Landrieu joins Vitter's cap sensibility; Melancon absent

Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu now makes for a Louisiana exacta for the upper house, joining her opposition party colleague Republican Sen. David Vitter in proposing non-extreme legislation to piggyback on existing law that governs how private entities compensate for oil spills of their responsibilities.

Weeks ago, Vitter proposed a very sensible plan calling for a liability floor of $150 million, twice the current cap, with the maximum increasing to an amount equal to four times the company's profits during the previous four quarters. Of course, being that Democrats run the Senate, it was dead on arrival for two reasons: it came from a Republican running for reelection especially in a year where Democrats may lose control of the Senate and because some Democrat senators are enthralled with the know-nothing wing of the environmentalist movement whose prejudices call for, if not an outright ban on offshore drilling, punitive measures to discourage it into oblivion.

That latter attitude is encapsulated in a current bill that would have no liability cap at all which would drastically reduce exploration in the Gulf of Mexico, limiting it only to the largest concerns, in effect reducing supply, driving up prices, and eliminating jobs and economic growth, particularly in Louisiana, as smaller firms would consider it too risky to explore. With politics blocking Vitter’s plan and the current Pres. Barack Obama and Senate Democrat-preferred plan too radical and counterproductive, Landrieu has stepped into the breach with a reasonable approach.

Landrieu’s idea would raise the current cap from $75 million to $250 million and require companies to pay into an insurance policy covering damages of as much as an additional $10 billion. It would base premiums on the size of a company's drilling operations, meaning larger firms would pay more. She has been researching this for some time, and, to date, evidence is that the costs passed on by the policy issuance, while onerous, would not appear to cripple exploration. While not as good as Vitter’s, because his would promote more careful behavior by forcing companies to bear the burden and does not require a periodic cost that would discourage drilling for some, it’s much better than what the Democrat leadership has stumped for.

It’s also good politics for both. Vitter’s Senate challenger Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon has come down on the side of unlimited liability and all the problems that entails, while Landrieu has a long ways to go in rehabilitating herself after she was the decisive vote that will produce a health care insurance system of higher cost with worse outcomes for which she will not be forgotten soon, so this can’t hurt in winning her back a handful of votes.

Hopefully, if the Senate Democrat majority doesn’t put politics ahead of people and miraculously go with Vitter on this issue, at least it will head in Landrieu’s direction, provided the required insurance is not burdensomely priced.

Reform job left incomplete unless Jindal spends capital

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While his enthusiasm deserves applause, at the same time Louisiana Treas. John Kennedy partially misdiagnoses what truly was a missed opportunity concerning the budget that emerged for state government this fiscal. Where he was correct and not provides lessons for a more effective approach in the future.

Kennedy blamed both Gov. Bobby Jindal and the Legislature for insufficient cutting and thus reliance on non-continuing fund sources (such as reducing in many cases bulging trust funds whose contents are unlikely to be used any time soon). He also outlined alternatives. The story is more complex both in the practicality of his suggestions and how to go about cutting spending.

Some of Kennedy’s ideas do have merit. For example, there does need to be greater oversight of contracts let by the state for professional services. As previously noted (and brought up by Kennedy), at least some portion of educational services contracts probably really aren’t that necessarily. But others simply sound good but invite their own problems. For example, Kennedy’s idea of lopping off vacated state jobs until the state loses 15,000 presents a host of problems. As previously noted, this indiscriminately removes positions which would disallow critical needs from being fulfilled through replacement, and has no relationship to priority of tasks.

Bad theory, selective outrage mark anti-tax cut screed

Once again, the usual suspects, with little merit, complain about tax reduction in Louisiana, telling us more about their preference for big government than any useful public policy prescriptions.

A week after it seemed to have caught smaller-government fever against type, the Baton Rouge Advocate editorially went back to its old ways by highlighting a warmed over report, the gist of which already has been critically examined, chastising the state for reinstating deductions and marginal rate cuts to state income taxes. In the end, it concludes that these actions were unwise because they took revenues from the state.

