Limited Government Archives - Page 27 of 35 - Mississippi Center for Public Policy

As the sharing economy expands, consumers win thanks to greater options and lower prices.

It is the free market working as it should. An individual has a service they can offer, they sell it on the market via a mobile app, and they are rated on their performance by the user. Other users can then make decisions based upon whether previous users had a great experience, a poor experience, or something in the middle. It is the definition of accountability, and doesn’t require government involvement.

But, of course, government must involve themselves. Solely in the name of consumer safety, because you or I apparently cannot make a decision without the government’s blessing.

However, we know those decisions are usually centered around the government’s interest in protecting the established monopiles. Those monopolies have already asked for and received the blessing of the government and feel it is their task to protect the moat around whatever industry they are in.

We saw this with the ridesharing economy a few years ago. As Uber and Lyft entered the mainstream, some localities in Mississippi took it upon themselves to ban ridesharing companies if they didn’t operate in the same fashion as the taxi monopolies. That included cities such as Jackson, Gulfport, Biloxi, and Oxford. In Oxford, law enforcement even threatened to arrest Uber drivers for running an unlicensed taxi service. After all, the city council in Oxford had adopted new ordinances after meeting with taxi drivers and owners.

Fortunately, the state acted and passed statewide regulations for transportation network companies in 2016, overriding local regulations that stifled the ridesharing economy. A year later Uber announced that they will be available statewide. And even without doing research, we can presume students at Ole Miss enjoy having Uber available.

Carsharing is another form of how individuals can make money from their car in the sharing economy. With carsharing apps, such as Zipcar, Turo, and Getaround, consumers can rent a car from an individual for a short time period as you currently do with traditional rental car companies like Enterprise and Hertz. Naturally, said car rental companies are fighting the carsharing industry.

Airbnb has had a similar experience with government regulators. Just this summer, a Biloxi city councilman, who also happens to be the president of the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association, announced his intentions to increase regulations and enforcement on Airbnb rentals in the Coastal city. The Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association is the state arm of the national association that has been pushing for homesharing regulations throughout the country.

The sharing economy should be celebrated and encouraged, but all it does is provide options.

An Uber ride is not automatically better than a ride in a traditional taxi simply because it’s an Uber ride. Nor is a house or room rented on Airbnb automatically better than a stay in a traditional hotel. If enough users have a poor experience, no one will continue to use that service provider. There is a great incentive in providing high quality services. After all, people vote with their feet.

But having these options available allows the consumer to make better, or more complete, choices. They can decide what they use based on what they need at that moment in time. And price is usually a central part of that decision.

The reactions from “traditional” companies is to be expected. They worked hard in pursuing regulations that limit competition. But when new players enter their arena, they then often complain about the unlevel playing field.

That would be less ironic if they didn’t create that playing field. But their reaction is understandable. However, the answer isn’t to impose outdated regulations on the new economy, but to deregulate existing industries. And for government to rely on the free market and trust their citizens to be able to make the best decisions for themselves.

This column appeared in the Meridian Star on October 12, 2018.

The Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics has begun to return property that the agency seized after the administrative forfeiture law was repealed.

This past session, the Mississippi legislature allowed the administrative forfeiture provision to sunset, meaning the previous law ceased to be in effect at the end of June. Administrative forfeiture allows agents of the state to take property valued under $20,000 and forfeit it by merely providing the individual with a notice. An individual would then have to file a petition in court to appeal.

On September 19, 2018, MBN sent notices allowing retrieval of seized property, totaling more than $100,000, to eight individuals. This includes:

$3,757 of seized currency to Courtney Walker of Biloxi
$3,000 of seized currency and two rifles to Michael Willis of Cyrstal Springs
$88,737 of sized currency to Luis Medeles and Christopher Zavala, both of Brownsville, Texas
$1,860 of seized currency to Dewayne Spearman of Pontotoc
$11,938 of seized currency to Tejinder Kaur of Brandon
$2,300 of seized currency and a pistol to Dexter Danzel Conner of Tuscaloosa, Ala.
A seized handgun and a holster to Jessica Meredith of Florence

On September 10, the Mississippi Justice Institute sent a letter to MBN advising the agency of the change in the law after it became apparent that they were continuing to seize property after the July 1 repeal date.

