Edwards loses with failed faux reform bills

A win for Louisiana automobile ratepayers turned into a loss for Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards.

This week, the Senate Insurance Committee torpedoed a trio of faux tort reform bills backed by the governor, who practiced as a trial lawyer prior to election to the state’s highest office. In his campaigns , he has enjoyed massive direct and indirect support of personal injury lawyers, who use the nation’s most consumer-unfriendly laws to transfer wealth from ratepayers to themselves by foisting the second-highest average vehicle insurance rates onto drivers to fund the more and larger awards the current set of laws allows.

Louisiana Republicans have for years attempted to ameliorate this situation, and with a nearly veto-proof majority in the Legislature they have a real prospect of carrying it off this regular session. To play defense, Edwards adopted a set of bills forwarded by Democrat state Sen. Jay Luneau, a trial lawyer, as a counterweight, to posture as tort reform in competition with a slew of GOP-backed bills that address genuinely the issue.

Improve bills addressing LA spending limit

A pair of bills that address how the Louisiana Legislature deals with the state’s expenditure limit marginally improves the current method, but further alterations build a much better case for their passage into law and adoption into the Constitution.

HB 464 and HB 469 by Republican state Rep. Beau Beaullieu would amend the Constitution and amend statute to alter the formula to compute changes in the expenditure limit and set a cap at five percent increase annually, both overridden only by two-thirds votes of the legislative chambers when in session. The statute also would set the limit annually at the lower of appropriations or the previous limit with the factor applied to both. Long overdue in concept, the details need adjustment or too many opportunities exist to make the cap much less effective.

The House Appropriations Committee started that process by removing language that would allow changes in the formula and cap outside of a specific legislative instrument, leaving less room to manipulate the amount between sessions for political reasons. But further tweaking needs doing to improve the bills even more as these advance to the full House and beyond.

Edwards closes barn door two months late

It’s a classic from liberalism’s playbook: create a problem through its policy failures, then propose a harmful, drastic solution to address that. Whether consciously, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards has come full circle in this way with his recent closing of the barn door two months after the horse escaped.

In this instance, the barn door was pursuing a timely test and trace strategy that would have kept blockaded a more pernicious spread of the Wuhan coronavirus – the horse. Edwards now predicates lifting or not extending further restrictions he began putting into place in the middle of March on the state’s ability to accomplish this. Despite no real evidence that certain regions of the state had experienced increased numbers of or rates of infections, last week Edwards used that excuse and what he regarded as insufficient testing capacity to continue restrictions indiscriminately across Louisiana through the middle of May.

Recently, he has said testing and tracing capacity should ramp up to make for greater ability in identifying individuals in contact with those infected and administering tests to them as well. But his newfound enthusiasm for this course seemed absent in late February, even though he had warnings and models to follow.

Democrats flail futilely against GOP majority

Let the gamesmanship begin, as legislative Democrats brought a knife to a gunfight with Republicans.

Louisiana Democrats, particularly Gov. John Bel Edwards, want to circumscribe the state Legislature in whatever way possible, because they barely muster a third of its membership. The longer they can jawbone their way into impeding the Legislature, the fewer policy defeats they will suffer.

The resistance has manifested in various forms. First, attendance for the chambers when they met, which seldom has more than a few members missing, were down considerably with just 78 of 105 in the House and the Senate had 23 of 39 (a few more would filter in, disproportionately in the Senate, as their legislative days progressed and had their names added as present). About half of Democrats played hooky as a form of protest to getting the people’s business done because they fear they won’t like the policy outputs, even as they present weak arguments to obscure that.

GOP can put Edwards on path to irrelevancy

The next month will determine whether the governorship of Democrat John Bel Edwards becomes irrelevant, or merely slides into semi-irrelevancy.

It’s over immediately for Edwards as a significant agent in Louisiana’s policy-making process if a petition to attenuate, if not overturn, his emergency proclamations regarding the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic succeeds in the next couple of days. Despite scant evidence to support his claims, last week Edwards alleged he needed to continue the series of restrictions (absent very minor modifications) imposed over the past 45 days on gatherings and business activities in the state, and issued the appropriate proclamation. This irked mainly Republican legislators, who wish to utilize state law to reverse some, if not all, of those restrictions through a majority in at least one legislative chamber.

If they pull it off, it’s open season on Edwards’ agenda from there on out. Proven impotent by majorities who demonstrated willingness to use their power, he will lose much of the informal authority derived from the office’s formal powers. For example, with this proven ability to defy what’s to stop the logrolling that produces line-item capital expenditures in budgeting from gathering majorities to hold quick veto override sessions where two-thirds votes wipe out gubernatorial line-item vetoes? Chamber GOP leaderships will tell Democrats that if they want line items in budgets, they’ll have to join in the overrides, and they’ll know they can’t depend upon Edwards to bail them out.

Data contradict Edwards statewide ban claim

The Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration fed Louisianans a demonstrably false line to back his extension of Louisiana’s economic shutdown.

