Newspaper cutback creates opportunity to help taxpayers

The decision by the New Orleans Times-Picayune to cease daily publication invites a review of the state’s corporate welfare laws benefitting large publishers at taxpayer expense. Unfortunately, that review is likely to track past efforts that put special interests over taxpayers.

The presumed problem stems from R.S. 43:141 et. seq., which mandates certain qualification for newspapers serving as “papers of record,” meaning it prints official government notices. Legislators from the area seemed convinced the law would have to be changed, and quickly, to allow the paper to continue as the paper of record for all things Orleans in the near future.

Actually, under current law initially the change still would allow many units of Orleans government to continue using the paper, because for many jurisdictions the law does not specify any publishing frequency. However, R.S. 43:202 specifically requires judicial notices be published in a daily paper for Orleans. Further, to be eligible for any jurisdiction to award an annual contract, the paper in question must have published “at least weekly” during the previous five years. This means legislators must feel that the Times-Picayune, as some have suspected in the wake of the announcement, plans to cease publication of a print edition sometime in the future, if change is felt to be needed for all instances of government record publishing in Orleans.

Whether for sake of economics or politics, merger founders

If any lesson should emanate from the failed attempt arrange union between my employer Louisiana State University Shreveport and Louisiana Tech University, it’s that a merger on these terms will not fix whatever ails higher education delivery in the Shreveport-Bossier metropolitan area.

All along, advocates argued the primary reason for the combination was to accomplish this. They described the symptoms that purported to signal deficiency in this area: relatively low enrollment numbers, almost no growth, and apparent difficulty in supplying programs. But they really couldn’t, or would not, articulate the causes of this. Instead, by having LSUS subsumed into Tech, essentially they argued that in order to cure the unknown disease the patient had to be killed and then resurrected as a symbiont.

While the idea had a great many area supporters, none of whom ever had served as a tenured faculty member or administrator in higher education, in the political and business communities in the area, as well as interest groups who assert their missions encompass education delivery, the naïveté of the notion was stunning in that so many failed to grasp its fundamental shortcoming. They appeared ignorant of a central truism in academia (and government), that institutions as organizations first and foremost do not act with a larger environmental purpose in mind – that is, to maximize higher education delivery statewide – nor to serve peripheral, specific environments – to Tech, the Shreveport/Bossier metropolitan area.

Senate fails to provide even minimal civil liberties relief

Good things can take a lot of time to manifest, but this is getting ridiculous with the Louisiana Legislature’s continuing inaction, if not actual sabotage, of the ability of a significant proportion of its citizenry to exercise a simple civil liberty.

That liberty being the ability to travel around and patronize commercial establishments without going into respiratory distress. As medical advances improve quality of life for those with a disability that impairs breathing, from having asthma to suffering chronic obstructive pulmonary disease to using mechanical ventilation, who now comprise a tenth of the population that as a whole will continue to increase in proportion as it ages, the discrimination that occurs by giving preference to those who choose to smoke in some avenues of commerce in Louisiana makes this violation all the more egregious.

Currently, 25 states ban any smoking in public establishments of any kind, with extensions emanating outside from them as well. Louisiana and some other states ban some indoor smoking and in Louisiana in a radius 25 feet from passageways for certain buildings such as hospitals and educational facilities. Smokers decry the restriction of their behavior and certain industries feel they might lose business if smoking were not allowed, but in the conflict of civil liberties that results – one group that wants to engage in a voluntary activity not essential to sustaining their lives as an aside to interacting commercially versus another that involuntarily suffers an ability to sustain life when the first group engages in that activity while interacting in the same commerce, thereby negating its members’ ability to interact in that kind of commerce – the preponderance of evidence shows the second group’s claim as more compelling, to not to have to suffer through that environment, meriting government action to ensure they may exercise that more vital liberty.

"One-time" money defined wrongly, invites wrong debate

As the state’s next fiscal year budget hurtles to resolution, the central debate among Louisiana policy-makers has become over the use of “one-time” money. Unfortunately, it’s the wrong debate using the wrong terminology.

To take a typical definition one might run across in the popular media, and one seemingly accepted by many politicians, these dollars are those “that likely will only materialize once.” The problem is, for much of what gets designated as this, it’s simply not accurate.