“We are glad to see that the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics is not only following the law, but is taking corrective action in cases where administrative forfeiture procedures were incorrectly used,” said Aaron Rice, Director of the Mississippi Justice Institute. “As a public interest law firm dedicated to ensuring that our laws are carried out in a way that protects liberty and honors constitutional rights, we are happy to have been able to assist MBN in carrying out its duties while remaining in compliance with new changes in Mississippi law.”

Until 2017, Mississippi was the wild west of sorts when it came to civil asset forfeiture. In 2015, the Mississippi Bureau of Narcotics, along with local police departments, seized nearly $4 million in cash.

They seized amounts as low as $75. They seized trucks, cars, ATVs, riding lawnmowers, utility trailers, and 18-wheelers; an arsenal of assorted handguns, shotguns, and rifles; cell phones, cameras, laptops, tablets, turntables, and flat screen TVs; boat motors, weed eaters, and power drills; and one comic book collection, according to a report from Reason.

And that does not include numbers from police departments that work independently of the Bureau of Narcotics. Until 2017, they didn’t track or publish asset forfeiture data.

Moreover, family members, especially parents, often had their cars or other property seized for the alleged crimes of their children. This happened even though the parents are not connected to the illegal activity. For example, in 2015, the Desoto County Sheriff’s Department agreed to return a 2006 Chevy Trailblazer owned by the mother of the petitioner, Jesse Smith, in exchange for $1,650.

In 2017, the legislature provided needed reforms. Now, seizing agencies must obtain a search warrant issued by a judge within 72 hours of seizing property. And all forfeitures are posted on a publicly accessible website.

Revenue from the first month of sports betting in Mississippi indicates a positive start for the Magnolia State.

In 2017, the legislature paved the way for sports betting should the Supreme Court overturn the restrictions on such activities, which they did this year. That allowed Mississippi to be one of the first states outside of Nevada to offer sports betting.

Through the month of August, an otherwise quiet month of the year before football season begins, casinos took in nearly $6.3 million in sports betting. This translates to more than $644,000 in revenue for casinos and $77,000 in taxes for the state.

Two other important points show greater promise.

First, just 11 of the state’s 28 casinos participated in the opening month of sports betting, with many opening in the middle or end of the month.

Additionally, Mississippi casinos took in nearly $3.5 million in just the first three days of September, more than half of the handle from August. The difference? The start of college football and the NFL.

Most expect these numbers to only climb in the weeks ahead.

Men make more money than woman for numerous reasons. But it is not because of discrimination.

June O’Neill, an economics professor and former Congressional Budget Office director, has researched this issue and concluded that: “The gender gap largely stems from choices made by women and men concerning the amount of time and energy devoted to a career, as reflected in years of work experience, utilization of part-time work, and other workplace and job characteristics.”

Familial roles – such as who stays home with the kids when they are sick – tend to play a larger role in determining wages than does gender. As a result of such roles – most kids want mom to be the one to stay home – women often earn less than men. But in today’s labor market, gender discrimination is not the reason why.

Consider that:

“Over 60 percent of all bachelor’s degrees are awarded to women.
“More women than men continue to graduate school and more doctorates are awarded to women.
“Women now comprise just over half of those employed in management, professional, and related occupations.”

Indeed, a recent Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) report finds that “women working 35-39 hours per week last year earned 107% of men’s earnings for those weekly hours, i.e., there was a 7% gender earnings gap in favor of female workers.”

As the gender pay gap is being debunked nationwide, some in Mississippi are clamoring for a state law to address an issue that is no longer an issue.

