appointment and has upgraded Detroit’s credit rating outlook to “stable.”

There are many smart people who think that deficits are a problem, but not now. Right now, they say, we need growth. And growth, according to standard Keynesian theory, requires higher deficits today. This perspective has three problems.

That’s me at US News. Click here to see why I think the “no need to worry now” view is wrong. And if you agree with me, let your voice be heard and please vote!

Reuters reports that an emergency financial manager might provide Detroit with a path toward bankruptcy. This week I’m at US News writing on how an emergency financial manager might help the city renegotiate the obligations that it cannot afford to pay:

An emergency financial manager will have a greater incentive than elected city officials to improve Detroit’s financial standing. For any Michigan politician, Detroit’s municipal employees make up an important group of voters. However, their political influence is more concentrated at the city level, and as an interest group they have diminished power at the state level. Because the emergency financial manager will be responsible to the governor and state legislature, he or she will not face the pressures to appease city employees that local policymakers confront.

China’s Ghost Cities 

The Purple Line’s uncertain future

Maryland’s new gas tax for transportation

Is Maryland copying Virginia’s new sales tax?

The Micro-Apartment craze

The research organization TRIP finds that traffic congestion comes at a steep price for drivers in the Washington, DC area. They determine that congestion and poor road conditions cost drivers $2,195 annually in lost time and the added vehicle operating costs of driving on congested, poor quality roads.

TRIP supports increased infrastructure spending, and I haven’t looked into their methodology, but undeniably DC-area drivers waste copious time sitting in traffic. Despite this, a Washington Post poll finds that Maryland drivers do not support higher taxes to pay for road expansion or maintenance. Perhaps increased taxes are unpopular because state residents believe that transportation projects involve wasteful spending that won’t improve conditions for drivers. Additionally, they may realize that traffic congestion is very difficult to overcome in a world of zero-price roads. Because additional roads lower the time cost of driving, additional lanes induce more people to drive farther. Building enough roads to eliminate congestion for everyone who would like to use them at zero-price in DC’s rush hour might not be possible, as reducing the region’s congestion problems would even lead more people to move to the area.

An alternative to raising taxes to fund new road construction would be to implement congestion pricing on area roads. Roads could be electronically tolled and priced at the rate that will eliminate congestion, varying with driver demand. So far municipalities have tended to implement congestion pricing on new highways. Here in the DC area, the 495 Express Lanes opened in November with congestion pricing. The new lanes were funded primarily by a private company, and the tolls are not yet meeting revenue projections; many drivers are choosing to continue driving on more congested, zero-price roads. However, congestion pricing doesn’t necessarily need to be implemented on a new road. Alternatively, policymakers could implement congestion pricing on existing roads or on specific lanes to reduce congestion for those willing to pay.

Tolls are often politically unpopular because, as Donald Shoup points out in The High Cost of Free Parking, people are often very opposed to paying user fess for a provision that has previously been funded by taxpayers broadly. However, the gains from congestion pricing may outweigh the political costs. Allocating road use through prices puts roads to higher-value uses. Assuming that TRIP’s estimate of the cost of congestion is correct for the average driver, this cost will vary widely among drivers who value their time differently, and drivers will value their own time differently depending on the day and the importance of being on time to their destination. Thus pricing roads according to demand allows those who have flexible schedules to drive when roads are otherwise uncrowded, and those who place a high value on their time will be willing to pay a high toll for the convenience of saving time and reaching their destination promptly.