Some of what gets lumped into this category honestly can be called that. For example, one portion of money that never will come as recurring revenue is the sale or lease of the New Orleans Adolescent Hospital, now shuttered for a few years. That $35 million indeed is a single shot,“one-time” (and, ironically or perhaps hypocritically, remains in the budget after self-proclaimed budget hawks squawked they had purged the budget of this kind of spending).

Roemer self-deception prepares him to suffer third strike

My first full-time teaching job out of graduate school (although technically still in it: I had just completed my exams and was working on my dissertation) was at the University of Southern Mississippi, where I had the fortune to run into some older students who recruited me for their intramural softball teams. One team played regular slow-pitch, where I pitched and played catcher (never mind I was six feet tall, 130 pounds, with glasses) and managed a high on-base percentage through walks (because I could see so well with the glasses). We made the quarterfinals before losing.

But the other team I was on went all the way to finals. This was the co-ed version, where sexes alternated between batters. Here, I was the pitcher, for a very simple reason: I could put the ball right over the plate almost all of the time, because in this league, you pitched to your own side at bat. The object was to toss as many fat pitches in there as possible. So I'd deliver them and our guys would mash them to the fences, even over them while our gals made contact and looped them over the infielders. The only game we lost was the championship where we got out-mashed and outhit by a bunch of greek guys and gals who these days probably all work for the people I graduated with from the Owen Graduate School of Management at Vanderbilt University.

I suspect in his past former Gov. Buddy Roemer must have been an excellent pitcher on this kind of co-ed team, given the number of softballs right over the plate he has tossed during his pseudo-campaign for the presidency. Plan A in regard to that was to get the Republican nomination. When that no longer suited his psychological needs because of its impossibility, he went to Plan B: obtaining the nomination from a quasi-political party called Americans Elect, which was supposed to offer a platform for a candidate that met the group’s funders’ conception of centrism chosen by the masses fed up with the two major parties.

Best policy to reduce LA imprisonment: excise liberalism

This past week, the New Orleans Times-Picayune ran an interesting series on Louisiana corrections policy and its larger ramifications to society. But perhaps the most revealing information from it, pointing to an issue which scarcely gets addressed, came in the form of portraits of the raw product that fuels imprisonment – the miscreants themselves, how they got there, and how policy affects their behavior prior to their infusing into the system.

The series focuses on the state’s stern criminal justice policies that make it apparently the lockup capital of the world as its rate is highest in the U.S., which has the highest rate in the world, and policy to change it that would produce fewer people incarcerated yet still punished and perhaps directed in ways to reduce repeat offenses. It makes the case that the high rate of imprisonment partly is a function of current policies (although some are about to be relaxed it appears) that if changed would alleviate the condition somewhat with benefits of the change to society exceeding the costs.

However, it does not stop to ponder the nexus between rates of crime and rates of imprisonment. One might think a high imprisonment rate must have a high rate of crime to supply the raw material. Think again: next to the U.S., Singapore has the highest lockup rate in the world, but one of the lowest crime rates, showing an intervening variable exists in the theory. And that is culture: one that accentuates the future-oriented values of work and thrift to keep poverty rates low rather than the present-oriented values of immediate gratification and conspicuous consumption, that features more helpful than confrontational attitudes between police and the citizenry, and promotes the idea that people need to work within societal systems with each other to try to achieve individual goals that have collective benefits. And while the argument could be made that the authoritarian history of its government encouraged this (as it does in culturally-similar Hong Kong today), it’s been two decades since Singapore transformed into a genuine democracy.

Budget spat counterproductive, reflects political ambition

The spat that has erupted between the Gov. Bobby Jindal Administration and Treasurer John Kennedy only may be understood in the context of political ambition that ultimately impedes optimal policy-making on the issue of the budget.

It began when Kennedy, no stranger to offering advice to other policy-makers even when it has little to do with if anything with his official duties, took matters a step further and criticized Jindal and his crew for their deserved reluctance to flush available but poorly-allocated revenues out of the budget that would lead to cutting higher-priority functions in state health care and higher education. Ever since he lost in his third attempt to move beyond the office he has held now for over a dozen years in 2008, unusually for an executive branch officeholder Kennedy has peppered the universe with ideas about how other parts of Louisiana government should do their jobs, but until now never had moved to outright political attacks on others with the accusation that they were whipping up fear to prevent the budget reductions.