But Mississippi, like every other state, must abide by federal wage and hour laws. These laws, among other things, prohibit discrimination based on gender. An employer in Mississippi cannot discriminate against women just because we don’t have a state law prohibiting it.

When controlling for hours worked and lifestyle choices, such as marriage, we get a clearer picture of earnings by gender.

Men work more hours than women

A review of data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics shows:

25.1 percent of men working full-time worked 41 or more hours per week, compared to only 14.3 percent of women. 5.8 percent of men worked 60 hours per week or more, compared to only 2.5 percent of women.
10.9 percent of women who worked full-time worked between 35 and 39 hours per week, compared to only 4.3 percent of men who did so.
An estimation shows the average full-time man worked 43.2 hours per week compared to 41.5 hours for women, or 85 more hours a year.

Marital status also affects the earnings of women, as does many other factors.

Single women who have never been married earn 91.3 percent of men’s earning, representing a gender gap of only 8.7 percent, eliminating more than half of the raw earnings gap.
Full time women who are not married with no children under 18 earn 94.2 percent of men’s earnings, representing a gender gap of 5.8 percent, eliminating two-thirds of the raw gender gap.
But married women, with and without children, earn 79.2 percent and 78.5 percent, respectively, of what similar men earn.

As we see, being married has a negative impact on the earnings of women. But one could also presume that that is a personal choice, and women may place greater value on flexibility, commute time, child care, and other factors important to those with children at home.

In the end, there is no gender wage gap when we compare apples to apples: doing exactly the same work while working the exact same number of hours in the same occupation.

Incomes in America rose to a new high in 2017 despite the constant talking points that the economy is only working for a few.

According to the latest data from the Census Bureau, American households have made their way solidly out of the recession and incomes continue to rise. And the report includes other significant data: Income inequality is more of a talking point than a reality and middle-income earners are actually moving up the economic ladder, not down. All while, the price of consumer goods continues to go down.

Median household income

Median household income last year was $61,372, an increase of 1.8 percent from the previous year in today’s dollars. This is the fifth consecutive annual increase after a half-decade of declines following the Great Recession. The last period of four consecutive gains was in the late 1990s.

Compared to 1975, annual incomes per household member, again in today’s dollars, are up more than $12,000. That means each America has an additional $1,000 in additional income per month than they did forty years ago.

Income inequality

One of the most common refrains we hear in politics today is about the rising income gap. It has spurred a new belief in socialism, and propelled the candidacy of Democratic-Socialist Bernie Sanders in 2016. Other have since followed in his footsteps.

President Barack Obama once called it the “defining challenge of our time.”

Two data points show that the shares of total income earned by the top 20 percent and the top 5 percent are relatively static. Meaning, the rich aren’t getting richer at the expense of everyone else. Over the past two decades, the income shares of the top 20 percent and the top 5 percent have remained stable at 49-51 percent and 21-22 percent, respectively.

As the chart shows, these percentages are relatively static during this time.

The middle class

Another common refrain is the disappearing middle class. After all, in 1967 53.8 percent of the population was considered middle income, those who make between $35,000-$100,000 (in today’s dollars). But the middle class is getting smaller because they are moving up to higher income groups. That is a good thing.

The size of high-income earners, those who make $100,000 or more is 29.2 percent. Forty years ago, only 9 percent fit in this category. That represents a growth of high earners of 224 percent. Meanwhile the share of low-income earners, those who make $35,000 or less, has fallen from 37.2 percent in 1967 to 29.5 percent today. A decrease of 20 percent.

Price of consumer goods

Usually involved in this discussion is the fact that everything seems much more expensive than it was a few decades ago. A lot of this is nostalgia, but there are some items that are indeed more expensive, significantly more so in many cases. That primarily includes healthcare and higher education, two sectors of the economy that are heavily regulated and influenced by the government.

Housing, which is often negatively impacted (in terms of cost to the consumer) by local government regulations, has largely kept pace with inflation.

