Overdue end coming to govt-paid LA bus service

There’s no reason to end the LA Swift service. But there’s every reason to end any state or local government involvement in it.

LA Swift is the bus service, heretofore paid entirely by the federal government and by small passenger assessments that vary between $4.40 and $5.00 a trip, between Baton Rouge and New Orleans. The idea was, after Hurricane Katrina, to provide an opportunity for those displaced from the New Orleans area to have access, perhaps even be employed, in the area while temporarily housed in Baton Rouge or select points in between. The federal government put up all the funds, presently about $2.3 million a year.

Over the years, naturally enough, the program began to mutate beyond its original purpose and thereby expand. While a ridership survey showed the majority of rides involved getting to and from work, nearly half were reported as occurring for visitation purposes, and some for health care reasons. Only a third did not have a private car to use for transport. It also promised some amenities in traveling, such as ability to view televisions, wireless connectivity, and the ability to transport bicycles. It grew into eight round-trips on weekdays, five during weekends with more limited stops, serving over 12,000 riders a month and thus promoting the following possibility.

Landrieu distorts, fibs for cover on Obamacare vote

With the necessity of an election now less than a year-and-a-half away, Sen. Mary Landrieu knows her reelection chances are most imperiled by hers being the decisive vote for the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act, better known as “Obamacare.” Thus she took the opportunity at the end of the recently-completed regular session of the Louisiana Legislature to write an opinion piece on a matter related to it that provides a textbook example of how she will try to distort, if not outright fib about, the issue during the campaign.

Landrieu addresses in writing the Legislature’s decision not to expand coverage to all but the lowest-income households already covered, a choice made optional for states as a result of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling almost a year ago on the matter. She berates its majority and Gov. Bobby Jindal for this opposition, and gives alleged justifications that, when analyzed in the light of truth, simply do not hold up.

Initially, she claims that “By saying no to the expansion, they said no to positive economic impacts to Louisiana’s economy and health care improvements for many people who desperately need and deserve better care.” She then cites statistics from the leftist advocacy group Families USA that purport to show increased economic impact and jobs – but naturally ignores the report’s lack of comprehensiveness in its approach that makes its conclusions next to worthless.

Policy-makers fail public again on film tax credit reform

While tax reform to begin the process of eliminating the income tax would have been great to have achieved, the single largest disappointment of the just-concluded regular session of the Louisiana Legislature was almost nothing was done to rein in unproductive tax credits, despite an entire commission studying the matter after the previous session’s end. And of these, failure to make meaningful change to the motion picture investor tax credit program should rankle taxpayers the most.

Not only is this the single biggest waster of the people’s money of all such items extant, where citizens get back fewer than one dollar for every seven transferred to mainly wealthy individuals (including state elected officials), but also the time was just so ripe for it to happen. Mounting budget pressures plus the commission’s exposure put the credit in the crosshairs, so the political will seemed present to make major modifications. There was talk, and legislation, about capping what would be claimed for salaries and other expenses and limiting qualifying investors’ stakes, and even sunsetting the program after a couple of years if it did not prove cost effective.

The move by a group of legislators calling themselves the “fiscal hawks” to find new sources of revenues also seemed to make meaningful change more possible. They talked up cutting the reimbursement levels of this and other credits in order to find dollars to offset their Great Satan of “one-time money.”

Guillory switch unhinges Democrats, with more to come?

Until last week, the U.S. Senate had more black Republicans in it – Sem. Tim Scott – than did all of the states’ (50 if we include Nebraska’s unicameral body) upper chambers combined. Now they’re even up, thanks to Louisiana’s state Sen. Elbert Guillory making the switch back from Democrat of six years ago to the party in whose governance body he once served.

