Today the Louisiana Board
of Regents for Higher Education emulated academia when its mandarins
encounter a substantial decision that will trigger controversial change – it
punted.
Sounding like students who didn’t realize the
gravity of an assignment and so didn’t start working on it until too late, enough
members of the Board said they wanted more time to complete the task. By
consent, they put off dealing with changes to the implementation and
enforcement of admission by exception rules until next month.
This started a couple of years ago when unilateral
changes made by Louisiana State University Baton Rouge saw the proportion of its
admitted students not meeting entrance standards promulgated by the Board go
above its permitted four percent limit. The
exceptions cohort graduated at a significantly lower rate, bolstering the
argument that they should have attended other state universities with lower
admissions bars.
Louisiana looks set to lose a key actor in its
struggle to provide a quality education to its children.
State Superintendent of Education John White will
resign after just over eight years on the job. He has served longer than
any appointed superintendent, and the longest since the four elected terms of Shelby
Jackson that ended in 1964.
White has earned his departure, since he found turbulence
in his job almost from the start. Actually already part of the state’s
educational scene as superintendent of the state’s Recovery School District
which then existed only in New Orleans when given the state’s top job, he had a
mission to implement long-reaching reforms passed into law only months into his
tenure, changes bitterly opposed by many in an educational establishment and its
allies who had overseen over the decades Louisiana’s plunge to the bottom.
Louisiana has a chance to correct a mistake it made
two decades that could rein in electricity price increases.
Last
month, the state’s Public Service Commission voted to study the impact of
forthcoming rate increases. These appear guaranteed as the generating infrastructure
of investor-owned utilities, specifically the state’s largest supplier Entergy,
has aged, necessitating large-scale replacement. Legally, utilities may pass
these costs over time to consumers, from residential to industrial.
A consortium of two dozen large industrial users,
which altogether use a substantial amount of the state’s power, maintain that
the conversion would increase rates by 50 percent. They have argued they should
have the choice to leave the monopoly system historically favored by the PSC,
which locks in a provider to a customer. Entergy in 2018
provided 79 percent of all power for industrial use.
It looks like Louisiana won’t drop any more
congressional seats this time around on the census. But the way things are
going, expect that to change in 2030.
That’s the conclusion you can draw from how reapportionments
appear a year out from digestion of census data to be collected Apr. 1. Alabama,
California, Illinois, Michigan, Minnesota, New York, Ohio, Pennsylvania, Rhode
Island and West Virginia look poised to lose at least one seat in the House of
Representatives, while states seeming ready to gain at least one include Arizona,
Colorado, Florida, Montana, North Carolina, Oregon, and Texas.
On a per capita basis, Louisiana has been the
biggest loser since 1990. It has shrunk from eight to six seats, although states
with much larger populations have lost more seats. And there’s a reason for shrinking
populations, a review of fiscal data shows: policies that damage state
economies, which consequentially puts state finances under stress, discourage
residency compared to states with sounder economic agendas.
As
recent tragic events remind, some spiritual leaders in Louisiana must act
to increase the safety of their congregations.
At last year’s end, a gunman opened fire inside a
church in the Metroplex area. In a few seconds, those bullets killed two
worshippers. But that was all, because armed members visited the like on the
shooter.
Texas recently relaxed requirements to enable churches
to provide their own security. In essence, any individual with a concealed carry
permit may take a handgun into a house of worship, unless the organization with
responsibility over the church explicitly bans these. Not only does this event punctuate
that broad Second Amendment rights can save lives, but it also signals to other
malevolent people that in states with such laws houses of worship may not offer
soft targeting, thereby discouraging these acts of violence.
It keeps getting worse for Medicaid expansion in
Louisiana as further research fortifies the conclusion that it operates largely
as another form of welfare designed to redistribute wealth.
Earlier
this month, the Foundation for Government Accountability issued a report
highlighting the facet of expansion its advocates desperately don’t want the
larger public to know: a significant portion of those made eligible and
enrolling in it already had or could afford insurance, and in enrolling merely
relieved themselves of that expense which they transferred to taxpayers, many
of whom must foot their health insurance out of their own resources. And in
that document, Louisiana figured prominently.
That research focused on the segment of the population
most likely to take advantage of the sweet deal, those families earning 100 to
150 percent of the federal poverty limit. Any under 138 percent qualify for
expansion, but from 100 percent up to that – about 85 percent of the total
cohort – they also can qualify to receive (very generous, often on the order of
90 percent or more) premium support to buy insurance through exchanges.
However, the law forces them into Medicaid if they qualify for it.
That the explanations keep changing surely indicates
the inherent dishonesty by those forwarding the rationalizations, Louisiana’s
Democrat Gov. John
Bel Edwards keeps reminding.
Remember when Edwards insisted that Louisiana
needed to keep, if not all, at least part of a sales tax increase to prevent
emergent budget deficits? Instead, federal
tax law changes made that retained increase superfluous and prompted a
historic run of overtaxation.
So, he, his administration, and his allies
searched for new justifications behind the tax increase that will hang around
the people’s neck and the resultant over-funding government for the next
five-and-a-half years. Several versions have come out since: the overflow can replenish
the Budget Stabilization Fund and pensions funds, it can go towards capital
outlay, and/or it would provide a buffer in case of a national economic
downturn (to match the one already underway during Edwards’ term).