But most every day consumer goods, everything from cars and home furnishings to appliances and clothing, have become more affordable. What do these goods have in common? They are controlled by the free market, not the government.

For some, they may be struggling. They may not have bounced back from the recession or perhaps life choices put them in a less-than-desirable situation. But we know, when we move past the talking points and political campaigns, Americans have never been doing better. The middle class isn’t shrinking. It’s getting wealthier. Incomes are not growing apart. And every day purchases aren’t getting more expensive.

Thanks to capitalism and the free market.

The city of Tupelo is in the process of drafting new regulations for food truck operators within the city limits.

According to the Daily Journal, city leaders hope to have an ordinance before the council in October. This has been in the works for some time now, with leaders talking about food truck regulations back in May.

At that time, Councilman Willie Jennings said, in proposing the regulations, “I just want to make sure the established businesses are protected.” Another councilman, Markel Whittington, said brick-and-mortar restaurants have requested food truck regulations. While he didn’t feel food trucks posed a ‘threat’ to those restaurants, he believed it was appropriate for government to act ‘on behalf of select business interests.’

“I think we have to protect some of our taxpayers and high employers,” he said.

The proposed ordinance would likely prohibit food trucks from operating on public property along major thoroughfares. Major thoroughfares include virtually all of Main and Gloster streets, two of the most prominent retail areas in the city.

And they also happen to be where most food trucks are currently located.

When Tupelo leaders began discussing food truck regulations, Mississippi Justice Institute, the legal arm of Mississippi Center for Public Policy, sent a letter to the city warning of litigation if these regulations passed.

“The very regulation Tupelo is discussing—a regulation about how close a food truck should be to a restaurant—was found to be unenforceable just this past December in Baltimore. Food truck regulations around the country have been challenged over and over in court, from Louisville, to San Antonio, to Chicago, and many places in between. Cities ultimately realize that these kinds of cases are very hard to defend,” the letter said.

More recently, the city of Carolina Beach, North Carolina repealed it’s prohibition on out-of-town food trucks from serving the city after a lawsuit was filed by the Institute of Justice. Under the law that has since been scrapped, only brick-and-mortar restaurants that have been in business for more than one year could run a food truck.

“It is a shame that it took a lawsuit to convince the town to repeal such an obviously unconstitutional law,” Justin Pearson, senior attorney at IJ said. “I’m hopeful that this vote will signal the end to the town’s attempt to use the power of government to favor a handful of established businesses over the region’s entrepreneurs.”

Food trucks are already regulated like brick-and-mortar establishments. They must already obtain a license from the city and the state, along with a health permit from the Department of Health.

This past session, Mississippi joined a number of other states in reforming civil asset forfeiture laws.

Lawmakers allowed the administrative forfeiture provision to sunset, meaning the previous law ceased to be in effect at the end of June. In response, Mississippi Center for Public Policy and the Mississippi Justice Institute joined with Empower Mississippi and national conservative organizations in thanking the legislative leadership for ending administrative forfeiture in the state.

Administrative forfeiture allows agents of the state to take property valued under $20,000 and forfeit it by merely providing the individual with a notice. An individual would then have to file a petition in court to appeal. This had the net result of requiring the individual to pay an often-large legal bill to get his or her property back. This, naturally, has an outsized negative effect on low-income households.

Asset forfeiture reforms

And that does not include numbers from police departments that work independently of the Bureau of Narcotics. Until 2017, they didn’t track or publish asset forfeiture data.

Moreover, family members, especially parents, often have their cars or other property seized for the alleged crimes of their children. This happens even though the parents are not connected to the illegal activity. For example, in 2015, the Desoto County Sheriff's Department agreed to return a 2006 Chevy Trailblazer owned by the mother of the petitioner, Jesse Smith, in exchange for $1,650.

Voters oppose civil forfeiture

Polling shows a large cross-section of Mississippi voters oppose the practice of civil asset forfeiture.

