Landry sizzling, Caldwell fizzling towards showdown

Louisiana’s Treasurer John Kennedy found a tough decision of his made somewhat harder by impressive fundraising totals by attorney general candidate former Rep. Jeff Landry, while the incumbent Atty. Gen. Buddy Caldwell by his totals shows he faces a tough road to reelection, increasing the odds of just he and Landry facing off.

Caldwell raised only around $39,000 for 2014 while Landry scooped up nearly three-quarters of a million bucks. Landry also loaned himself almost $100,000 more than the roughly $300,000 Caldwell has in his entire account. His contribution haul topped that of the unannounced candidate Kennedy’s – who obviously ponders entering the contest since he went to the trouble of polling it with his name in it – by some thousands, although Kennedy’s many years in his current office have allowed him the chance to build a campaign warchest three times the size of Landry’s and over 10 times larger than Caldwell’s.

Two points of significance emerge from these numbers posted by these Republicans. One is that, while no means uncompetitive, Caldwell shows surprising weakness. An incumbent should do better in fundraising without having to depend upon most of his meager total coming from one side of one case on which his department’s actions favor. This reflects Kennedy’s polling, where Caldwell pulled just one-sixth of the intended vote while Kennedy topped it at almost a quarter of the electorate. Some 300 grand is nothing to sneeze at, but that Landry has lapped him almost four times indicates not a lot of faith at this point in Caldwell.

Jindal record bruised by bucking LA political culture

Naturally, Republican conservative Gov. Bobby Jindal has faced a constant barrage from the liberals and their mainstream media handmaidens for the last dozen years (the latest such, exemplifying both valid points but selectivity, is here), and over the course of his governorship from the less ideologically principled political right as well. Yet more recently some principled conservatives have begun to criticize him, even if more on instrumental rather than on ideological grounds. It’s an outcome less a consequence of executional shortcomings and more concessions to the fundamental challenge his state stewardship has brought to its political culture.

Over several decades the notion that some group out there, usually conceptualized as anybody out of state and within it anybody who had made a success of themselves outside of the fields of sports or politics constituted bogeymen that deprived Louisianans of things that government could redress, ingrained itself into the state’s collective psyche (and, if you were black for the first half of this period, that was true with most whites in that class and actually against you). Reduction of the degree of the native-born population, increasing educational attainment and (more recently) its quality, and wider exposure to information all have eroded this populist fancy, but it will take decades of continued societal evolution for it to mutate into an inert form.

Principled conservatism rejects populism, even as the two can coexist with the bogeyman becoming government controlled by outgroup forces, as a genuine conservatism posits a government minimized in size and reach to maximize liberty lacks the power to pursue populist schemes. Nonetheless, in an environment where populism has burrowed in like a tick on a hound, to create conservative policy it’s difficult not to make some kind of accommodation to populism that ends up producing half-measures that bring disenchantment to conservatives because the neither fish nor fowl quality of them brings a host of implementation issues.

Make curbing LA licensing run amok election issue

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, as Pres. Barack Obama surely is with a call Louisiana policy-makers particularly should heed to get rid of useless, special-interest-serving licensing requirements.

Actually, Obama didn’t go quite that far in his budgetary call to apportion $15 million to states to study ways of achieving this, declaring only that barriers impeded market entry or mobility. But that’s the practical effect of licensing, which only occasionally and for skilled professional, important work should be necessary. For all others, licensing is a way of limiting the supply of workers in a field, allowing those in the club to charge higher fees and thereby unfairly extract more wealth from consumers with lesser incentive to deliver quality from this market distortion sanctioned by government.

The idea has special trenchancy for Louisiana as it abuses licensing in this fashion more than any other state, according to the perspicacious Institute for Justice. It was this organization that pressured successfully the state at least to tone down its ridiculous florist licensing through removal of the absurd arrangement quiz and won in court the overturning of the state’s asinine regulation that to sell caskets one had to have a funeral director’s license. Among the sillier requirements still on the books are licensing for interior designers (the people who spend other people’s money), pest control workers (the guys with the spray cans who spend 5 minutes spraying corners and baseboards), and home entertainment installers (who wrangle with rolls of cables that don’t get sorted out until the fifth try); most states don’t require any licensing for these jobs. Other over-regulated occupations require surrealistic effort – barbers and cosmetologists must have 350 training days, greater than eight times that required of emergency medical technicians.

Socialized medicine system claims BR hospital ER

Predictably, critics who call the closure of the emergency room for Baton Rouge General Medical Center a failure of public policy show the real failure comes in their unwillingness to grasp of the laws of economics, especially as it related to health care.

For months, the expenses of its emergency room had been outstripping its revenues, especially after the old Earl K. Long Medical Center closed due its deteriorating and outmoded condition, with most of its services done with state money now performed at Our Lady of the Lake Regional Medical Center. This is as BRG Mid City’s was the only ER left near the north Baton Rouge area, the lowest socioeconomic status area in town, and many patients that used EKL for primary care instead of taking the longer trip to OLOL started heading to Mid City.

More business usually is good and helps the bottom line – unless you are in the health care business with its perverse incentives due to extensive subsidization of some people’s health care by others. In fact, business was so good at Mid City that its statistics show the typical wait in the ER was twice the national and Louisiana averages and typical treatment time half again longer, with the federal government’s indicator of hospital quality defining its ER volume as “very high,” or a minimum of a visit every 8 minutes.

Vitter, Boustany choose poorly on Jones Act support

Sen. David Vitter’s ability to graft conservatism onto Louisiana’s populist political culture has made him a force in the state’s politics and an early favorite to win the governor’s race next year. That doesn’t always translate into the best policy, with him and a fellow member of the state’s Congressional delegation running afoul of this error recently.

With new power as a committee chairman, Sen. John McCain has pledged to increase pressure to eliminate requirements of the Merchant Marine Act of 1920, better known as the Jones Act. Passed in the heady, protectionist-oriented days after World War I, this law prohibits foreign-built, foreign-registered vessels with foreign crews and without substantial domestic ownership from journeys transporting cargo from one U.S. port to another directly. Both Vitter and Rep. Charles Boustany, whose constituencies contain a significant minority of shipbuilding activity in the country, have voiced opposition to their fellow Republican’s idea. Not surprisingly, generally supporters in Congress come from the majority of states that have no intracoastal shipping interests, while the opponents cluster from coastal states.

McCain, with considerable evidence backing him, says the much higher building and operating costs of these vessels cheat American consumers, for the overpricing get shoved down the supply chain and ultimately down the throats of the buyers of the shipped products. While Boustany, Vitter, and others argue that this prevents foreign competition, whose pricing can be a third or even quarter of what gets paid in America for building and staffing, from eliminating a large number of jobs, they conveniently forget the jobs being cost to the country as a whole by redistributing economic wealth towards favored but less inefficient industries, depriving this input from activities that would use these kinds of resources more efficiently and thereby create greater wealth, more jobs, and better ones.

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.