Begin discussing ending LA subsidy to public broadcasting

If not zero it out entirely, the budget Gov. Bobby Jindal will present tomorrow should initiate a debate on reducing the state’s appropriation to the Louisiana Educational Television Authority.

In light of the too-candid admission of a former National Public Radio executive that its part of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting did not need public funding, calls have intensified to remove taxpayer dollars from supporting NPR and the CPB’s television arm the Public Broadcasting Service. Nationally as of 2009, state governments provided 14.2 percent of revenues to radio and 22.5 percent to television (including in-kind support from universities).

In Louisiana, finding comparable figures are difficult.

Paper makes errors to knock LA spending cut emphasis

While journalists and their editors might be good writers and have some skills at tracking down information, typically they lack the time and/or ability and/or willingness to put into context properly the things on which they report. Due to this tendency, the Baton Rouge Advocate shows how even a routine, even mundane, story can become an uninformed, gratuitous swipe at targeted political interests, in this case supporters of streamlined government.

One of its beat reporters took on the assignment of detailing a perceived rise in the number of forest fires, leading with “The number of forest fires more than doubled in Louisiana during the first two months of the year because of dry, windy weather, forestry officials said.” He already got into trouble right off the bat because it reads like in the past two months the number of fire doubled from some level of unspecified period in the past, which we later discover is actually a year-over-year comparison of the first two months of 2011 with 2010.

Regardless, the narrative appears to be weather largely is to blame for the number of fires handled by the state’s Forestry Office in the Department of Agriculture and Forestry, which are only those that occur on timber company land, are inaccessible to local firefighters, or are too large for local firefighters to handle. But when the state’s forester, Charles Dubea, mentioned, or was prompted to do so, that he felt response efforts were getting hindered by reduction of state resources for the department’s firefighters, the story veered in a different direction:

Loyalist sacrifices spot to preserve Jindal reforms

As noted previously, when Gov. Bobby Jindal wants to win a public policy battle, he won’t let public perception get in the way of achieving that objective. Yesterday, one of his soldiers fell on his sword in an awkward way to increase his chances of winning a big one.

Roland Toups, longest serving member of the Louisiana Board of Regents and a Jindal appointee since 2009, resigned at Jindal’s request. The Regents soon will consider study results, prompted by Jindal, to merge Southern University New Orleans and the University of New Orleans and transfer both into (for now) the University of Louisiana System, a contemplated decision guaranteed to rile every higher education elite in the state except those backing UNO and the ULS.

Distracting from the sensible choice to proceed has been a suit filed by the politically-reemerging Cleo Fields, who creatively suggested the lack of any minority representation and disproportionately low female representation on the Board was unconstitutional. While bad jurisprudence, it’s good publicity for merger opponents and, unfortunately, other events got Toups put into a position that made his continued service untenable.

Roemer likely to find last hurrah hoisted on own petard

As previously noted, by making semi-populist, contra-big money, anti-Washington themes central to his nascent presidential campaign, these detract from the legitimacy of former Gov. Buddy Roemer’s extraordinarily long shot attempt to win in 2012. Roemer is a political insider born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he still believes somehow he can capture the Republican nomination as a spokesman for the significant segment of the population attracted to the kind of platform he espouses, because, to a lesser degree, he did the same to become governor. Here’s why this time it won’t work.

Roemer thinks he might catch on because in his successful gubernatorial campaign he spoke about cleaning up cronyism in Baton Rouge and reducing the size of government – a populism growing in strength in America then but at odds with Louisiana’s political history, where “populism” was seen as the use of more intrusive government to divvy up wealth and power purportedly on behalf of the citizenry. But such were the excesses in spending by and perception of corruption concerning the third former Gov. Edwin Edwards’ administration that the message resonated.

The Democrat Roemer was working on his fourth term in Congress, with a reputation for bucking liberal party leaders in ideology, when he set his sights on the leading the state. He didn’t consciously try to win the support of traditional Democrat powerbrokers but became viewed as an outsider dependent upon smaller donations and grassroots support. Perhaps most helpful to his cause was a televised debate where, alone among the Democrats, he stumped for his different approach and absolutely forswore a place for Edwards in his administration. Media figures warmed to that and almost every newspaper in the state endorsed him afterwards. That seemed to catch enough people’s attention to get him into the general election runoff with Edwards, who subsequently withdrew.

But 2012 will be a quarter century past that campaign, and the world and Roemer’s record is very different now.

Hike in state employee retirement contribution justified

At its board’s next meeting within two weeks, Louisiana’s State Employees Retirement System will discuss whether to raise the percentage contribution of salary for some, presumably defined benefit program members of the state government workforce, as announced by the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration, from 8 percent to 11 percent. It’s an action way overdue.