On the one hand, it’s just a label. Guillory’s overall voting record since his election in 2007 to the state House and then special election to the state Senate in 2008, according to the Louisiana Legislature Log voting index (where 100 means all votes in a year were of the conservative/reform variety) gives him an average of just 56 – exactly the overall average of the entire Legislature over those five years putting him a shade on the side of Republicans who typically espouse conservatism and reform ideas. His one year in the House and first in the Senate were much lower – a 32.5 compared to nearly 72 in the next three years, going from a district 58 percent black and 69 percent Democrats to one 54 percent black and 63 percent Democrats. The district now is 55 percent black, 61 percent Democrats.

On the other hand, the symbolism carries import politically both positive and negative. No group in America even is close to the loyalty that blacks display to Democrat candidates of any color, but at the national level black Democrat candidates score slightly better support. Whether that gets scrambled by having a black Republican candidate is another matter. Guillory has joined an extremely small group; while current data is difficult to come by, a decade ago only a half dozen black Republicans sat in state legislatures, and every one of them represented a majority white district. Possibly no black Republican ever has won election to a state legislative spot in a majority-minority black district since the 19^th century.

Clash of populism, principle within GOP defined session

At the close of the 2013 regular session of the Louisiana Legislature, some speculated that potentially a new day could be dawning in the state’s politics. That’s correct, but for absolutely the wrong reason cited.

The revolutionary aspect of it all supposedly is that the Legislature is willing, ready, and able to stand up for itself against the executive, who presumably uses his formal but more his informal powers of office to dominate policy-making. In this view, session results allegedly showed legislators could take charge and become the prime movers of policy.

Evidence of legislative leadership is said to be its ability to carve out a budget more to its liking, particularly of the House, than what the governor preferred. Elements of both parties in the House combined forces to drive the process, resisting even the Senate, which seemed to be closer to Gov. Bobby Jindal’s preferences. Meanwhile, Jindal himself abandoned his stated priority given before session commencement of tax reform to eliminate income taxation and appeared to do little or could do little to keep the budget shaped along his preferences.

GOP unforced LA budget errors leave room for mischief

While the parameters will become clear by the end of the day, the apparent compromise product for Louisiana’s operating budget represents a small defeat for conservatives in concessions on extra spending that perhaps did not have to be made and in the potential for bigger government down the road.

As previously noted, the conservative Republican faction that controlled the Senate, about a third of the House of Representatives, and had the backing of Gov. Bobby Jindal, largely could have dictated terms with the assistance of the non-conservative wing of the party (with a couple of other non-party members) in the House, the so-called “budget hawks” who comprised about another third, cutting Democrats out of the deal. Being that as a whole Republicans had a majority, that should have been the natural outcome, and it largely was.

The “hawks” came on board because the use of “one-time” money – a term that includes surplus recurring revenues dedicated for one purpose but which are used for another and nonrecurring monies from one-off transactions such as property sales – was limited and two bills, HB 437 and HB 620, were promised to be passed in addition to the budget in HB 1. They actually didn’t have much leverage over the former because the amount of that money fell under the total specified in the House rule that would have required a two-thirds vote. But there was trading going on with the legislation, because of the majority needed not just to pass a budget, but also because of the constitutional two-thirds vote requirement to take it up (and the other two bills) with less than three days to go in the session.

Democrat LA budget overreach can rescue GOP agenda

Perhaps on the brink of getting glorious something for absolutely nothing, if Republican legislators are smart Democrats may find they got themselves to pull defeat from the jaws of victory on the issue of Louisiana’s budget.

Yesterday, unanimously the House rejected Senate changes to the operating expense budget HB 1. These included adding back in from previous House receipt of the bill some “one-time” money, or a mix of recurring revenues that do not initially go to the general fund and nonrecurring monies from things like asset sales, spending more on higher education and on a educator salary bonus, and reducing cuts to government contracting and other ancillary services that otherwise might not be implementable.

This probably mostly pleased one of the three House factions, conservative Republicans, despite their misgivings over the increased size of government that resulted. That change they likely countenanced to satisfy Democrats, the chamber’s minority but made relevant in the debate because other Republicans, termed “fiscal hawks,” had broken with the leadership and initially proposed a combination of tax increases and cuts, reductions in the least valuable tax credits, and a semi-gimmick tax amnesty in order to wipe out any use of one-time money. Although each group represents about a third of the chamber, the “hawks” had leverage because of the House rule that forces the use of any one-time money past a certain growth factor, which produced a figure of $188 million this year, to be approved by a two-thirds vote.

