No reason not to raise tuition to salvage LA budget

As policy-makers cast about for ideas to stave off cuts into the hundreds of millions of dollars to Louisiana’s higher education system, leaders in that sector are coalescing around the entire sensible option of allowing schools to raise tuition beyond the 10 percent allowable increase for this upcoming fiscal year. That option needs to be taken.

Yes, with the state ranked 18^th among all states and the District of Columbia in per capita spending it’s clear that higher education spends money inefficiently, primarily because of its overbuilt nature. And it’s not like spending generally has not been increasing for higher education in Louisiana: going back to former Gov. Mike Foster's first year, total spending on higher education to this past year has increased 95 percent. During this same period, the inflation rate increased only 51 percent. Adjusted for student credit hours delivered, which gives an indication of output, the increase still is 63 percent. In other words, in the past 18 years, changes in spending on higher education outpaced inflation.

Yet as previously noted, any plan to rectify revenue shortfalls cannot be done hastily in the breech, as this year’s budgeting task would dictate, so offered as a solution was the temporary suspension of unproductive tax exceptions. However, the tuition-raising option also makes sense. Under current law, because the Legislature oddly has a veto power over tuition hikes, that was modified to allow up to 10 percent increase unilaterally by institutions if they met certain performance benchmarks. So, the Legislature could amend it to allow for something like a one-time hike beyond 10 percent to help bail out higher education this year.

Venture capital woes further endanger Caddo politicians

With more disappointing news coming from their venture capitalist endeavor in addition to other questionable actions, members of the Caddo Parish Commission may find themselves having to pay the fiddler in reelection attempts this fall.

Last month, in a public meeting scheduled to explain why a target hiring date of employees of the beginning of 2014 by Elio Motors, and production beginning first in the middle of that year and then at the beginning of this year, have all been deadlines that have been missed, the company announced it was pushing back the production start date again until early 2016. In 2013, through a complicated arrangement, essentially an arm of the parish bought discarded General Motors infrastructure as a site for the firm to produce a mass-produced concept vehicle that has been described as anything from futuristic to a scam.

This could not come at a good time for about all of the commissioners, most of whom who voted to put taxpayer money on the line with the assumption the Elio arrangement would pay off in terms of jobs and tax revenue, instead of being left holding the bag, because of this upcoming election year. Worse, most also have been complicit in a number of other decisions that were not in the taxpayers’ best interests.

Pulling children from test taking only hurts them

This is starting to get ridiculous. So is preventing your children from being tested over material learned during the school year because the exam is structured around the Common Core Standards Initiative really striking a blow against an intrusive federal government, corporate greed, lower standards, or whatever bogeyman the standards are believed to be?

Yes, a very small number of families have divulged intentions not to let their children take these exams at the end of winter, including some in Ouachita Parish. Results from these are used to evaluate a significant number of teachers and all public schools; in fact, absences lower these scores. They also provide a marker for student progress.

Gov. Bobby Jindal, who was for CCSI before he was against it, called upon the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to provide alternate tests. But that would be wasteful and meaningless, because such tests, even if formulated in record time that could replicate the goals of instruction already performed, would not be comparable to those that came before and will come in the future, and BESE rightly disregarded the plea (which needlessly took the form of a useless executive order).

Waivers for IN still produce bad expansion deal for LA

Now that Indiana has made some accommodation to Medicaid expansion partly on its own terms, the question becomes whether this represents a sensible model for Louisiana to embark upon its own version.

As originally formulated, refusing to expand Medicaid through the misnamed Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (“Obamacare’) was a no-brainer. Even under the most optimistic projections, when the federal government went from the 100 to 90 percent reimbursement rate by 2020, after that it would cost the state more money than without expansion and its continuing to rely upon provision of uncompensated care for those without insurance and ability to pay. By 2023 the cost to Louisiana would be $68 million annually, growing at a rate of almost 15 percent a year. This means in the decade of 2020-29 the state would pay an extra $858 million above and beyond what it could. (And you don’t even want to consider the most pessimistic projection, which puts additional decade costs around $4 billion.)