Such a view shows a vast ignorance about economics and how the world really works, and disregards that state government’s fiscal difficulties come from its revenue-raising structure and overspending. Its most basic mistake is that it relies upon a model of tax policy that is unsustainable in theory and in data, a belief that taxation rates do not affect human behavior.

Jones, ban, berms: politics explain odd Obama policies

As days go by and the Pres. Barack Obama Administration continues to engage in perplexing policy regarding the Gulf of Mexico oil spill, it becomes clearer that it is part of a political strategy where Democrats are going “all in” ideologically speaking at the expense of immediate electoral consequences.

Given the vast negative opinion nationally , and especially in Louisiana, about the moratorium on deepwater oil exploration imposed by Obama, one might think that this would have been abandoned, particularly as the judiciary gave Obama a chance to retreat by striking down the first ban, twice, and additionally given its enormous costs and incredible overreach that its six months not only are far longer than needed to inspect and reapir but also likely actually reduces safety. (Of course, the entire exercise already has been compromised by Obama’s creative license in using expert opinion.) Yet it continues, and stealthily has acquired a near-moratorium on all new drilling including that in shallow water.

In Louisiana, the ban is suppressing the victory chances of Democrat candidates this fall. The last thing Rep. Charlie Melancon, a vocal ban opponent, needs is a reminder to voters the president from his party for no good reason is damaging a significant part of the state’s economy and that he has no influence to stop it. The small chance of Democrats retaining Melancon’s current spot representing the Third District, the epicenter of the labor force for the oil exploration industry, has about evaporated because of the ban. And nationally this cannot help Democrats against the increasingly-likely chance they will lose control of at least one chamber of Congress in national elections.

Melancon tries again with more questionable numbers

Even if its tactics are transparent, one must credit the Democrat Rep. Charlie Melancon campaign for Senate for its extreme tenacity in the face of long odds. Or it may be just one more potential sign of desperation on its part.

Rarely does a campaign release its internal polling numbers but with the recent release of information it has collected relevant to Melancon’s challenge to incumbent Republican Sen. David Vitter, the campaign now has done so twice this year. Normally, this is not done because of concerns about appearance of partiality and internal strategy concerns.

But as all but two polls releases well over the past year have shown, Vitter continues to enjoy a large lead and/or majority proportion of the vote. In most he crests 50 percent of the intended vote, and in almost all he enjoys a double-digit lead. In just about every independent poll, he has had both. The two exceptions to these conditions, guess what, are the internal Melancon polls conducted by a firm that almost exclusively polls for Democrat campaign.

Previously, the inadequacies of this approach for understanding the true competitive balance of a contest and the inherent unreliability of the results (for example, without having knowledge of the sampling frame or exact question wordings) render them useless for telling us anything meaningful about a contest. However, because one news outlet cast these concerns aside and ran a story stumping for the questionable numbers, perhaps the campaign thought it could get such favorable coverage again by repeating the exercise – especially because, as divergent as the result were last time, these were even more out of step with the rest of the polling (including independent ones) world.

This latest edition has Melancon behind but within the margin of error when no other poll (even other partisan Democrat ones) shows him close to that. The campaign claims it is because of an obscure personnel issue that few voters know about, so that is an unlikely source of such a large difference. This admission probably means that was part of a push poll process, where the pollster asked one or more questions highly loaded and distorted against Vitter before asking for a vote intention. We would know about this and other matters such as sampling frame and the like only if the Melancon campaign releases unexpurgated data and reports from the poll, and it is unlikely to do that because of the problematic reliability and validity aspects that are sure to come out.

But we can conduct an exercise that researchers who gather and analyze primary data use, estimating construct validity of the concept of debate, vote intention. When a researcher wishes to evaluate how well an instrument, such as a survey question, really reflects the concept being studies, construct validity is established by seeing how closely related the measure in doubt is to others that supposedly do the same. Since all other studies are showing a much different distribution of vote intention that Melancon’s internal numbers released publicly, we must conclude this one doesn’t show much construct validity and hence isn’t doing a good job in revealing the reality of the Senate contest.

Yet that’s not the purpose of the number’s publicity, that being to jumpstart the Melancon campaign and to remove the long-standing air of inevitability that not only will he lose, but lose big. As such, it represents spin and nothing else of value.