Despite a constitutional imperative that the state must rid itself of its unfunded accrued liability in its retirement accounts by 2029, the state has moved slowly on securing funds to do so. For this fiscal year, agencies had to budget $690 million to stay on schedule to make this deadline, and this soon will rise to $1 billion a year. Depending on the system, extra amounts set aside to handle the problem – a result of overgenerous promises relative to revenues being collected to fund them – for each system equals to triples money required just to pay for current obligations, an added expense anywhere from over 17 to nearly 30 percent, depending on the system, of base salary costs.

To reduce this sapping of funds that otherwise could go to pressing priorities such as health care or higher education, both facing significant cuts for next fiscal year, only two things can happen: either or both the rate of return on invested money has to increase, which to make up the UAL ($18 billion or so) by the deadline would be beyond any reason, and/or the minimum amount employees (in the defined benefit plan; none of this applies to the defined contribution plan) kick in must rise (the state’s portion, which can be as much as roughly matching currently the employee’s contribution if not much higher, if rising would add nothing since it already is paying the difference). The Administration’s choice will draw flak because it essentially means a reduction in take-home pay for those employees.

But we have to recognize the privileged position Louisiana state employees relative to those employees in the private sector.

Dog bites man: liberals' vendetta on Jindal continues

In an apparently coordinated effort, the New York Times and the leftist Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington have produced, respectively, a story and a report that concludes Louisiana first lady Supriya Jindal’s charity (1) donates technology to Louisiana schools, (2) gets donations to do this from corporations that may or may not have business in the state and may or may not also have donated to husband Gov. Bobby Jindal’s campaigns, and (3) there’s no improper relationship among all of this. Meanwhile, dog bites man.

Self-important people from the worlds of interest groups and ethics matters dully were polled, with conclusions that, as donors also may have business with the state at some point since the charity’s founding or given Gov. Jindal a campaign donation, this appeared “troubling,” and that “it’s a good cause” but “it creates the appearance he’s being bribed.” Mind you, there’s no proof of any tradeoff, and about the worst infraction anybody can detect is that Gov. Jindal has the audacity to appear in a picture with his wife on a web page devoted to begging for donations. That’s really putting the squeeze on these poor corporations.

Fevered minds, no doubt inflamed by both the Times’ and CREW’s loathing of Gov. Jindal for his policy preferences (the only valid complaint about ethics that CREW can make about Jindal is a single reporting violation), wish there could be more to this.

Shaw retirement gives Smith early Senate advantage

It never had seemed likely that, at age 78 and a somewhat-different district almost certainly staring him in the face, Republican state Sen. B.L. “Buddy” Shaw would run for reelection this year. His formally-announced exit opens the stage for a contest, at least one ambitious politician does not hope to get by trying to preempt the field, as wrenchingly difficult and expensive as when Shaw captured the seat.

Besides his age and the rigors of campaigning in a district the boundaries of which are likely to be redrawn to some degree as a result of decennial redistricting, Shaw also gave himself a dozen-year deadline in state legislative service. Having served in the House from 1996-2004, then retiring to help care for his wife during a medically-trying period, her return to good health allowed him to capture the seat at the retirement of term-limited Max Malone.

For that alone he did area conservatives prodigious service.

Tobacco tax hike idea latest try to stop needed reform

As opposition among some providers for Louisiana’s revamp of its Medicaid program continues to crumble, others make last-ditch efforts to preserve the existing system that inefficiently uses public dollars to their benefit.

The latest effort to forestall reform comes from the organization that protects the largest beneficiaries of the existing system, because the majority of clients in the system are children, the Louisiana Chapter, American Association of Pediatricians. Rather than improve the system, they suggest increasing taxes, specifically on tobacco.

Sin taxes always have their allure, with the arguments that, in this case, smoking would decrease presumably with its attendant problems and raise some revenue on the side. But these hikes usually don’t come close to bringing in projected revenues and they do hurt small business – possibly throwing more unemployed people onto Medicaid (and reduced smoking actually ends up costing more in health costs in the long run).

New GOP majority ratifies increasing role of party

As previously noted, the recent win by Republicans in a special state Senate election to give the party its first post-Reconstruction legislative majority carried plenty of symbolism, but to assign that as the only outcome fundamentally mistakes and misreads that event and those leading to it.

Those on the left tried to downplay its significance by muttering about how Louisiana’s legislators don’t frequently act in a partisan matter and their labeling habits are rather casual. History largely supports that contention – except this is now 2011 and conditions have changed enough for a permanent alteration to the state’s political culture going forward.

