Other Edwards zero delusion to impoverish LA

Besides his delusional zero COVID fantasy, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards presses on with another pipe dream – Louisiana’s future energy production featuring zero carbon emissions that doesn’t cause significant hardship.

This week, Edwards announced that the state would join the United Nations’ “Race to Zero” campaign, as part of the organization’s Framework Convention on Climate Change. This dovetails with his executive order designed to drive the state to zero emissions by 2050 that also set up a task force to find ways to do that, whose report should arrive early next year.

Forget for the moment that the catastrophic anthropogenic global warming scenario on which Edwards has based all of this is scientific hogwash and concentrate instead on how ruinous the costs will be to achieve this, especially when compared with the consequences of the mythical apocalyptic scenario currently shopped around, and that even if zero emissions were achieved today everywhere (according to the CAGW methodology) that wouldn’t even reach the target for slowing the presumed rate of warming by the end of the century. In fact, not only no policy to achieve this does not create more impoverishment, but these choices also disproportionately hit poorer people harder.

Overleveraged BC must cut costs, bid services

Especially given the amount of these Bossier City has outstanding, it makes sense to shop for the best bonding deals – unless you’re Republican City Councilor David Montgomery.

The city’s highly leveraged position turned into an issue of incumbent competence during this spring’s city elections. At almost $487 million or $6,827 per capita, of Louisiana’s ten largest cities (some of which operate under consolidated governments with the surrounding parish), Bossier City citizens owe the most per head (using 2019 data, as some have yet to file their legally-required audits for 2020). Shreveport trails by over $1,500, and only Baton Rouge’s Metropolitan Government also cracks the $4,000 level (for 2020, Bossier City’s fell to $6,561).

Worse, according to revenues available, Bossier City will come under pressure to pay it all off. Its debt-to-annual revenue ratio is 3.14, just exceeding East Baton Rouge but trailing its neighbor to the west at 3.85. The higher the ratio, the less money the city will have available to pay operating expenses in future years, thus tempting tax increases (whether by individual debt authority renewal or rolling forward property tax rates) to cope.

New flood insurance rules overall benefit LA

Although some of Louisiana’s members of Congress oppose the implementation of National Flood Insurance Program reform at this time, it’s happened and, if rolled out properly, will reduce overall taxpayer risk and bring comparative rate relief to many clients.

Since its most recent significant alteration nearly a half-century ago, the NFIP has proven a fiscal nightmare. Only property owners with a federal government-backed mortgage legally in zones defined as particularly flood-prone must have it, with it over time having received $60 billion premiums but paying out $96 billion. Further, because of data and technology abilities in that era, policy pricing didn’t reflect individual properties but instead followed a crude blanket approach that itself tended to underestimate risk in higher-risk areas and overestimate it elsewhere, which effectively meant lower-risk properties subsidized higher-risk ones.

Another factor also historically skewed pricing: federal government willingness to pass one-off disaster aid legislation to reimburse owners wracked by flooding, such as the bill last week that addressed a host of recent disasters to hit Louisiana and some other states. And yet one other has allowed for pricing that doesn’t properly account for risk: the willingness of Congress simply to write off NFIP debt as it did in 2017 and has proposed doing again. Both serve to make some taxpayers subsidize the living choices of others by assuming part of the latter’s risk.

LA treating condemned better than children

Worse than sad, it’s shameful that Louisiana treats its condemned inmates better than its children in school.

The past 18 months have brought unique problems for education of the state’s children, with draconian measures taken at first in response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. After closing doors everywhere at the end of the spring 2020 semester, in some districts these would remain shut for the entire 2020-21 school year. Even where classrooms reopened, policies such as quarantining if a child had been anywhere close to someone who came down with the virus remained in effect.

This segregation took a noticeable toll. Comparing test scores with 2019, those of 2021 dropped nearly five percent, largely driven by increased pervasiveness of remote instruction in the interim.

Rare LA positive leadership needs extension

In a break from the usual news about how Louisiana trails other states in sensible policy-making, it’s nice to see the state lead on at least one issue.

Taking effect last month, a law in Texas mirrors the administrative decision made by Louisiana’s State Bond Commission in 2018. The law requires that underwriters for bond sales by government entities in the state comply with a non-discrimination clause relative to gun manufacturers: an underwriter who has a policy of refusing lending to that industry can’t bid on underwriting government debt.

The SBC voted on such a restriction at a time when two such discriminating entities, Bank of America and Citigroup, planned to bid on $600 million in state business. Since then, JPMorgan has proclaimed a similar discriminatory policy.

Fantasy virus ending continues needless pain

Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards continues to fight the last war, unable if not unwilling to surrender the zero COVID fantasy underpinning his political party’s and liberalism’s ideological assault.

