Even as he goes down to defeat, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards
could not help but extend his hand up and parallel to him, with palm facing him,
lowering his pinky, and telling a number of Louisiana families to read between
the lines.
He reacted as such when learning that the
Louisiana House of Representatives’ budget plan included a provision that if
the Taylor Opportunity Program for Scholars did not receive full funding that
recipients would frontload tuition payments. The Republican leaders who
backed the notion felt that a change in fiscal fortunes would produce more
money than anticipated later in the fiscal year and if not then families would
have more time to secure alternative funding. At present, TOPS appears to have only 70 percent funding.
However, neither of these rationales made a
favorable impression on Edwards, who wanted to lard up at least another couple
of hundred million dollars’ worth of tax increases on top of the $2.3 billion
legislated over the past 13 months to close the gap. Keep in mind Edwards
himself in his executive budget proposed cuts to TOPS, as a strategy to coerce
the GOP majorities in the Legislature to hike taxes.
A virtually parenthetical comment derived essentially from a
footnote created a bit of turmoil at the Board of Elementary and Secondary
Education, illustrating a larger debasement of the scope and purpose of public
policy research that has wafted through policy discourse for the past half-century.
During
a routine report adoption, Louisiana School
Board Association Executive Director Scott Richard challenged a passage
that noted the state’s Student Scholarships for Excellence Program, known
colloquially as a voucher program that allows lower-income families with
students at or who otherwise would attend low-performing schools to have the
state pay for tuition at a qualifying public or private school up to a certain
level, saved the state money. He pointed out a sentence in a February Legislative
Fiscal Office report alleged that the state would save $8.3 million without
the program.
BESE gubernatorial appointee Doris Voitier then
asked for the report’s alteration to include the LFO snippet. It is no accident
that Richard, whose clients generally loath the program because it both
highlights their failures and removes resources from their control, and
Voitier, a careerist of government monopoly schools whose appointer Gov. John
Bel Edwards opposes vouchers and in this year’s budget tried
to scale back funding of these, called for this. So the report forwarded to
the Legislature will have both, treated as equal.
A couple of announcements last week confirmed what
my Advocate colleague Stephanie Grace
argued as the coming
of the “permanent campaign” to Louisiana gubernatorial politics, one of
these proffering a surprise that perhaps demonstrates how far its tentacles
have reached and what it means going forward.
Grace notes that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’
statement – just a bit over six months into a four-year term – that he would
run for reelection signals a mindset that state politicians increasingly
incorporate campaign optics into the governing strategies they employ and
therefore the issue preferences advanced and the methods they used to do that.
She speculated that the Republican-led Legislature, particularly the House, and
GOP Atty. Gen. Jeff
Landry, a potential rival to Edwards’ reelection, in the methods they
oppose and/or try to upstage Edwards in the pursuit of his agenda, join Edwards
in this mode of governance.
However, less well-noticed at about the same time
Edwards confirmed the obvious that Republican Lt. Gov. Billy Nungesser in
a speech insisted
he swore off running for governor, thus against Edwards, in 2019. In the
first half of the year, Nungesser had coordinated with a leading Republican
Party official in an odd,
if not far-fetched, scheme to bring business to the state apparently
without Edwards’ knowledge, despite that his job description has nothing to do
with such efforts. Such a move could be seen as attempting to raise his profile
for ascension to the state’s top spot.
The toxic mixture of envy and cluelessness of
Louisiana’s Democrats went
on full display yesterday, captured by a single remark with the handiwork
of their governing philosophy as the background noise.
In the wake of the failure of HB 38 by
state Rep. Malinda
White, which for the next two years only would have allowed deductibility
of 57.5 percent of excess federal income tax deductions on state individual income
taxes unless the combination of mortgage interest and charitable contributions
exceeded that mark, state Rep. Gene Reynolds,
head of the chamber’s Democrats, stupidly opined “They voted to protect the
interests of the super-rich.” From such a statement, and if representative of
the state’s Democrats, demonstrates they have no clue about the bill’s potential
consequences or the bankruptcy of the ideology behind it.
Officials of the foremost backer of the bill,
Democrat Gov. John
Bel Edwards, alleged that most of the 23 percent of returns that took the
deduction concerned filers of $100,000 and over. The latest data (fiscal year 2014)
indicate that about 25 percent took it, at an average of a little over $2,800.