This atypical behavior of a statewide elected official stems from Kennedy’s absolutely naked ambition to achieve higher office, with the governor’s office presumably in his sights in 2015 (as his rhetoric in these commentaries that began only after his last unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, we can assume he is not interested in a rematch in 2014 with Sen. Mary Landrieu). This isn’t necessarily a bad thing; having such a carrot dangled spurs candidates into coming up with good policy suggestions. And, when he first came up with a comprehensive list of policy changes to try to reduce state spending without, he argued, big cuts in health care and higher education, while uneven both in quality and realism, there were some good ideas on it.

Dynamics make Jindal serious VP nominee contender

With the Republican presidential nomination apparently settled, figuring out who will be presumptive nominee Mitt Romney’s vice presidential running has begun to rival baseball as the national pastime. As Romney has started to lead national polls against embattled incumbent Democrat Pres. Barack Obama, the stakes grow higher and especially so in Louisiana, as one potential contender is Gov. Bobby Jindal.

Talk of making him the game changer on the GOP ticket emerged in that contest four years ago, but reasons he would not have made the cut (assuming, leaving aside his declaration to then-candidate Sen. John McCain that he was a non-candidate, he would not have been selected) were he would have left the state open then to a Democrat successor (current New Orleans Mayor Mitch Landrieu) and he didn’t come from a state that would give him a competitive advantage. He also didn’t have a lot of experience in elective office – then three years in the U.S. House of Representatives and just starting as governor.

Turns out that those two things didn’t much matter, as the eventual pick former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin got the nod, who had only a little more experience as a governor and also hailed from a noncompetitive state. However, like Jindal, she had acted in office as a conservative and with her female sex, as would have Jindal’s south Asian Indian background, was figured to offset Obama’s “Magic Negro” status in the minds of less sophisticated voters.

Reelection politics drives prison privatization opposition

As the issue has been brought to the wider consciousness of policy-making in Louisiana, it’s ironic that, for the second straight year, the chances of reducing state government spending in corrections through privatization seems to be dwindling under charges that contracting out corrections would be detrimental, when Louisiana already is by far the state that contracts out corrections the most.

As measures that would contract out prison operations, if not sell them outright, have faced stiff resistance although on spurious terms, ignored in the background has been the fact that, besides the two prisons already privatized two decades ago, between now and then Louisiana has gone in whole hog on contracting out its corrections operations. At the end of 2011, only 47.45 percent of all individuals under state incarceration were housed in state prisons. The only difference between an expansion of private sector corrections in the state and the current common practice is the state contracts on a short-term basis with local governments.

But this still is contracting, where not only do parish sheriffs running the facilities who accept state prisoners (almost always rural sheriffs, as the urban ones’ facilities typically don’t have enough room for their own miscreants) feel pressure to get as many transfers in while spending as little as possible on them to make a “profit” off the state’s $24.39 daily reimbursement, some go in for subcontracting – they house whatever prisoners they have plus ones from the state in facilities run and even owned by the private sector. There’s no conceptual difference between this and contracting with the private sector.

Bad budget consequences await with meat cleaver approach

As stated previously, the good news concerning the Louisiana House of Representatives decision, in its iteration of next fiscal year’s budget, to dump out all of the “one-time” money is that, in doing so, it began to take a little more responsibility in setting priorities and thereby inviting consequences for its actions, establishing minimally increased accountability on its part. But the bad news is that this is not going to work as planned and thereby will create major policy problems that negate this approach’s usefulness in this instance.

To reiterate, the state’s fiscal structure, because well over half of its revenues from its own resources are dedicated in some fashion, creates a financial straitjacket that poorly matches money to priority – low priority items get over-funded and create unused pots of money, while especially the areas of higher education and health care get squeezed in terms of dollars available. The typical solution has been to sweep idle funds out of those over-funded areas – most of what is termed in total as “one-time money” – to approximate reallocation on the basis of genuine need.

However, many self-proclaimed fiscal hawks, rather than fix the system that would fix the allocation problem, want to prohibit the correction method in an attempt to force smaller, more efficient government onto the state, which by any metric does need right-sizing. Yet in doing so, they foist an unhealthy starvation diet in those two areas because their replacement strategy is incomplete and unworkable.