Earlier this week, Edwards said just about all of the current restrictions countering the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic he had proclaimed into place would apply statewide through May 15. A number of Republican legislators questioned this approach, noting that infection rates varied considerably across the state and so a regional strategy that would focus on local governments imposing restrictions would serve the twin goals of leaving the vulnerable parts of the population less so going forward by the swifter acquisition of herd immunity among the healthy subset and in reviving livelihoods. As justification, he said that three of the state’s nine health care regions showed an increase in virus incidence and one held steady. Additionally, several parishes had some of the nation’s highest infection rates among counties.

That explanation never made sense. Imposing statewide restrictions on less-affected areas beyond what local authorities would deem prudent in no significant way would do any better in controlling the virus anywhere, and following Edwards’ tactic to its logical conclusion means no state should loosen restrictions (or the several that don’t have any at the statewide level should impose these immediately) until the absolutely worst case (at this time, New York) feels that it can. (And even New York will take a regional approach.)

Looming LA financial disaster unaddressed

It’s an abacus reading nobody wants to see. Or, apparently talk about in Louisiana to this point, at least among the policy-makers who matter. But they can’t avoid the harsh reality of the disaster state finances will encounter both this and next fiscal year, and perhaps even beyond.

Every state will take a noticeable hit from the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic and the significant economic slowdown it has triggered for more than a month, with more to come. However, Louisiana remains more vulnerable than just about any, with its oversized energy and tourism sectors, underperforming economy, and inefficient fiscal structure. Two different assessments place the state as the sixth-most and the most vulnerable economically to the crisis.

The math is painful, both for this concluding fiscal year and the next. One analyst sees the state encountering a 40 percent shortfall from its current budget, which in state-supported dollars means in the neighborhood of an $8.3 billion haircut. Some back-of-the-envelope calculations don’t support such an extreme view, but produce sobering numbers nonetheless.

Edwards continues botching virus response

I don’t suppose leopards change their spots. And now the Legislature must act.

Having botched the initial response to the coming of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, perhaps it should have been expected that Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards wouldn’t do much better when it came to start handling the back end. Yesterday, Edwards announced the status quo on gubernatorial-ordered restrictions until May 15, with the small exception that elective medical procedures could commence that are time sensitive and that some interactions may increase, such as with outdoor dining and curbside delivery.

Edwards argued that Louisiana’s high per capita infection rate mandated the feet-dragging, which is ironic because Edwards policy decisions in no small measure needlessly aggravated the crisis. By not preparing adequately for a clearly coming threat and then issuing draconian directives indiscriminately applied, he permitted increased chances at infection, decreased opportunity for herd immunity to be acquired in low-risk populations, and now is delaying the ability of the public to get back on its feet economically.

Reckoning here for underfunded LA pensions

Even as Louisiana seems to have Wuhan coronavirus pandemic expenses covered and adequate unemployment insurance reserves, it will see significantly higher expenses from Medicaid and the earned income tax credit as a result of the economic attenuation from gubernatorial responses to the virus. But the real busting of its fiscal year 2021 budget comes when adding in extra pension costs.

Currently, those two extra expenditures for the budget year starting Jul. 1 track at about $140 million. But this doesn’t include additional obligations due to pension funds because of the large market downturn as economic consequences of the pandemic began to bite.

This is because accounting standards dictate that a government pension fund should not have an excessive unfunded accrued liability, or the amount predicted paid out minus contributions and investment changes, 30 years in the future. Thus, in Louisiana each year a computation is made about the amount left unfunded and amortized over the next 30 years, which then should be paid that year above forecast investment gains (according to statute an assumed rate of return fixed by a panel) and contributions. These contributions are a mix of an employee share, 8 percent for most, and an employer share which starts at a base but then elevates to whatever level necessary to make the next year’s payoff of the UAL.

Smart reopen can redeem botched lockdown

Having botched Louisiana’s response on the upswing of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards has a chance at partial redemption on its downhill side.

Tomorrow, Edwards is expected to outline his next response to the dwindling crisis. As of today, the seven-day rolling average of new cases registered only a two percent increase and deaths rose just four percent. Further, the outbreak largely remains confined to St. Tammany, Orleans, St. Bernard, Plaquemines, Lafourche, Jefferson, St. Charles, St. John the Baptist, and St. James Parishes, which have only 29 percent of the state’s population but 61 percent of the cases and deaths.

Compared to his neighbors, Edwards is well behind the curve. A week ago, the governors – all Republicans – of South Carolina, Georgia, Florida, Alabama, Mississippi, and Tennessee announced measures continuing through this week of substantially reopening their economies, although local officials retain the authority to impose more restrictions. Independently, Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott has done the same. Nothing along these lines has come from Arkansas Republican Gov. Asa Hutchinson, because Arkansas, along with a handful of other states, never imposed measures to shut down large swaths of the economic sector.