Both efforts ended up the same way. That one did as it did and the other was pursued at all tells us all we need to know about the courage and priorities of the Louisiana Legislature.
Yesterday, the Legislature’s
Revenue Study Commission issued its final
report, which boldly stated that not all of the hundreds of tax exemptions
on the books might be worthwhile, but that more data were needed to know that,
and that they should be collected when they aren’t (even though common sense
might have indicated creating such evaluative mechanisms each and every time
another one of these was carved out), and maybe the Legislature ought to do
something about this and a bunch of these exemptions. Meanwhile, dog bites man.
The same day these
scintillating conclusions got broached to the wider world, another legislative
panel spent 270 minutes tackling, with arguments about sequester effects, budget
gimmickry accusations, and tax
reform agendas swirling about competing as subjects of legislative
investigation, the all-important, if not the most pressing issue of the
millennia – whether the Louisiana High School Athletic Association should do as
Texas has done for decades, creating separate
championship classifications for public and non-public schools. At the
conclusion, its members decisively moved to do nothing about what apparently
legally they could do nothing about anyway.
Consider, after securing
your air sick bags, that the roughly $40,000 spent on the extra per diem and travel expenses for the RSC
members to congregate over the past nine months might actually have been worth
telling us what we already know. It might have been worth it to find out what
should be done isn’t, and the panel even provided a handy list of mooted
exemptions, and another of those that at least one member thought were questionable
in utility – if then in the future the first get taken off the books, and
the second given serious study as a result of this.
While it was understandable
that the RSC might be hesitant with the proposal by Gov. Bobby
Jindal to swap
income taxes for higher and more broadly collected sales taxes to go into
any details about specific exemptions, at least it could addressed the slam
dunk cases for elimination, an extremely limited field because so few have any
data collected about them. But one in particular does, which has shown it to be
incredibly wasteful from day one: the motion
picture investor tax credit. Yet it couldn’t bring itself to recommend even
this one’s demise, although at least it put it on the list for further study.
Still, this quivering mass
of Jello at least addressed something serious. Some legislative panels called
the Senate Select Committee on High School Interscholastic Athletics and the Subcommittee
on High School Interscholastic Athletics of the House Committee on Education
took up the separate championships topic that should be of no concern
whatsoever, from a policy standpoint, to legislators.
About the only thing worth
finding out was that some private schools apparently hire some blithering
idiots to coach sports, being as they testified they were so concerned that the
plan would "segregate" them and deny students in public schools the ability to
compete against the full range of football programs in the state. As if this is
important in any way to a student’s academic growth? Therefore, how would this
involve the Legislature and state in any way?
Not that it even could
qualify for legislative consideration, for the LHSAA is a private organization
that can decide among its members, who are not coerced into joining it, that
under current state law is not regulated. If these schools don’t like the new
arrangement where there are championship brackets separately for public and
non-public schools, they are free to leave the organization or even to set up their
own as in Texas. And nothing in the new
arrangement prevents these schools from scheduling to play public schools prior
to any playoffs, so even the complaint about restricted opportunities is bogus.
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