Landrieu joins Vitter's cap sensibility; Melancon absent

Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu now makes for a Louisiana exacta for the upper house, joining her opposition party colleague Republican Sen. David Vitter in proposing non-extreme legislation to piggyback on existing law that governs how private entities compensate for oil spills of their responsibilities.

Weeks ago, Vitter proposed a very sensible plan calling for a liability floor of $150 million, twice the current cap, with the maximum increasing to an amount equal to four times the company's profits during the previous four quarters. Of course, being that Democrats run the Senate, it was dead on arrival for two reasons: it came from a Republican running for reelection especially in a year where Democrats may lose control of the Senate and because some Democrat senators are enthralled with the know-nothing wing of the environmentalist movement whose prejudices call for, if not an outright ban on offshore drilling, punitive measures to discourage it into oblivion.

That latter attitude is encapsulated in a current bill that would have no liability cap at all which would drastically reduce exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, limiting it only to the largest concerns, in effect reducing supply, driving up prices, and eliminating jobs and economic growth, particularly in Louisiana, as smaller firms would consider it too risky to explore. With politics blocking Vitter’s plan and the current Pres. Barack Obama and Senate Democrat-preferred plan too radical and counterproductive, Landrieu has stepped into the breach with a reasonable approach.

Landrieu’s idea would raise the current cap from $75 million to $250 million and require companies to pay into an insurance policy covering damages of as much as an additional $10 billion. It would base premiums on the size of a company's drilling operations, meaning larger firms would pay more. She has been researching this for some time, and, to date, evidence is that the costs passed on by the policy issuance, while onerous, would not appear to cripple exploration. While not as good as Vitter’s, because his would promote more careful behavior by forcing companies to bear the burden and does not require a periodic cost that would discourage drilling for some, it’s much better than what the Democrat leadership has stumped for.

It’s also good politics for both. Vitter’s Senate challenger Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon has come down on the side of unlimited liability and all the problems that entails, while Landrieu has a long ways to go in rehabilitating herself after she was the decisive vote that will produce a health care insurance system of higher cost with worse outcomes for which she will not be forgotten soon, so this can’t hurt in winning her back a handful of votes.

Hopefully, if the Senate Democrat majority doesn’t put politics ahead of people and miraculously go with Vitter on this issue, at least it will head in Landrieu’s direction, provided the required insurance is not burdensomely priced.

Reform job left incomplete unless Jindal spends capital

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While his enthusiasm deserves applause, at the same time Louisiana Treas. John Kennedy partially misdiagnoses what truly was a missed opportunity concerning the budget that emerged for state government this fiscal. Where he was correct and not provides lessons for a more effective approach in the future.

Kennedy blamed both Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Legislature for insufficient cutting and thus reliance on non-continuing fund sources (such as reducing in many cases bulging trust funds whose contents are unlikely to be used any time soon). He also outlined alternatives. The story is more complex both in the practicality of his suggestions and how to go about cutting spending.

Some of Kennedy’s ideas do have merit. For example, there does need to be greater oversight of contracts let by the state for professional services. As previously noted (and brought up by Kennedy), at least some portion of educational services contracts probably really aren’t that necessarily. But others simply sound good but invite their own problems. For example, Kennedy’s idea of lopping off vacated state jobs until the state loses 15,000 presents a host of problems. As previously noted, this indiscriminately removes positions which would disallow critical needs from being fulfilled through replacement, and has no relationship to priority of tasks.

Bad theory, selective outrage mark anti-tax cut screed

Once again, the usual suspects, with little merit, complain about tax reduction in Louisiana, telling us more about their preference for big government than any useful public policy prescriptions.

A week after it seemed to have caught smaller-government fever against type, the Baton Rouge Advocate editorially went back to its old ways by highlighting a warmed over report, the gist of which already has been critically examined, chastising the state for reinstating deductions and marginal rate cuts to state income taxes. In the end, it concludes that these actions were unwise because they took revenues from the state.

Such a view shows a vast ignorance about economics and how the world really works, and disregards that state government’s fiscal difficulties come from its revenue-raising structure and overspending. Its most basic mistake is that it relies upon a model of tax policy that is unsustainable in theory and in data, a belief that taxation rates do not affect human behavior.

Jones, ban, berms: politics explain odd Obama policies

As days go by and the Pres. Barack Obama Administration continues to engage in perplexing policy regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it becomes clearer that it is part of a political strategy where Democrats are going “all in” ideologically speaking at the expense of immediate electoral consequences.

