As the law of the instrument goes, give a small boy
a hammer and he will find everything he encounters needs pounding. That vibe
emanates from a recent article
from the Lafayette Advertiser concerning
Louisiana’s college enrollments, where the author fixates on one factor explaining
variation in that level when in fact this one thing, tuition and fee levels,
has less to do with enrollment variance than many others.
The piece begins by alleging “Eight years of state
budget cuts have led to some student turn-offs to public higher education in
Louisiana, and it's showing,” then further postulates cuts translated into
higher tuition and fees, which then discouraged some students from attending.
As evidence, it points to the number of attending students in academic year
2010 – a figure derived from what is called the “14th day registration,”
or the number enrolled at an institution on the 14th day of the fall
term – compared to 2015, a drop of around 10,000.
The obvious question appears immediately – if “eight
years of state budget cuts” caused this, why do we view only five years of
data; why not view AY 2008 to AY 2016 data? Not including the latter endpoint
makes sense at this time because it’s impossible: the 14th day
number for all institutions won’t come through for another month. Which then
begs another question: why did this piece get written now, using nearly
year-old data when waiting a month would have produced fresh data?
They
may have a point, but good luck in ever getting the state to pay off or
change its ways, so compromise should be the order of the day.
Walker Mayor Rick Ramsey feels the state’s
construction of Interstate 12 exacerbated flooding the town received in the
middle of the month. Specifically, the retaining wall of the east-west highway running
down the median appeared to trap water that pooled into the municipality. More
aggravatingly for Ramsey, years ago he requested that the state’s Department of
Transportation and Development provide more drainage underneath, which largely
went ignored.
Present DOTD Secretary Shawn Wilson, who served as
chief of staff of the agency almost a dozen years prior to taking the helm
earlier this year, as much as admitted Ramsey’s proposition. Framing the
argument in expectancy value terms, he said the decision to put in the barrier
and drainage associated with I-12 did not factor in such a severe weather event
because of its remoteness in happening. He hoped the department could work with
those aggrieved by the outcome rather than have the controversy go to court, as
Ramsey as threatened.
Quite correctly the Louisiana Republican Party refused
to censure Public Service Commissioner Scott Angelle and Commissioner of
Administration Jay
Dardenne for their failure to support a Republican candidate for governor
last year, even as Dardenne deserves approbation for the greater disservice he
did the state’s people.
Last weekend the GOP’s State Central Committee
met, with items for consideration including a vote of formal disapproval for Republican
Angelle’s staying silent when Republican Sen. David Vitter made the
runoff against eventual victor Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards,
and one for Republican Dardenne’s endorsing of Edwards. Angelle now runs for
Congress while shortly after the election’s conclusion Dardenne took the top
job in the Edwards Administration.
Angelle deserved no such condemnation. He gave no
reason for his reticence, which clearly came from two sources even if he never
publicly will admit this: his pique at voters’ rejection of him and a belief
that Vitter should not have bested him but also he wanted to continue to have
an elective political career. Thus, he would not endorse Vitter who in his mind
he felt “unfairly” bested him (because Vitter had admitted commission of a “serious
sin” believed to have been soliciting prostitution yet whose bare-knuckle style
of politics kept him in power despite that embarrassing revelation), but he
also would not endorse Edwards as a way to pay back an ungrateful electorate
and to count coup on Vitter because to do so probably would anger his
conservative base too much, leading him to forfeit any chance for him to run
for Congress successfully.
Louisiana’s Republican Party wisely
pulled back on a resolution that reputes to prevent felons from running for
office using its label, but pledges made to try again continue to ignore what
state and constitutional law have to say on the process.
This past weekend, the party’s State Central
Committee rejected bringing to a vote such a measure amid concerns that it did
not have the legal authority to do so. Members had fewer than 24 hours to
review the proposal that emanated from the Executive Committee made up of party
leaders, even as it wisely
dropped ambiguous language prone to politicization that also would have
prevented “racist” individuals from running as Republicans.
Party leaders maintained that a Louisiana
political party did have the legal authority to limit use of its label in this
fashion by candidates, alleging that both the state’s chief legal officer,
Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry,
and the state’s chief elections officer, Sec. of State Tom Schedler,
both Republicans, concurred. If so, whatever rationale purportedly lies behind
this argument seems counter to statute.
