BESE succeeds, whiffs on trenchant issues

Louisiana’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education may declare itself woke, but at other times it actually gets the job done correctly … when overenthusiastic members of the public don’t allow it to dodge a politically sensitive issue .

Last week, BESE – through one of its committees where technically all 11 members sit on it – wisely deferred full implementation of a program aimed at improving reading and literacy at the kindergarten through second grade levels. A pilot program already has shown promising results.

Yet while the overall concept seemed sound, six of the seven members who comprise the accountability and choice caucus of BESE objected to administrative aspects of it (the other as chairman didn’t vote). Principally, they objected to how it coordinated with accountability measures, in particular the extra costs to achieve this for nonpublic schools who accept Louisiana Scholarship Program students for which the state pays only approximately half in voucher form of what it doles out for regular students in public schools.

More data, same story: Medicaid expansion bad

But, Medicaid expansion!

Salivating proponents of Louisiana accepting this praised Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards to the skies his doing so when assuming office. They alleged it would propel the state from the bottom among its brethren in healthiness by claiming large swaths of the public without health insurance suddenly would become healthier with access to it.

This view ignored reality, and more than five years after its implementation data continue to confirm the whole mess is one big wealth redistribution scheme that does little to improve health outcomes at exorbitant cost. The latest bit comes from a report issued by the Mercatus Center that focused on the amount of regulation in health care among southeastern states. Louisiana ranks high in regulation but low in health care quality metrics, not just within the region but nationally. In fact, despite having doctor availability well above the lowest-ranked states and reasonable access relative to them, it ranked second in the southeast for patient difficulty in regard to finding treatment with managed care visits. It ranked 47^th out of 50 states with respect to preventable hospitalizations, and last among all states in health outcomes.

Vaccine passport anywhere in LA bad policy

Louisiana is hurtling towards an unwise, counterproductive, and constitutionally-suspect “zero covid” policy, and it must be halted before wasting more resources and real harm to people is done.

In recent days, Democrat New Orleans Mayor LaToya Cantrell declared that adults in the city would have to carry “vaccine passports” in order to engage in many forms of commerce, enforced by merchants and government. That means proof of Wuhan coronavirus vaccination or a recent negative test. The Louisiana State University System is signaling that if and when any full authorization for vaccines come to fruition, it will expect the same of students and employees.

But steps like these ignore reality to the detriment of the state’s people and visitors. Unfortunately, while Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards vetoed a bill in the past legislative session that would have prevented this, policy-makers should reject such things anyway.

LA census data advantage legislative GOP

More specific, parish-wide census data for 2020 are in, and from this the contours have become set for state legislative reapportionment in Louisiana.

These data contain population counts by race and age. The data at the most specific levels will be released by the end of September, and because of the much lower tolerances for these regarding congressional districts, as well as the specificity needed for local contests, until then only the impact of the data on reapportionment for the legislature, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education, and the Public Service Commission can be scrutinized. (Judicial reapportionment is not required and historically often isn’t done every decade.)

Certain to confuse many casual observers will be the way the census changed its definition of race/ethnicity. In the past, the Census Bureau has caught flak for the way it categorizes people, particularly Hispanics, as being too narrow. For 2020, it tried to address this by creating a matrix of racial backgrounds that specifically allows for combinations.

Natural selection favors saner climate policy

You just can’t make this stuff up. And to the extent that its contents will improve policy-making in Louisiana, that’s a good thing.

The initial hand-wringing from the unbridled hysteria launched by release of the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change from the United Nations apparently has had an especially robust impact on snowflakes. Understanding its extent requires reading snippets from the actual text of the news story (my comments in brackets):

A growing number of people are reluctant to bring a child into a world that’s set to be ravaged by climate change in the coming decades ….

LA climate alarmists to take note of report

If you listen to those with a political agenda granted a megaphone by incurious media, before the century ends what part of Louisiana doesn’t get swallowed up by rising seas will scorch under the sun lashed by extreme weather. Fortunately, unfiltered science casts extreme doubt on this.

This week, the Sixth Assessment Report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change came out, just in time to jumpstart a whole new wave of panic for policy-makers meeting later this year to try to lobby for more draconian solutions for a problem greatly exaggerated. Of course, that’s the issue of climate change, and the document that relies far more on adherence to a political agenda than scientific inquiry fits the pattern of its previous editions: cautious evidence of marginal changes hyped into extremism.