Given the vast negative opinion nationally , and especially in Louisiana, about the moratorium on deepwater oil exploration imposed by Obama, one might think that this would have been abandoned, particularly as the judiciary gave Obama a chance to retreat by striking down the first ban, twice, and additionally given its enormous costs and incredible overreach that its six months not only are far longer than needed to inspect and reapir but also likely actually reduces safety. (Of course, the entire exercise already has been compromised by Obama’s creative license in using expert opinion.) Yet it continues, and stealthily has acquired a near-moratorium on all new drilling including that in shallow water.

In Louisiana, the ban is suppressing the victory chances of Democrat candidates this fall. The last thing Rep. Charlie Melancon, a vocal ban opponent, needs is a reminder to voters the president from his party for no good reason is damaging a significant part of the state’s economy and that he has no influence to stop it. The small chance of Democrats retaining Melancon’s current spot representing the Third District, the epicenter of the labor force for the oil exploration industry, has about evaporated because of the ban. And nationally this cannot help Democrats against the increasingly-likely chance they will lose control of at least one chamber of Congress in national elections.

Melancon tries again with more questionable numbers

Even if its tactics are transparent, one must credit the Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon campaign for Senate for its extreme tenacity in the face of long odds. Or it may be just one more potential sign of desperation on its part.

Rarely does a campaign release its internal polling numbers but with the recent release of information it has collected relevant to Melancon’s challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. David Vitter, the campaign now has done so twice this year. Normally, this is not done because of concerns about appearance of partiality and internal strategy concerns.

But as all but two polls releases well over the past year have shown, Vitter continues to enjoy a large lead and/or majority proportion of the vote. In most he crests 50 percent of the intended vote, and in almost all he enjoys a double-digit lead. In just about every independent poll, he has had both. The two exceptions to these conditions, guess what, are the internal Melancon polls conducted by a firm that almost exclusively polls for Democrat campaign.

Previously, the inadequacies of this approach for understanding the true competitive balance of a contest and the inherent unreliability of the results (for example, without having knowledge of the sampling frame or exact question wordings) render them useless for telling us anything meaningful about a contest. However, because one news outlet cast these concerns aside and ran a story stumping for the questionable numbers, perhaps the campaign thought it could get such favorable coverage again by repeating the exercise – especially because, as divergent as the result were last time, these were even more out of step with the rest of the polling (including independent ones) world.

This latest edition has Melancon behind but within the margin of error when no other poll (even other partisan Democrat ones) shows him close to that. The campaign claims it is because of an obscure personnel issue that few voters know about, so that is an unlikely source of such a large difference. This admission probably means that was part of a push poll process, where the pollster asked one or more questions highly loaded and distorted against Vitter before asking for a vote intention. We would know about this and other matters such as sampling frame and the like only if the Melancon campaign releases unexpurgated data and reports from the poll, and it is unlikely to do that because of the problematic reliability and validity aspects that are sure to come out.

But we can conduct an exercise that researchers who gather and analyze primary data use, estimating construct validity of the concept of debate, vote intention. When a researcher wishes to evaluate how well an instrument, such as a survey question, really reflects the concept being studies, construct validity is established by seeing how closely related the measure in doubt is to others that supposedly do the same. Since all other studies are showing a much different distribution of vote intention that Melancon’s internal numbers released publicly, we must conclude this one doesn’t show much construct validity and hence isn’t doing a good job in revealing the reality of the Senate contest.

Yet that’s not the purpose of the number’s publicity, that being to jumpstart the Melancon campaign and to remove the long-standing air of inevitability that not only will he lose, but lose big. As such, it represents spin and nothing else of value.

Traylor stalking horse to weaken Vitter for Democrats?

Now that the cat is out of the bag, the real question is, what exactly motivated former Louisiana Supreme Court Justice Chet Traylor to run in the Republican primary against incumbent Sen. David Vitter?

Traylor said he filed against Vitter at the last minute – with no campaigning to that point and no money raised – because he was encouraged by Republicans and Democrats who felt negatively about Vitter’s character. Three years ago Vitter abruptly apologized for commission of a “serious sin” believed to be linked to a prostitution ring but never confirmed, nor was Vitter ever charged with any crime in connection to the unspecified behavior.

But as the wider world has learned (even as some in northeast Louisiana had known before now), Traylor himself has ethical issues, around a tangled web of romantic relationships with married women and with the settlement of the estate of his late wife who divorced her previous husband, now-state Rep. Noble Ellington, to marry him. That occurred after his election to the state’s highest court, although he ran unopposed for a second term almost a decade after the incident so it never came out as a campaign issue. His wife died about the time he resigned from the court three years later, although now he appears to have a romantic liaison with his stepdaughter and litigation about the estate came after he left the bench.

