BC Council to navigate Bossier way challenges

At its next meeting, the Bossier City Council will begin facing the consequences of getting along and going along with the old Bossier way, but will have a chance as well to begin its repudiation, focused upon happenings in newly-reelected Republican Vince Maggio’s district.

City elections occurred as news broke about a questionable deal the city made with two property owners in Maggio’s district. At the Council meeting days before the election, Republican Councilor Brian Hammons queried as to why the city was giving each a new parking lot.

As this space previously had noted, the answer City Attorney Charles Jacobs gave, that supposedly the owners had threatened lawsuits over alleged damage from construction of the nearby Walter O. Bigby Carriageway, when investigated lacked credibility. Instead, available evidence suggested that public dollars were being spent to aid the private business of a friend since childhood of GOP Councilor David Montgomery, a conclusion also forwarded in a post at the news and entertainment web site SOBO.live. That media outlet put in a public records request to obtain exact documentation of the incident.

Low stimulus crucial to LA amendments' defeat

It’s time to settle the debate that has arisen about results concerning recent statewide constitutional amendments that failed, and we begin by reviewing a major contributing factor to their defeat by nearly 2:1.

On paper, the most persuasive interpretation would be the results mainly are an artifact of structural turnout patterns. For decades, as the major political parties have become increasingly ideologically pure and polarized, the effect first observed half a century ago of the top-bottom nature of Democrats – support shaped like a barbell wider at the top of the socioeconomic scale, thinner in the middle, and again expanded at the bottom – and the toy top nature of Republican support – thinner at the top and bottom of SES, thick in the middle – has given way to a more defined inversion of the class system insofar as political parties go.

Increasingly, this reordering where now support for Democrats resembles more an inverted pyramid and Republican identifiers shape into a standard wine bottle has implications for election turnout. In the middle of the 20^th century observers believed higher-turnout elections favored Democrats, since less-reliable voters disproportionately had lower SES characteristics who in turn disproportionately voted for Democrats, but as the inversion began to accelerate (because of the emergence of the affluent society after World War II that brought a different issue mix in elections to the fore) that tendency disappeared.

Cast critical eye on opposing less govt spending

Already the narrative is being pounded home by leftist-sympathetic traditional media that suppressing federal government spending will prove as cataclysmic to America as Ramses’ stubbornness did to Mosaic Egypt. Don’t buy it, as illustrated in a case in Louisiana.

Recently, the Acadiana Advocate delivered a story about the impact of reduced federal spending on farm subsidies. In particular, it lamented projected cuts to U.S. Department of Agriculture programs that help food banks and schools purchase food from small local farmers.

It agonized a bit over the lost income this market distortion would cause farmers, but the main problem it conveyed was the distribution of free or subsidized food would be attenuated. Individuals associated with food banks and similar organizations were reported wringing their hands over the possibility of increased “food insecurity,” which allegedly a seventh of Louisianans suffered.

Election reformist tide swamps BC insiders

The clean sweep starting in 2021 of Bossier City elected majoritarian branch officials that was completed last week also resulted in a near clean sweep of Bossier political insiders in favor of reformers, the latest city elections produced.

Exactly four years ago the city was being run by a mayor with 16 years in office and a set of city councilors who had among them 127 years of service. Come Jul. 1, it will have a mayor of 4 years in and combined service among councilors of just 12 years. None will have been in office more than four years.

Moreover, this rolling revolution will put a majority of reformers outside of the current political establishment in charge of the Council, a first in the city’s history. In their rookie terms, both Republicans Chris Smith and Brian Hammons left no doubt as to their reformist chops. They will be joined the GOP’s Cliff Smith, who through his activities as a concerned citizen left no doubt of that status.

Try again with fiscal reform minus bad timing

The constitutional amendment that rewrote the fiscal portion of Louisiana’s Constitution failed primarily because of a tactical error made by Republican Gov. Jeff Landry and his legislative allies.

This amendment, #2, sunk last weekend with only 35 percent of the vote on 21.3 percent turnout. The key to understanding why and how this translates into the blunder is in who was activated to vote against it.

Much was made of some conservative opposition to it, but the size of the loss is the first indication that this didn’t have much to do with the result. Picking up on a Trojan Horse meme circulated by the left designed to ensnare them, these individuals put their thinking caps aside and shunned the pro-growth, smaller government aspects of the reforms in favor of panicked long-shot interpretations that passage meant the state would tax churches out of existence. However, only had the result been a much closer loss would they have made the difference.