According to a poll from 2016, 88 percent of voters oppose civil forfeiture, including 89 percent of Republican voters. Every category of Mississippi voter identified in the poll — by race, age, sex, political party and district — is against police taking property from people not convicted of a crime.

By reforming the civil forfeiture system, Mississippi is adopting policies that are in-line with voters in the state and reforms that other states have enacted.

New regulatory action for home sharing is bad policy for taxpayers and is harmful for tourism.

An industry lobbyist who is also a member of government and is proposing government action that would affect his or her industry, is clearly conflicted by interests. In fact, it would be hard to find a better example of a clear and direct conflict of interest.

By proposing government regulatory action against the home-space-exchange platforms, like Airbnb and their users, Biloxi City Council President Kenny Glavan voluntarily put himself into such a conflict. In addition to his government position, Glavan is also president of the Mississippi Hotel and Lodging Association and an employee of a Biloxi Hotel and Casino. But putting all of the conflicts aside, his ideas are just not good public policy.

Uber, Lyft, Airbnb and other companies that use mobile platforms to enable people to exchange goods and services are serving an important role in our economy - one that has played out for centuries – creative destruction.

Trying to regulate these companies in ways analogous to taxis and hotels limits the innovation of all competitors and leads to regulatory capture, where companies are rewarded more for their relationships with policymakers than for their relationships with customers. Airbnb already has major financial incentives for protecting consumers and behaving well – it’s called the free market. In the mobile/digital world, where consumer rating information is ubiquitous, reputation is everything. In short, it is in the best interest of Airbnb and other home-space-exchange platforms to ensure consumers and providers are not harmed. In fact, it’s in their best interest to ensure the experience is enjoyable.

Providing enjoyable experiences for constituents through the short-term rental industry has been good for Biloxi’s tourism economy and for other locales across the state. According to data from Airbnb, more than 5,000 guests booked stays with homeowners in Biloxi in 2017. Those homeowners earned over $760,000 in such transactions. Statewide, more than 50,000 visitors stayed in roughly 1,300 homes across Mississippi last year, generating more than $6.4 million for homeowners and who knows how much more for local businesses where tourists spent money on meals, shopping, and other things.

It is understandable why people working in the hotel industry are upset by this disruption and by the fact that these platforms and their users are not governed by the same regulatory burdens of the hotel industry. The same can be said of the taxi industry. The incumbents in these industries have paid a regulatory cost. Rather than trying to impose old regulations on new, innovative, customer-focused players, we should consider deregulating the existing industries so that competition is enhanced and innovation is incentivized. The way to achieve this is through the free market. Writing new regulations and trying to enforce old ones encourages cronyism.

If we want Mississippi to grow and prosper, we’ve got stop allocating so much of our resources to lobbying and favor seeking. We need those resources in the private sector, where customer-based innovation thrives. That’s the only way to get long-term, sustainable, economic growth. That’s how Mississippi’s economic pie gets larger. Without it, we’re just fighting for the pieces – and those with the entrenched relationships among the political class will always get more.

This column appeared in the Sun Herald on August 12, 2018.

Few policy reforms have been as popular as welfare-to-work. Why, then, is the U.S. Senate trying to kill state efforts at encouraging able-bodied adults to get a job?

Welfare-to-work was one of the signature policy wins of the 1990s, resulting in the 1996 Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act.

The legislation was signed by President Bill Clinton, after being shepherded through Congress by House Speaker Newt Gingrich and Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott, who recognized welfare had become a trap for many Americans.

The two most important features of the federal law were time limits on how long recipients could remain on welfare and work requirements for those on welfare. Both of these reforms were targeted at able-bodied, working-age adults on cash assistance (TANF) and food stamps (SNAP).

The positive impact of federal welfare reform is well documented. A 2004 report by the left-of-center Brookings Institution states: “The welfare-to-work objective was predicated on a simple proposition: poor families are better off employed than on welfare.

Jobs are the best antidote to poverty. The work requirements have helped increase the employment rate of single mothers, lowering welfare dependency and child poverty.”