This week, Edwards continued a face covering mandate until Oct. 27 in response to the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic. This came despite new case growth slowing dramatically and, of course, relies on suspension of disbelief when it comes to the efficacy of mask mandates in the first place; at the micro level, masks do a moderate to poor job of stopping transmission, and at the macro level mandates fail to have any measurable positive effect because the attenuated micro impact is diluted further by improper wearing and not wearing. Worst of all, potentially physically but certainly psychologically mask wearing harms children, and Edwards’ order extends to any kids in school.

Most importantly, at a theoretical level, insistence on this mandate betrays propagation of the belief that public policy can eradicate the virus. If you understand, as health officials in other countries increasingly have come to, that this horse left the barn a long time ago and the virus is now endemic, mandates do nothing; certainly individuals can wear them for their own protection, as little as this may provide, but doing this will not alone, nor in combination with anything and everything, wipe out the virus. That’s why public health authorities increasingly have ditched them, even in jurisdictions with higher case rates.

Caddo overtaking NO as most ridiculous LA govt

It looks like New Orleans has competition for the most ridiculously leftist local government in Louisiana – Caddo Parish.

Because on one important metric – implementing a pilot program for a universal basic income – while Orleans has talked a good game, Caddo has walked the walk, pulling along its main population center of Shreveport. Last year, both New Orleans and Shreveport’s mayors signed up for participation in this program organized by Mayors for a Guaranteed Income (headed by a former mayor turned out of office because of his support of ideas like this) with money donated largely by Jack Dorsey, Twitter and Square founder.

The idea of paying every family a fixed amount of money every month, when as a sole means of income security without any additional public welfare programs, isn’t bad. But this program seeks not to replace but to supplement existing programs, to negative effect as research has demonstrated. Nevertheless, in the middle of a statewide drubbing in his running for U.S. senator, Shreveport Democrat Mayor Adrian Perkins signed on, later joined by Democrat New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell.

Better guidance needed to avoid tragedy

The frustration Louisiana legislators have with the Department of Health must turn into regulation and legislation that protects better vulnerable patients in nursing homes.

Last week, a joint committee that oversees Medicaid service provision met to review the tragedy surrounding several nursing homes that evacuated clients to decrepit facilities with the coping of Hurricane Ida. Over a dozen have died since, although at this point only the perishing of five has been attributed directly to occurrences at the evacuation site.

That site essentially was a warehouse ill-equipped to handle over 800 patients, with a number of them designated under the Louisiana Administrative Code Tit. 48 Sec. 9767 as code “red” or high-risk, intensive need patients. Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry has opened an investigation as to whether criminal charges should come over the incident, while Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose office ultimately oversees the department, also said scrutinization was in the offing.

Partisan Campbell hypocritically chides GOP

When Democrat Public Service Commissioner Foster Campbell penned his latest jeremiad about partisan political actions, no doubt he stood in front of a mirror to get a good idea of what a political partisan looks like, and a hypocritical one at that.

Campbell recently fobbed off an opinion piece onto some northwest Louisiana media outlets, in it complaining about Louisiana Republicans elected to Congress. He wrote that the state needed federal disaster aid owing to a string of destructive storms, but that its House Republican members voted against a bill that contained such relief. He alleged that these highly-paid representatives turned their backs on constituents due to GOP orders, letting partisanship get in the way of fulfilling the state’s needs.

Then there’s the rest of the story that Campbell deliberately leaves out. The bill to which he referred has as just one part authorization to spend on disaster-related matters. It also extends several expiring programs and continues funding federal government activities, with the existing budget expiring at the end of this month, through Dec. 3 at those current levels.

Bring virus policy sanity, emulate Scandinavia

The political left of Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards often points to the more-taxing, freer-spending, greater-regulated Scandinavian states as worth emulating. In Louisiana, Edwards needs to put his money where his fellow ideologues mouths are by following Scandinavia on Wuhan coronavirus pandemic policy.

Last week, Norway joined Denmark in stripping just about every restriction placed on their societies and economies designed to combat the virus. Over the past 18 months, each varied tremendously in response where at some points they had so few as to emulate almost entirely restriction-less Sweden and then at other times (briefly) clamped down as hard as the current vaccine passport regime in New Orleans. But now just about all restraints are gone, unless a future huge spike in cases occurs. For its part, Sweden already has announced it will join them in ridding its few at the end of the month.

Health officials in these countries noted higher vaccination rates, such as having at least half of people over age 50 with complete immunization, led them to begin dispensing with restrictions over a month ago. Most notably, Norway’s official in charge in assessing the danger presented by the virus has proposed terming it a as one of several respiratory illnesses with seasonal variation, much like influenza.