Merger study may promote efficiency over politics

Local citizen leaders from Shreveport have floated the old idea to merge my institution, Louisiana State University Shreveport, with Louisiana Tech and Louisiana State University Medical Center Shreveport. While there are as many political reasons to do this as educative ones, if done for the latter something like it could improve educational efficiency in the state.

The idea isn’t new, and its history shows the political perils. During the term of the previous LSUS chancellor in the first part of the 1990s, he brought up the idea or merging us and Tech, which essentially got him run out of his job and town. A map reveals much of the logic behind his idea: LSUMCS is just miles from LSUS, which then is 70 miles west of Tech in Ruston, which is just five miles east of Grambling State University in Grambling and 30 miles west of the University of Louisiana – Monroe in Monroe. Also, 65 miles to the southeast is Northwestern State University in Natchitoches. Why scatter all these centers of higher education across an area of population of just a half million people?

Tech seemed the likeliest candidate for a merger.

Polling shows campaigns to feature even more attacking

New polling information about the only two substantive contests for statewide office up for grabs this fall shows a little clarity emerging on one but the other as murky as ever, and points to campaigning up until the Oct. 22 election becoming even less tied to issues and more to personality.

A poll conducted for WWL-TV in New Orleans for lieutenant governor showed the current occupant Jay Dardenne leading his opponent Plaquemines Parish Pres. Billy Nungesser 40-27 percent, and current House Speaker Jim Tucker up on incumbent Sec. of State Tom Schedler for that office. The margin of error computed for these races, both involving only Republicans, is four percent.

Ordinarily, that would tell us that while the Secretary of State matchup is close enough not to declare a definite leader, Dardenne’s lead is significant.

Official uses misdirection in downplaying LA pension reform

If we know nothing else about government, we know that bureaucrats always stump for more resources associated with their agencies . This explains several disingenuous remarks made by Louisiana State Retirement Systems Director Cindy Rougeou to members of the press regarding reform efforts that would downsize the power and resources of state pension funds.

They came as part of her stumping for Amendment 2 that voters will face in less than two weeks, which would mandate some portion of forecast budget surpluses to pay down the unfunded accrued liability of the four state retirement funds, which hold and manage money from defined benefit pensions in which most state employees participate. While she correctly voiced support for that measure, she proceeded then to try to explain away the responsibility that policy-makers and retirement officials had in creating the over $18 billion hole that must be wiped away according to the Constitution by 2029, in the process trying to cast doubt on proposals to assist in that made by the interest group Blueprint Louisiana. A list of these erroneous assertions made by her and the real facts concerning them is instructive.

Assertion: “The problem is the debt, not the benefit being earned.” This she argued because the state did not pay enough into the system in the past to make sure projected payouts would be covered.

Fact: The state contributions did not cover projected costs because benefits were too generous in the first place.

Report shows LA state policy-makers excelled on economy

Welcome music to the ears of Gov. Bobby Jindal and legislators running for reelection comes from a group reporting that Louisiana has fared recently better economically than about two-thirds of the states. But it’s important to understand the relationship between policy and results to assess validly the credit policy-makers may take for this.

The Federal Funds Information for States noted that while Louisiana was slightly below the national average in growth of personal income over the previous year, it ranked 10^th in employment growth, 11^th in population growth, and tied for the 13^th-lowest unemployment rate. All in all, this ranked it 15^th overall among the states for the past year.

Just in time for these elected officials to take credit, it reflects most on Jindal as by far he has the most influence on state economic policy as a single individual, even though collectively the Legislature has a lot to say about that as well.

Jindal endorsement leaves opening for his anti-tax critics

Through his nearly four years as governor, Bobby Jindal has attracted charges from a distinct but vociferous minority claiming he says one thing and does another. But now given a Hobson’s policy choice, Jindal has presented to these heretofore spurious opponents at least a small piece of ammunition that for the first time supports their assertion.

To date, the examples they have used lack validity. They complain about the ethics agenda that was largely Jindal’s creation that actually depoliticized and improved the process, that Jindal has not really reduced the size of government when the number of employees funded by state revenues continues to decrease and savings are being wrung through increased efficiencies in areas such as indigent health care, and that Jindal, who has argued consistently the opposite, supports “tax increases” yet cite increases in fees-for-service, including tuition, as obviously inapplicable examples. But, hold the phone on that last point, as, buffeted by political reality, Jindal has given them an opening with the first legitimate example validating their claim.

Asked about Amendment 1 on the Oct. 22 ballot, Jindal expressed support for it.

Leftist crackup preparing to plague NO misses diagnosis

The nervous breakdown of the political left has come to Louisiana, courtesy of a planned copycat march/sit-in/camp out/exercise in futility in New Orleans along the lines of the “Occupy Wall Street” mob.

Like its point of origin, whose members have set up shop around the environs of the financial center of the world in New York, this “Occupy New Orleans” bunch appears to be just as disoriented, clueless, and anti-intellectual as the original and its other knockoffs. Let’s hope that this screed of self-indulgence doesn’t turn as racist and destructive of other peoples’ livelihood as some of the others.