Reform bill failure leaves inefficient LA higher education

The failure of state Sen. Conrad Appel’s SB 117 to become law invites another look into how financing of higher education in Louisiana occurs, the facts and myths surrounding it, and therefore how to proceed to reduce the inefficiency of the system while improving outcomes.

His bill would have created a commission to assign performance standards for schools, which subsequently would have been used to apportion state money to them on the basis of outcomes. In testimony, Appel said while the state lagged in support per student compared to southern state peers, the more important issue was performance and getting greater efficiency gains. Critics, and perhaps explaining why the measure failed, argued it was a lack of money in the system where its increase might get better performance.

However, the data largely validate the idea that higher education in Louisiana can be run more efficiently and does not suffer that much from lack of resources. Using the latest data available (2010), the state (of all of them plus the District of Columbia) ranks 18^th highest in per capita state appropriations, yet ranks close to the bottom both in degree completion (defined as those finished within six years) and in retention. But in total expenditures per capita, Louisiana is right in the middle, and ranked 32^nd in amount of spending per full-time equivalent student.

Jindal, allies can play winning budget hand

If you’re Gov. Bobby Jindal and his legislative budgetary allies, you call the bluff.

In the annual exercise of poker being played with real money called the state’s budget, the three-player environment that has surfaced in the Louisiana House of Representatives this year includes Jindal and conservatives who almost exclusively are Republicans, a faction of Republicans and a few others who term themselves “fiscal hawks” who have supported creating a slightly smaller budget of a mixture of tax increases, spending cuts, tax credit reductions, bonus funds in the form of a tax amnesty, and changes to the budget process connected to this year’s product, and Democrats who want higher spending and taxes. The Jindal crew has picked up an important ally in the Senate Republican majority, giving them a firm grip on two of the three legs comprising the lawmaking tripod.

This weekend, the HB 1 version (older one here) that came back from the Senate challenged the strange bedfellow alliance of the “hawks” and Democrats, in different ways. For the former, it pumped in “one-time money,” a mixture of money that includes nonrecurring revenues from things like property sales and recurring dollars that do not originate from the general fund, and decoupled the several tepid and one obnoxious reforms of them from passing as part of this upcoming year’s budget. For the latter, it included items liberals had complained about lack of inclusion such as a public elementary and secondary educators pay raise although in a one-off form, more money to higher education, the small tax increase on merchants, and generally bigger government. For the former, it contests their public oaths about the budget and images as reformers they have tried to carve, while for the latter it entices them to come aboard by giving them stuff they publicly have stated they support.

Senate grows LA govt to overcome dissident intransigence

Somewhat predictably, the Louisiana Senate threw back to the House of Representatives an operating budget designed to bludgeon the political clout of both the minority party Democrats and a faction of the majority party Republicans by making offers that can’t be refused nor can be resisted. Meanwhile, the fiscal system that produces this chaos remains the same and grows government.

The version of HB 1 that came from the House represented a significant departure from the version initially introduced by Gov. Bobby Jindal. Most dramatically, it removed large swaths of some kinds of “one-time money,” such as transfers of surplus money from dedicated funds and borrowing from dedicated funds of state-authorized entities, and replaced it with another kind, a tax amnesty program. It also made some minor across-the-board spending cuts, eliminated a small amount of wasteful tax credits, and hiked taxes somewhat on retailers by eliminating the state provision to pay for them acting as sales tax collectors for the state in a timely fashion.

It also came weighed down by a series of measures that the GOP faction, self-styled as “budget hawks” because they talk loudly about budget reform without ever actually addressing satisfactorily the issue for the most part, stumped to institute budget process reform at the margins. With one exception, these would be innocuous to helpful in defining the process.