The Last Thing Missouri Needs Is More Urban Planning
A recent op-ed in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch called for substantially increasing the power of urban planners in St. Louis and...
Building Height Limitations Are Unwise
There is a controversy in Kansas City’s Country Club Plaza. A developer would like to build a nine-story building on...
More Evidence of Failures of CIDs
The two sure things in life are said to be death and taxes. I might add a third (admittedly related...
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More Hotels; Fewer Taxes
Despite the fact that Kansas City just held an election in which the city’s profligate use of tax subsidies played...
Plugging the Port Hole
A recent column by Dave Helling in The Kansas City Star called for Kansas City Mayor Quinton Lucas to challenge...
How Bad was the CDFA Study of Incentives in Kansas City?
It was with great anticipation that I received the long-overdue study of economic incentives in Kansas City conducted by the...
Crosby Kemper III and Patrick Tuohey Discuss KCI and Country Club Plaza on Ruckus
The Show-Me Institute’s Chairman Crosby Kemper III and Director of Municipal Policy Patrick Tuohey appeared on KCPT’s Ruckus on Thursday,...
How Missouri’s Special Taxing Districts Promote “Legal Plunder”
In the land of the blind, the man with one eye is king. When it comes to Missouri’s rapidly proliferating...
Shocker! KC Developer Builds Building, Pays Taxes!
In a sign of the times, Rob Roberts at The Kansas City Business Journal found it newsworthy that a developer...
Development Can Happen without Subsidies
It is a sign of how bad the subsidy culture is getting when Kansas City Star reporter Diane Stafford has...
The Luxurious Intercontinental Hotel is Blighted?
For those trying to take Kansas City’s tax policy seriously, the discussion of blighting the luxurious InterContinental Hotel on Country...
How Will the Convention Hotel Help Taxpayers?
Let’s assume for the sake of argument that the planned convention hotel in Kansas City does increase convention business. How...
Show-Me Study Featured in New Book
Tax subsidies for economic development were designed to go to poor areas that actually needed development. But that is not...
Urban Neglect: Kansas City and TIF
My colleague Michael Rathbone and I authored an essay titled “Urban Neglect, Kansas City’s Misuse of Tax Increment Financing.” In the essay we examined...
Kansas City Dead Set On Its Dead-End Development Ways
Last week, the Kansas City Star compared the Kansas City region’s race-to-the-bottom tax incentive competition to economic cannibalism. The newspaper cited a...
Double Trouble: Kansas City Considers Extending Trolley Line To Plaza
It seems like only yesterday that I was calling Kansas City’s trolley plans a slow motion train wreck, yet the...