In particular, poverty rates for black children reached an all-time low.

In spite of its immense success and popularity, the temptation to reverse federal welfare-to-work and related reforms has been unrelenting. Even though he signed PRWORA, Clinton crafted an expansive waiver process that had already started to undo some of PRWORA’s gains by the time he left office.

President George W. Bush not only failed to reign in the waiver process, he oversaw passage of the 2002 Farm Bill (in his defense, he vetoed the 2008 Farm Bill), which loosened food stamp requirements even more, including opening up the program to noncitizens.

Then, beginning in 2009, the Obama administration used the Great Recession in an attempt to unilaterally–and thus illegally–dismantle TANF work requirements.

To say the least, the waiver process under the Obama administration was not transparent.

As late as 2013, no state had even formally applied for a TANF work waiver. Instead, regional offices pressured state welfare agencies to accept various waivers, allowing longstanding policies to be overturned with a single email. Most state lawmakers, and some governors, were unaware that their human services departments had even requested such waivers.

The results soon became evident. Whereas only 12 states had obtained statewide permission to waive food stamp work requirements before Obama took office in 2009, two years later 47 states were waiving food stamp work requirements.

This stampede was aided by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, which also suspended the work requirement nationwide for two years (2009 and 2010). Food stamp participation rates–and food stamp spending–skyrocketed, with spending doubling under the Obama administration, even as it had already doubled under Bush.

With food stamp spending hitting $80 billion in 2013, lawmakers in conservative states started ringing the alarm bell.

Kansas was one of the first states not to renew its waiver. In doing so, Kansas merely reverted to what the 1996 welfare reform law actually says–that able-bodied adults without children are only eligible for food stamps for three months every three years.

After three months, these adults have to find work, volunteer, or obtain job training in order to remain on welfare. Kansas tracked what happened to those able-bodied adults who cycled off their state rolls. Almost two-thirds obtained employment within a year, many finding permanent well-paying jobs in a variety of industries. Other quality-of-life measures, like marriage rates, also increased.

Here in Mississippi, the poorest state in America, lawmakers first started pressuring for change in 2015. In 2016, Gov. Phil Bryant declined to renew Mississippi’s waiver. And in 2017, the legislature codified that Mississippi could not waive federal work requirements for SNAP.

The $867 billion Farm Bill (H.R.2) just passed by the U.S. Senate threatens to undo this reform for Mississippi, as well as Arkansas, Florida, Kentucky, Missouri, and West Virginia. The subterfuge was accomplished by deleting 7 U.S.C. 2015(o) and moving the work requirement to 7 U.S.C. 2015(d). This occurs on p. 295 and pp. 326-327 of the 1,242-page Senate bill and is a textbook illustration of why it is bad practice to amend laws by reference without indicating what is being changed.

At best, the substitution creates unnecessary confusion. At worst, the result for Mississippi and the aforementioned states is to invalidate their state laws that specifically cite subsection 2015(o) in eliminating the work requirement waiver.

It is tempting to believe the Senate didn’t realize that in the back and forth of crafting the Farm Bill it might be gutting state efforts at helping able-bodied adults find work. Given the tendency of past Farm Bills to expand welfare eligibility, the artful deletion seems intentional.

This assumption is buttressed by the Senate’s tabling of a floor amendment aimed at reforming the food stamp waiver process altogether. In any event, the offending language needs to be fixed now that the Farm Bill is headed to conference.

As demonstrated in a new study by the Employment Policies Institute, more generous welfare entitlements lead to more poverty and more people on welfare.

Whatever the benefits of a targeted and limited safety net for families in crisis, able-bodied adults should be expected to work. Allowing these folks to remain on food stamps indefinitely is personally and socially destructive.

It is immoral that the U.S. Senate is not only doing nothing to free people from the welfare trap, it is also trying to stop states from doing so themselves.

This column appeared in the Daily Signal on July 6, 2018.