None of what Traylor has done in these incidents appears illegal and some people may not even consider his actions unethical. Yet Traylor surely knew that this information would come out immediately and that it would sour many people on him who presumably might be looking for an alternative to Vitter because they were uneasy with his moral behavior. Why would you allow all of this sordid detail to be exposed nationally to oppose somebody on whom you had next to no disagreement on substantive issues and also state the main reason you were running because of ethical issues on which you yourself were wide open to criticism and thereby unlikely to win? Nor, given the dynamics, was it ever likely that Traylor had any real shot of winning the nomination even without the publicizing of this history.

Traylor is no political novice who might be excused for not putting all of this together. Unless he’s an extremely unaware and/or quirky individual, only one reasonable explanation presents itself – he has allowed himself to be used as a stalking horse by Democrats for some unknown reason. If so, this represents the last, most desperate gamble by Democrats whose favored candidate Rep. Charlie Melancon trails Vitter badly in polls.

If Traylor has come to some kind of agreement with Democrats to enter the contest to cast as much negativism on Vitter as possible in order to weaken him and give Melancon a boost (or do the unlikely in winning to present an even weaker opponent to Melancon), of course neither he nor leading Democrats ever will admit this (who already are providing restrained cheering about his entry into the race). The only visible clues would come from whoever ends up donating to or assisting Traylor in his campaign, if a lot of typical Democrat heavy hitters give him money or Democrat apparatchiks appear working on his campaign. But even the absence in large part of such individuals does not disprove that a bargain had been struck.

This is just one explanation, but perhaps the most logical given what we know. The only thing known for certain is, given the circumstances, his decision to run at best is bizarre and only can help improve the microscopic victory chances of Melancon.

Big govt regulation also at fault for LA shipyard decline

As noted recently, unwise defense policy by the Pres. Barack Obama Administration precipitated a naval contracting crisis that means Louisiana, unless unlikely events unfold, will lose thousands of jobs in shipbuilding over the next few years. But the actions of Obama to ratchet back unnecessarily naval forces, described more precisely, acted as just the straw that broke the camel’s back, with an interesting parallel to the same rationale that caused the Democrat-run federal government to allow the oil spill disaster in the Gulf of Mexico to turn into a catastrophe.

Also as recently noted, adherence to an ideology that government knows best and that puts special interests over the common good has afflicted the Obama Administration’s response to the crisis. One manifestation of this attitude was the refusal of Obama to waive the Merchant Marine (Jones) Act of 1920, which needlessly delayed cleanup assistance. This same law also played into the dynamics that put the U.S. shipbuilding industry into a delicate position where now loss of government contracts can doom shipyards like Avondale.

After World War II, with tremendous capacity and little competition, U.S. shipyards reigned supremely. But they did not change as did the times. Foreign competition heated up while domestic builders continued to kowtow to union demands, raising costs to build. Further, regulations like the Jones Act created tremendous disincentives for a domestic industry: why build domestic ships when the cost of using them in transport became so high that it is now cheaper is many instances for U.S. industries to transship from a U.S. to foreign port and then back to the U.S., or to use only foreign materials, than to ship U.S. products directly from port to port?

Even as market pressures have reduced the wage differential that the largely-unionized shipyards in the U.S. had to suffer (not without bitter fights in the past), and the U.S. isn’t the only part of the developed world to have experienced shipbuilding decline, that past has put U.S. shipyards in a noncompetitive posture too dependent upon government contracting with few commercial contracts. Ill-advised defense policy then pushes more and more of them out of business.

A welcome change in defense philosophy could turn things around, but, absent that, this reality adds another imperative for repeal of the Jones Act. The clock can’t be turned back to restore the industry or to have the Obama Administration act more expeditiously without the Jones Act to have prevented oil slick damage, but ridding us of it going forward at least would stop U.S. taxpayers from subsidizing maritime-related jobs to the tune of nearly $4 million each annually, to give the shipbuilding and carriage industries a chance to get new markets, and to reduce costs to other U.S. manufacturers. Other anti-competitive regulatory regimes must be reviewed and altered with the goal of reviving the U.S. maritime industry in mind.

It’s bad enough that the Democrat-run federal government put its boot on the vulnerable neck of Louisiana first by Obama’s inadequate response to the oil spill, then increasing the pain by his politically-motivated drilling moratorium that serves no useful purpose . Worse now, it increases the pressure still more by policies to cripple more than just the state’s offshore drilling sector. This needs to change before these policies damage the state further.