To understand this, the state’s political history does matter. Up until the 1920s typically the state was, for the most part, conservative if that is defined as unwilling to pursue extensive government spending and intervention and in social arrangements (i.e., segregationist). But not entirely, as witnessed in the latter part of the 19^th century when the populist movement achieved some of its greatest electoral successes in Louisiana, more than anywhere in the American South. Thus, when Gov., later Sen., Huey Long consolidated power, he did so by tapping into that latent populist discontent and fused it with an ideology of government intervention and redistribution.

With legal and social restrictions causing only the Democrats to be able to function as a major party, different factions formed within it, populist and reform. The latter typically believed redistributionist tendencies had gone too far but often did not differ much on social issues with race relations being paramount. As such, for an extended period no impetus existed for the legitimatizing of another major party, for in an American party system that especially tends to obscure party differences, one cleavage only was not enough to cause a split.

But as time passed and the civil rights movement brought that issue to the forefront, the issue of government intervention added the civil rights component to its mix, creating both economic and social cleavages that could bifurcate the Democrats. Yet the populist tendency of the state held back significant growth of the GOP. Reformists now could have a semi-competitive GOP as a home, but it was competitive only because of social conservatives who maintained their populist economic outlook. Therefore, relative to the two parties at the state level, there often was more of an echo than a real choice in terms of those candidates willing to take on the GOP label to distinguish themselves from Democrats.

The first real significant alteration in this arrangement came concerning national issues, especially where Republican presidential candidates provided choices and not echoes that contained, for GOP candidates, few if any populist appeals. This allowed alignment of both economic and social issues along a clear liberal/conservative continuum. Especially after the election of Pres. Ronald Reagan in 1980, that began to filter down in to Louisiana’s state and local politics, gradually breaking the hold populism had on the majority of political elites and voters.

Yet at the state level, this process was slowed by the presence of the blanket primary. Because it featured no nominations for party labels, it greatly cheapened the labels as signals to voters about the clarity of the issue preferences of candidates. It allowed candidates to build disproportionately support on the basis of candidate personality, which deemphasized the role issues played. A popular canard is that the blanket primary helped kickstart the state’s GOP, but only insofar as it made easier one ideologically-similar candidate to distinguish himself from another, choosing that label not so much because there was significant differences between him and other on issue preferences, but as a tool to entice voters of conservative persuasion to think he was different. The reverse sometimes happened in districts with a significant black minority registration, where a candidate who might be more conservative than liberal would term himself a Democrat to pick up black votes to prevail.

This lens once was correct to understand the smaller role party played in public policy-making in the state. But to continue to apply this to the present situation ignores the different environment and dynamics in play today. Several such changes have emerged.

Steadily, real world results have eroded the legitimacy of the redistributionist tendency, dulling the appeal that populism has, reducing its number of adherents, and purifying the parties as reformers comfortably have found a home in a competitive GOP. A political generation has come of age since Reagan that sees clearer differences between labels, less hampered by the populist persuasion, despite the obfuscating impact of the blanket primary. Access to information particularly has exploded in the past 15 years that makes it easier for candidates to present and voters to find information that clarifies ideological choices. Finally, term limits promoted the chances of more ideological candidates to campaign relying more heavily on issue preferences without having to compete against long-standing officeholders who built a lasting image perhaps at odds with their actual voting record at a time where issues meant less and voting records were more difficult for voters to discover.

These changes mean partisan labeling has become more important, because increased willingness of candidates, particularly conservatives, to convey issue-based information to an electorate able and desirous to access this information better aligns competing ideologies to labels. And because Louisiana traditionally, except in the area of economics due to the populist strain, has been resistant of government intervention, especially as populism has eroded has seen this strengthening alignment redound to the favor of the GOP.

So there is more than symbolic value to the Republicans achieving majorities in all of the majoritarian power centers in government, and it does signal policy consequences. One vote absolute majorities will not produce revolutionary changes in policy. But they signal the shape of things to come. Particularly after the fall elections, when we can expect even more pure ideologues elected to the chambers with larger Republican majorities, party will matter more than ever because more than ever it provides a meaningful distinction on a criterion increasingly important to voters.

Mark this year down. It will be the last, particularly in the House, where partisanship does not play a consistently significant role in policy emanating from the Louisiana Legislature.

Selfish, ignorant protesters illustrate LA's problems

The ignorant and idiotic definitely came out to play when special interests mustered a couple of hundred warm bodies to protest good government and the dismantling of power and privilege in Baton Rouge this weekend.

Held out as a rally against the budget-cutting tactics of Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker, whose measures to remove the preferred positions enjoyed by public sector unions in that state have drawn intense opposition from their beneficiaries at the public’s expense, criticism spilled over onto Louisiana’s Gov. Bobby Jindal who, like Walker, has recognized his state must live within its means by making proper priorities that gets the state of out doing the ineffective or nonessential, working more efficiently, and not privileging special interests over the people. But from the commentary that emerged from it, those who gathered in Baton Rouge sounded like morons.