And, as it turns out, for care no better than that consumed or not by the uninsured. As the study known as the “Oregon health insurance experiment” demonstrated, Medicaid users in the aggregate on outcomes did no better than the same uninsured patient population. This points to the necessity of reforming the fee-for-service rationale behind Medicaid and the patient consumption behaviors that it causes.

Manufactured controversy dies by interesting source

Former presidential candidate, U.S. Senate candidate, U.S. House candidate, gubernatorial candidate, Ku Klux Klan grand wizard, state Senate candidate, and former state Rep. David Duke has a unique quality of becoming of sillier and sillier as time passes. Despite that, Republican Rep. Steve Scalise must be thankful Duke opened his trap about recent controversy manufactured around Scalise involving the gadfly.

Keeping Duke away from publicity is like trying to separate the cast of Keeping up the with Kardashians from the gaze of a television camera, and so when Baton Rouge local radio host Jim Engster invited onto the air last week the guy who makes a living from other people’s donations, he presented himself present and correct almost as fast as Pres. Barack Obama walks back promises about red lines, closing detention centers, keeping doctors you like, etc.

Duke was miffed at Scalise when the latter had the audacity last month to offer a preemptive apology in case he might have spoken to members of a group Duke fronted that evinced white supremacist overtones. Given that the group essentially was unknown to many Louisiana politicians, that it never publicized in advance his appearance, that the talk had to do with tax issues, that the organizer of it said the invitation came from a neighborhood association of his creation (dueling for attention with a rival organization from which it had broken) and any group members there had wandered in early, that any organization related to Duke who by this time any connection to whom was toxic to any politician that would make any of them keep as far away from this as possible, and Scalise’s own history of personal comportment and principled politics, it’s certain that anything Scalise had to do with the group was incidental and accidental.

Free community college bad for LA for many reasons

For a state that already does not efficiently use its higher education resources, Pres. Barack Obama’s proposal to throw around free community college education to all would end up particularly ruinous to Louisiana, and thereby needs rejecting.

Last week, Obama announced that he wanted the federal government to pay 75 percent of the costs to those who wished to attend these, with states picking up the other quarter of the tab. Presumably, this means that anyone who graduates high school or who obtains a General Equivalency Diploma could get a full ride as long as they took a paltry six hours of courses a semester, maintained a 2.5 GPA (at this academic level much lower means either you’re lazy or you shouldn’t be able to fog a mirror), and apparently would have several years of eligibility for this. The estimated federal government annual cost is $60 billion, and assuming the proportion of Louisiana students doing this mirrors its proportion of the national population, this could cost the state $600 million annually.

That amount alone, or over half of what the state planned to contribute to pay for its entire higher education system this fiscal year, makes it a non-starter, but there are plenty of non-fiscal reasons why this is a bad idea. Marginally negative is that it could skew into community colleges students who could develop more fully at a baccalaureate-and-above school. More negative is that it would push a greater number of marginal students into college, where few will succeed (only about a fifth complete programs as it is, although some are there for knowledge from a few specific classes), wasting taxpayer resources by having to provide more instructional resources that really aren’t needed. This also spills over to more qualified students, who, knowing that a free ride awaits them if they squeak out of high school, strive for the minimum, instead of feeling an imperative they need to produce as much quality as possible in order to earn their way at lower costs into higher education, creating more capability and return on taxpayer dollars from elementary and secondary education.

Polling says Vitter sitting pretty, Edwards not so much

Last week several candidates for statewide office opened their cheeks wide and got their statewide campaign temperatures taken, bringing signs of health for some but worrying signs of sickness for others.

The information came courtesy of a pair of polls, one taken by a firm that works with Gov. Bobby Jindal, the other from a firm hired by Treas. John Kennedy, who has not stated any election intention for this or next year, that by virtue of which enabled his name to appear in both. The former, among other things, asked about potential gubernatorial candidates this year, while the latter gauged opinion about hypothetical gubernatorial, attorney general, and 2016 senatorial contests.