Political hacks aside trying to use this to the advantage of their ideological agendas, this tribal response comes from many working in both science and media. So, it wasn’t too difficult for one of Louisiana’s media outlets to find an academician who took cursory note of the conclusions derived for and by policy-makers and extrapolated these to the state. She said at least a six degree temperature rise would buffet the state’s crops and marine life, river flooding would become more common from storms, and sea level rise of four feet would occur unless curtailing drastically the use of fossil fuels with the use of technology.

Edwards surge policy hypocritical, cynical

If you’re going to promote hypocritical policy, don’t pull your punches, even if it contradicts the observable facts.

That’s the mantra the Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards Administration has employed as Louisiana faces another surge of the Wuhan coronavirus. This challenge appears courtesy of the virus’ delta variant, which is more transmissible, and has taken advantage of the 59 percent of the state’s population not vaccinated.

The population segment being affected disproportionately is healthier, but with record numbers of cases this has led to the same in hospitalizations. This has caused capacity constraints that threaten to move beyond having to delay elective procedures to create space and could begin interfering with treating more critical non-virus-related cases. (But because of the healthier affected population, deaths have not approached record levels.)

Parents must protect kids from Edwards order

Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards’ face covering mandate reimposition has put parents in a pickle who wish to prevent the child abuse that it advocates

After Republican Atty. Gen. Jeff Landry publicized Louisiana law that allows parents to have students opt out from school vaccination schedules, Edwards doubled down on his insistence that children as young as 5, and his preference that this include children as young as 2, should wear masks in school most of the time. He did so in sending a letter to Superintendent Cade Brumley to remind districts about the content of his latest order, emphasizing the intent was to stop the spread of the virus – despite what public policy studies have concluded on the matter.

Even though the law he mentioned doesn’t cover a mask mandate, Landry released guidance for parents to make written dissent to both masking and vaccination mandates, pointing out deficiencies in mask wearing insofar as affecting transmission of the Wuhan coronavirus. It didn’t go into details, but the latest information specifically relating to children shows they transmit the virus at a far lower rate than do adults, that a comparison of schools with masks mandated and not didn’t show any different in number of virus cases, and that studies conflict on whether requiring masks on children – who get sick from the virus at a tiny fraction of the rate that even vaccinated adults do and are 3.2 times less likely to die from the virus than a person would suffer death from a lightning strike – harms them psychologically and/or physically.

Bossier residents score legislative wins

Lost in all the excitement the Louisiana Legislature’s historic veto session were two significant wins for Bossier Parish brought home by Republican state Sen. Barrow Peacock and GOP state Rep. Dodie Horton.

For years, south Bossier City in particular has agitated for a new Jimmie Davis Bridge, ideally replacing the decades-old two-lane purveyor of traffic with a new four-lane structure. The current bridge can’t be refurbished because federally-protected barn owls refuse to stop nesting on it.

Throughout his decade in office, Peacock, who represents both ends of the bridge, had fought to make the new doubled span a reality. Costing an estimated $125 million, about a fifth of that had been secured for the canceled refurbishing, meaning around $100 million more needed funding.

Democrats' work disincentives to hit LA hard

In Democrats’ headlong rush to bring increased socialism to America, Louisiana looks poised to suffer disproportionately.

Last week, the national jobs report highlighted this effort pointing to Louisiana’s vulnerability. While the national unemployment rate dropped 0.3 percent to 5.4 and nearly a million more jobs came online, the labor force participation rate didn’t move, even as average wages continued climbing, now up 4 percent for the year and stoking inflation. All in all, estimates are that there are 1.2 million more job openings than people willing to work, which has made employers scramble to offer a whole host of nonpecuniary benefits in addition to wage hikes that will further drive up prices to consumers.

Louisiana is even worse off. While the country as a whole still lags on jobs and unemployment with levels lower than when Republican former Pres. Donald Trump took office, the state fell farther and has more slowly come back. Its number of jobs is lower than that of 15 years ago, its labor force participation rate is the lower than that seen at the end of 1989, currently ranking seventh worst among the states, and its unemployment rate remains higher than nine years ago, currently ranking ninth worst. Obviously, the state’s ability to get people working is lagging is even worse than the national economy’s slow response to the policies of Democrat Pres. Joe Biden and the Democrat-controlled Congress.