Two wealthy St. Louis businessmen have entered this year’s statewide Republican primaries, and along with touting that they are political outsiders, they will undoubtedly advance a simple theme:
Government needs to run like a business, and no one is more qualified for the job than a proven chief executive from the private sector.
I think we should have this discussion.
It’s too early to handicap the prospects of John Brunner and David Spence—running for U.S. Senate and governor, respectively—and let’s harbor no delusion that their races will be determined by anything resembling an academic debate over governance.
No, this will come down to the hallowed traditions of Missouri politics. You know, gaffes and scandals and crazy sound bites and really crazy sound bites.
But at press time, neither Brunner nor Spence had properly weighed in on important matters of state, such as the need to defend God and His followers against those who would take His guns. Or against the moral assaults of the homosexual agenda and the science-intelligentsia and all of their blasphemous claims that the world is more than 6,000 years old. Or against those immigrants streaming across the Mexican border of our state. Or against birth control and labor unions and black people and animal rescuers and all the other Muslim socialist terrorist threats to the Christian state as we know it.
Until we hear from Brunner or Spence on these pressing issues, we don’t know them at all, do we?
So let’s talk about what we do know: They’re wealthy businessmen. And they want to throw out the politicians and run the state like a business. And they’re new.
Good. Let’s consider what they can do about running Missouri like a business.
We’ll begin by dismissing Brunner. It might not have occurred to him, but the U.S. Senate is a legislative body, not an executive one, so running a business has nothing to do with being a member of Congress. CEOs are accustomed to making their own decisions and having their own way. An effective senator more resembles the CEO’s lobbyist than the CEO.
Besides, how can a wealthy businessman claim to be an outsider when Congress is bought and paid for—in both parties—by the world of big business? He’s like a guy showing up at a company he owns disguised as a customer.
Brunner is out of here, at least until he offers us some decent sound bites in the GOP’s Battle of the Unhinged. Tell us God called to tell you He didn’t really ask Todd Akin to run for office. Make sexist Sarah Palin jokes about Sarah Steelman, and use the press conference announcing your apology to attack the media.
Do something. But you can’t talk about running government like a business.
David Spence is a different story. He ought to make a central theme out of running government like a business.
If he does it honestly, he’s likely to get crushed electorally, but that’s expected to happen anyway, so he might as well do Missouri a public service in the process.
Full disclosure: I know Spence a bit, and he’s a smart, self-made man with a good heart and quite an ability to build companies, including Alpha Packaging. I know nothing of his politics, although one would assume he’ll lean far to the right of the likes of me. I doubt that he’d either want or get my endorsement.
Spence has no name recognition in the state and no experience in running a statewide campaign for governor (or for that matter, any political campaign) and he’s a rich guy from St. Louis, which I wouldn’t advertise on billboards outstate. I suspect he’ll have plenty of money at his disposal, but he may find this task is a lot harder than it looks.
But let’s assume that Spence gets the GOP nomination and gets to take on Gov. Jay Nixon, a veteran of more than three decades in state politics and a man who has won five of his seven statewide races. Nixon enjoys some of the highest gubernatorial approval ratings in the nation; he has countless more friends, supporters, and visibility than Spence in all of the state’s 114 counties; and he’s really not likely to lose his re-election bid.
Nixon has collectively received more than 8 million statewide votes spanning seven elections. Spence hasn’t had his name on a ballot. This doesn’t look like much of a contest.
That said, Spence ought to stick to one theme: He ought to talk about running the state like a business. I mean really talk about it in business terms, so that people might begin to understand what competition among state governments is all about.
It’s simple: Don’t think about Jefferson City as the place where the state Capitol is located. Think about it as the headquarters of Missouri, Inc.
Missouri, Inc. is a company engaged in the business of state government. It has 49 direct competitors, the other American states, and they battle each other on a wide range of fronts.
Missouri, Inc.’s competitors share its mission of seeking new and better jobs and economic development for citizen/customers. Every governor in the nation boasts about the new jobs that he or she creates. Every one ignores the ones that have left the state, only to end up being boasted about by another governor.