In the former, undeclared but possible Democrat candidate New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu led the way with 28 percent, Republican Sen. David Vitter received 27 percent, Republicans Kennedy and Lt. Gov. Jay Dardenne trailed at 11 percent each, while Republican Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle mustered only 6 percent and dragging the rear was Democrat state Rep. John Bel Edwards at 4 percent. The latter survey’s gubernatorial choices led to Vitter having 24 percent, Edwards 20 percent, Kennedy 13 percent, Dardenne 10 percent, and Angelle 2 percent.

Targeted suspensions workable LA budgeting strategy

All right, so relative to predicted recurring revenues and forecast costs for fiscal year 2016 Louisiana now has a $1.6 billion gap that could require hundreds of millions of dollars of cuts to health care and higher education from this year’s baseline. Leaving spending reductions aside for the moment, what on the revenue side could be done to close this?

A number of things could be tried, but the problem is as most of them involve structural reform of Louisiana’s fiscal system and spending proclivities, they deliver not much in the way of short-term relief, with most of that coming further into the future. For example, the motion picture investor tax credit likely would have little earned in FY 2015 that also would get claimed on the tax returns of that span. And any removal of these would require a two-thirds vote in the Legislature, which seems unlikely for almost any of them, given politics, regardless of whether they would have a major impact this upcoming fiscal year.

But the Legislature constitutionally is empowered to suspend laws, by the same vote threshold as what it takes to enact the law, which while to raise a tax is two-thirds, to pass an exception is just a simple majority of the seated membership. Suspensions may last only 60 days after the end of the next regular session, i.e. possibly through Jun. 30, 2016, and do not face a gubernatorial veto. Thus, Gov. Bobby Jindal, oft quoted indicating opposition to any non-neutral tax changes that would have the effect of an overall tax increase, could be bypassed by simple majorities to wipe out temporarily tax exceptions, a mark that seems much more realistic by which to succeed.

N.O. smoking ban likely represents tipping point

Whether it ends up a tipping point for the remainder of Louisiana, at the very least the moderate-ranging smoking ban to begin in New Orleans this spring is significant.

Last week, the City Council passed it along to Mayor Mitch Landrieu, who is expected to sign it. Slightly watered down from the initial draft, it bans smoking in all indoor public places and even a few outdoors, except where smoking accessories are made or sold and in private homes. Significantly, this exceeds in reach state law on the matter.

The question now is whether this will have an impact statewide. New Orleans arguably is the largest city in the state and certainly part of the largest metropolitan area, and the most tolerant, until now, of a smoking culture. Now with perhaps the least likely and largest of places in the state for a local government having exercised its powers given to it by the state to protect the health and safety of the public, possibly this could burst through remaining resistance at the state level for a similar kind of ban as some other states have legislated.

LA should join cash welfare recipient drug testing wave

Despite meeting the derision of some in the past, trends across the country point to the desirability of Louisiana’s joining other states in requiring drug testing for cause of welfare cash recipients.

Since a U.S. circuit court of appeals decision over a decade ago essentially ruled that drug testing to receive federal benefits constituted an unconstitutional search unless suspicion of use was established, a dozen states have passed laws that require such testing when suspicion is present. That can be established as simply as administering a test that queries about behavior. Additionally, most states, including Louisiana where this applies to benefits administered by the Department of Children and Family Services (Temporary Assistance for Needy Families), have not opted out of the federal welfare reform law that requires felons convicted of drug crimes to face mandatory testing for receipt of benefits, and 18 have had legislation to adopt testing introduced in the past year. Perhaps the most high profile discussion under way will happen in Wisconsin, where the political left’s bête noire Gov. Scott Walker, a potential presidential candidate, supports such legislation that includes a wide array of public assistance programs.

Louisiana is not one of those that has gone past the TANF rules, but has its own history regarding such legislation. A few years ago bills of this nature appeared regularly in the Legislature, with the last couple of attempts making it out of the House. But the Senate stalled them and 2012 marked the last bill filed of this nature.