Upon pondering about the fiscal impact of the
recent floods striking the Baton Rouge area, my Advocate colleagues got
it half right and half wrong. Through an editorial correcting
the misimpressions of some, they argued that, no, the volume of recovery
money shoved through the economic system will not produce a “bonus” that will
solve a looming budget deficit, but missed the mark in neither will it also exact
a significant penalty that could worsen the fiscal situation further.
When the hurricane disasters of 2005 occurred, at
first policy-makers believed the massive scale of devastation would put a
serious crimp into the state’s economy, driving down collected tax revenues. Two months
after the levees failed in New Orleans, the Revenue Estimating Conference
convened to slice nearly $1 billion out of budgeted general fund collections
for fiscal year 2006, and a subsequent special session of the Legislature went
out to chop around that much out of the budget.
What they did not figure was that exact extreme destruction
would prompt so much recovery spending coming from sources outside of the state
– the federal government and private insurers – that this produced a surge in
general tax collections. In the decade afterwards, the federal government would
spend $18.2
billion on various aspects related to the storms, its flood insurance would
pay claims of $13
billion, and private insurers would pay out around $25.9
billion, almost all of these coming in the first five years.
Perhaps Louisiana Education Superintendent John
White has outfoxed Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards in
the struggle to keep the Student Scholarships for Educational Excellence Program
from attenuation.
When the budget process shook out, the program
that provides funding for students that attend or would attend subpar schools
to enroll in an eligible private or public school took a funding hit of over 5
percent. This meant that several hundred families already accepted into the program
would not receive vouchers, a program first.
But behind the scenes White
formulated a deal with providers to take on the wait-listed students. He said,
with the blessing of the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, that the state
could give through the families to schools enrolling these children around $100
guaranteed for each enrollee – more than $5,000 below the typical tuition the schools
could charge the program participants – in the hopes that perhaps the
Legislature in the spring would create a supplemental appropriation to pay off
the balance.
So much anxiety over what kind of relief Louisiana
can expect in response to the flood disaster surrounding Baton Rouge earlier
this month would disperse by wringing the politics out of the disaster funding
process.
Observers
fret about the relative lack of seniority of Louisiana’s members of
Congress, that at least two and possibly three of the most senior will not
return, that the most powerful Majority Whip Rep. Steve Scalise must
balance state and party interests, and that past votes against sending money to
other locations may come back to haunt the state when discussing the state’s chances
of landing a decent sum to assist in paying for cleanup. Without a system so infused
with politics, these questions would matter little.
In brief, current
law centralizes most disaster recovery funding in federal hands. Essentially,
when
hitting a small trigger amount – about $6 million in the case of Louisiana –
federal aid of at least 75 percent of costs kicks in for almost every kind of
recovery spending, with some of an emergency nature paid fully by the federal
government. Potentially, by law federal policy-makers could pay for it all. Moreover,
the process for making states eligible – a disaster declaration of any of
several kinds – relies on almost total subjectivity. This low threshold and
leaving a declaration ultimately in the hands of an elected official, the president,
has led to an exponential
increase over the past nearly quarter-century in declarations and amount
paid out. From typically two or three dozen declarations a year under Pres. Ronald Reagan,
Pres. Barack
Obama now issues hundreds a year.
Although invited, last week Louisiana Fourth
Congressional District hopeful Democrat Marshall Jones did not attend
a candidate
forum at Bossier Parish Community College. Nor will he attend many, if any,
of these kinds of events throughout the election season.
In this instance, as besides BPCC both the Bossier
and Caddo Parish Republican Parties sponsored the gathering, perhaps Jones, the
only Democrat in the contest and who declined participation, could have an
excuse not to appear. But throughout the campaign expect him to dodge as many
as he can unscripted events that could feature inconvenient questions.
This is because state Democrats have had their hearts
fluttering thinking they can replicate the success of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards given
his surprising victory last year. They see a formula to create a winning
coalition: have a Democrat express social conservatism on God, guns, and the
unborn as loudly and as often as possible while infrequently mumbling liberal
economic bromides and other issue preferences of the left they figure will
reassure enough of the hard left base while conning enough of the center-right
electorate into thinking such as candidate acceptable, aided by a multitude of
quality Republican candidates not paying attention to him in the rush to bash
each other.