It’s just a big circle.
But there’s other competition as well, as all of the states/companies handle education, transportation, tourism, law enforcement, prisons, social services, and other common points of focus. They battle like companies.
And while they differ from private-sector businesses in that they are not driven by profit, they compete for market share and talented employees, just like big companies do. They need quality services and a motivated workforce, just like big companies do. They need vision and growth strategies, just like big companies do.
And Missouri, Inc. is getting clobbered. It has been on a downhill slide for decades, with no turnaround in sight.
Missouri, Inc.’s economy is stagnant at best. Its citizens/customers lag far below the national average in per-capita income, and its investment in a wide range of key services ranks 40-something among the 50 states/companies.
Meanwhile, Missouri, Inc. has the lowest-paid employees in the nation. Dead last.
All good CEOs want costs under control, but those with vision realize that a fairly compensated, motivated workforce is a key ingredient to any company’s long-term success. Dead last?
What would a new CEO do?
The first thing would be to find some money. No self-respecting business prides itself in having lower sales than the competition. No CEO boasts about holding down revenues. Conversely, every good CEO wants to be a builder.
If CEO Spence wants to run Missouri, Inc. like a business, then he would have to call for a vast overhaul of its revenue structure. The goal wouldn’t be to have the highest revenues in the nation—this isn’t about profitability—but it would be to develop enough resources to provide quality services delivered by decently compensated employees.
That would mean higher taxes and user fees wherever Missouri, Inc. was dramatically below the competition, with a goal of ending up somewhere in the middle of the pack to assure a combination of good services at a fair price. That’s what smart companies aspire to do.
If CEO Spence did this in the real world, he’d get really pulverized, especially as a Republican. Calling for an increase in any tax or fee structure is widely regarded as political suicide; Nixon hasn’t made the mistake once as governor, and he’s not likely to start now.
But it’s exactly what needs to happen if someone wants to run Missouri, Inc. like a business.
There are countless examples of where to raise money, but even the two most relatively painless—the lowest-hanging fruit—are viewed as strictly off-limits by the intelligentsia of both parties. One would be tobacco taxes; the other, interstate highway tolls.
Missouri, Inc. ranks a shameful 50th out of 50 in tobacco taxes, with a 17-cent-per-pack tax that’s less than half of the national average. To put this in perspective, the state could institute a 12-cent raise that would yield something like $80 million in new revenues annually and still have the lowest tax rate in America.
Ditto for tolls on Interstate 70. Several years ago, Missouri, Inc.’s Department of Transportation (MoDOT), successfully competed (against fellow states/companies) to obtain tolling authority from the federal government. But Missouri, Inc.’s legislature—frozen by lobbyists—hasn’t given MoDOT permission to institute those tolls, despite the fact that a large share of the hundreds of millions of dollars to be generated would come from out-of-state truckers and tourists.
A competent CEO would seek to fix this immediately at Missouri, Inc. Good luck trying, CEO Spence.
What would more likely emerge from a candidate like Spence is a narrative that suggests a private-sector CEO is somehow more likely to understand how to bring jobs to the state than a politician. This would have validity only if the CEO provided the real story, not the usual pretension that low taxes and special incentives are all that matter.
A real CEO knows better. He or she understands that a complex decision to relocate one’s company involves far more than tax policy (which is short-term and always subject to change). A serious CEO looks at a wide range of quality-of-life factors such as location, climate, education, and the quality of the workforce.
In this regard, Missouri, Inc., already among the lowest corporate tax states—with little to show for it—needs to make a serious investment in education and other services if it wants to win in the long run. That costs money.
In the parlance of business, this would be known as making an investment in the company and its people and its future.
It would be refreshing if newcomer Spence, a bona fide CEO, actually told the people what they need to hear in this regard, rather than what they want to hear about Missouri, Inc.
I can’t imagine he’ll do it. It would be political disaster if he tried.
But he’d be my favorite CEO.
SLM co-owner ray hartmann is a panelist on KETC Channel 9’s Donnybrook, which airs Thursdays at 7 p.m.