One question is how long the voluntarily unemployed, the lazy, and the aging hippies that typically comprise these groups can last if they get this thing in the Central Business District started and keep it going. If they can stand ditching the products of the capitalist system, such as their laptops, digital recorders, cell phones, and the like and actually live in hovels, where will these spoiled children of affluence, if not from their parents, get money to keep it up? In New York, professional trendy progressive groups are donating and collecting money on behalf of the juvenilia, as are labor unions through in-kind infrastructural aid such as organizers and supplying their members as reinforcements. Will similar kind of aid come to the New Orleans rabble?

Another is whether it will have any policy impact, even the most miniscule. In this version, it plans to camp basically across the street from the Federal Reserve Bank branch in New Orleans, one of the branches of the Atlanta District in order to protest ever-chimerical “corporate greed.” Just how situating this in a relative financial backwater compared to the entire world of finance will achieve their ill-defined, nebulous goals no doubt escapes not just anybody who can rub two brain cells together, but also the protesters themselves.

Workers in downtown New Orleans – actual contributors to and producers of benefits society enjoys, unlike the extended summer breakers scheduled to encamp in Lafayette Square – probably for the most part will ignore the spectacle, although some might get a kick out of the roadshow, like when the circus comes through town. In fact, they should see them as an objects pity, due to the self-deceived failing to have the knowledge, intelligence, or wisdom to understand the biggest impediment to however they define “economic justice” is not a system that maximizes the opportunity to contribute to the well-being of all who put forth effort, but is elites in Washington who use government to intervene inappropriately in that system while spouting the same platitudes issued forth by these skulls full of mush ready to descend on New Orleans like locusts.

No joke, naming deal gets Jindal, taxpayers off hook

I guess the joke finally has run its course upon the Louisiana Superdome finally getting naming rights sold, sparing the state and the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration some small embarrassment and enriching taxpayers.

Some years ago I wrote a satirical piece on the issue. For many years, the state had been trying to sell the naming rights to the facility for some extra revenue. Throughout this period, the state also was paying a subsidy to the New Orleans Saints essentially to keep them in town by defraying operating losses. In that post, I imagined that the state was going to rename the Superdome the Super Bowl, which would bring in extra tax revenues because the National Football League would have to hold the genuine Super Bowl game there every year and invite the Saints. As I observed then, “it’s probably the only way [the Saints] ever will play in the Super Bowl.”

But about the time the real-life Saints cancelled that statement by their win in Super Bowl XLIV, the Jindal Administration was renegotiating the long-standing subsidy deal that had been costing at its conclusion $23 million a year.

Political intrusions on land-use choices unwelcome

Prior to state elections taking the forefront, in Shreveport a series of questions have arisen concerning the political ramifications of normally dull concepts such as corridors, access roads, and state-local relations. Their answers may indicate more attention being paid to political rather than economic and quality-of-life concerns.

Louisiana State Highway 3132, colloquially known as the Inner Loop, presently runs south through Shreveport and Caddo Parish from Interstate 20 ending at Flournoy-Lucas Road, or State Highway 523. (See here for a map.) The general idea held by policy-makers of all governments both state and local was that this road would continue curving to the southeast until it intersected State Highway 1 north of the Port of Caddo-Bossier, or would follow an alternative conception routing it farther south in the hopes of intersecting whatever manifestation of Interstate 69 appears in the next decade and thence to the Port, but either option would continue it from the present intersection.

It also illustrates a complex mix of governmental authority because of the nature of American intrastate governmental relationships.

Hannan's choices showed proper nexus of faith, politics

Particularly wonderfully about the life of Roman Catholic the Most Rev. Archbishop Philip Hannan, he lived long enough to see his beloved Church return to an increased emphasis on the eternal and transcendent and provided a beacon to do so when dealing with the political world.

Hannan, who served as the Archdiocese of New Orleans’ leader for nearly a quarter century, was installed just as the American Church began sliding towards infatuation, still not entirely ended, with the trendy and secular. Yet Hannan, in his pastoral mission, never let what by the 1970s and 1980s had become overemphasis on pursuing a social gospel among many in the Church interfere with living the actual Gospels.

As such in the world of politics, he bore invaluable witness to verities when other Catholics became distracted.

Amusing, but minor candidate wackiness degrades debate

With the likelihood that any of the challengers to Gov. Bobby Jindal could defeat his reelection less than that of the Earth reversing its rotation and its axis of rotation shifting to east-west, since these marginal candidates that in any other contest with more substantial candidates would be ignored almost totally can find much more spotlight, expect their oddities to emerge into full view. Take, for instance, the ranting of one Adroniki “Niki Bird” Papazoglakis.

The social worker running as a Democrat sees a politicized vendetta against her because her nonprofit group, after being considered last month to land a $5,000 stipend to produce a speaker for a seminar sponsored by the state’s Department of Children and Family Services in January, recently was told none would be forthcoming, after she had qualified to run. The unmarried and childless pending graduate degree holder worked as the policy director of the group and was informed budget constraints nixed the offer.

That may be true, but the department additionally stated that the group lacked the proper qualifications to get the award in any event. And, legally, Papazoglakis’ filing for office may have alerted department officials that she disqualified her agency from any kind of participation, as the state ethics code bars that kind of relationship of state government with an elected official who is a principal with an organization receiving such a payment – which, yes, if the Earth’s tilt and spin changed, she could be by early next year.