School reform critics display lazy, hypocritical arguments

As the Louisiana education train rumbles on, disturbing the ideological prejudices of the political left and disrupting traditional power bases, in their desperation opponents sometimes don their tinfoil hats and claim black helicopter sightings through their faith that somehow some kind of untoward influence is manifesting as a result of the world becoming something they didn’t make. Recognize that such claims simultaneously demonstrate maximal fatuousness as well as stunning moral myopia that leads to selective and unsubstantiated outrage.

For example, recently a group called StudentsFirst hailed Louisiana’s education policies as the most pro-student in the country. The group ranks highest policies that establish education choice provision and decentralized solutions for it.

Naturally, this sent the sentinels of the one-size-fits-all, government monopoly model of education provision into fits, and one complaint attempted to be used to discredit the laurels was that the group donated money to candidates running for the state’s Board of Elementary and Secondary Education. Hence, the constipated argument goes, the group goads candidates into supporting their position, and then rewards those elected by lauding them.

Jindal tax swap succeeds in fairness, wealth creation

During his second, which ended as his first successful, gubernatorial campaign, Gov. Bobby Jindal said he wanted to cut individual income taxes across the board, if not eliminate them entirely eventually. According to Jindal, that day now has arrived with his announcement of a plan involving the elimination of individual and corporate income taxation that, even with self-imposed imperfections to it as a legacy of Louisiana’s populist plague, creates a fairer and more beneficial tax system for all.

Jindal’s states that simplification of the system will produce more efficiency that will encourage investment from outside the state and more economic development within it by removing these taxes and all the exceptions to them that are disincentives to investing in productive activities. It doesn’t get any simpler than wiping out the state’s progressive income taxes and the 128 exemptions to them which (2011 statistics) comprise more than half of all revenues not collected. Or, another way of thinking about this is that already about half of all income tax revenues are forgone through exemptions; why not just go all the way and let go of the other half?

But Jindal is not counting on the additional economic growth alone to offset loss of state revenues. He also maintains there will be an increase of sales taxes, in a range suggested between 1.6 to 3 percent additional to the state’s combined 4 percent rate. That basic rate is unremarkable – it ranks 38^th among the states – but when the local rate gets thrown in, which has the highest weighted average of all the states at 4.85 percent – this makes the current overall aggregate rate the country’s third-highest and it easily would become the highest with the predicted addition.

Sleepy elections bill to gin up big newspaper opposition

Every once-in-awhile what is considered the omnibus elections bill presented each regular session to the Louisiana Legislature contains something significant to the way in which elections are conducted in the state. Most years it only makes technical and procedural changes that significantly alters things little. But this time out, one of these minor changes may have big ramifications to an important special interest that has nothing to do with elections.

Tucked away in this year’s version, which comes as a product of the State Board of Election Supervisors, among the roughly three dozen measures expected to be written into bill form and introduced is one that would drop the requirement that the names of inactive voters – those who have registration addresses not able to be verified by registrars of voters during the annual canvass or whose correspondence sent to the address on file was returned undeliverable – be published 90 days prior to federal primary elections. The purpose of this is every two years for the state to alert these voters that they would have to go through additional hurdles in order to vote unless they provide address verification.

Instead, the state argues that the online listing, where a voter may enter their names to see whether they have been put on inactive status which is never more than a day old, should suffice. It also would save, according to the last available statistics, for all parishes $200,000 in off-election years and $375,000 in presidential election years.

Dentistry argument misses point about personal responsibility

An intramural argument has broken out between the dentistry profession and those seeking expanded dental preventive care for children of poorer families. But unless a larger question is resolved first, regardless of which side gains the upper policy hand taxpayers will be the loser.

In the wild, wide world of Medicaid coverage, dentistry is an outlier with federal law and regulation essentially making its provision optional. Louisiana provides some emergency care, although it recently had to drop regular care for expectant mothers due to budget concerns. But what many don’t realize is dental care is available to these children in one area, right at their schools, where some perform sealant procedures on teeth, designed to reduce the incidence of cavities that may prevent future access of Medicaid emergency-based services.

In fact, as of the latest statistics available, Louisiana is rife with such clinics, which were encouraged to be established by the state by legislation in 1991 and now have 64, which ranks ninth highest in number but sixth-most per capita. Should a school establish one, they are not cheap; the state Department of Health and Hospitals requires a minimum of six different kinds of professionals mandating six broad areas of performance.

Cassidy, Fleming look best options ready to beat Landrieu

While Democrat Sen. Mary Landrieu already has challenged Republican opponents to “bring it on” and made moves to bolster her 2014 reelection campaign, those in the GOP have started the process of differentiating and sorting themselves out to determine who best may bring it on to her ultimate displeasure.

As recently noted, recently involuntarily retired after a single term former Rep. Jeff Landry might want to make his absence in Washington, DC a short hiatus by taking Landrieu’s spot, but that he faces a number of headwinds, chiefly an excitable recently-concluded campaign against Rep. Charles Boustany that may have alienated part of the party and particularly influential members, and depleted many of his available resources. The two were thrown together in the same district as a result of decennial reapportionment that cost Louisiana a seat in the House of Representatives.

Part of Landry’s appeal has been his consistently conservative record, particularly on fiscal matters, but another member of the state’s delegation who could match him call for call on no tax hikes and restrained spending is Rep. John Fleming. Their lifetime American Conservative Union voting records (Landry’s as of this writing just a year as they have been compiled only through 2011) are almost identically perfectly conservative. And Fleming probably could bring more resources to bear for such an expensive campaign (Landrieu spent over $10 million in the 2007-08 period to win reelection) having himself accumulated a half million to start and, like Landry, a successful businessman who can self-finance to some degree a campaign of this magnitude.

Legislature must tweak, fund more ethics enforcement

Loathe as the Louisiana Legislature might be to get into the nuts and bolts of adjudicating ethics matters of elected and appointed officials, it looks as if it will need to do so again as kinks continue to crop up from the massive reform of ethics laws and in their adjudication from the 2008-09 period.

Back then, after incoming Gov. Bobby Jindal made it one of the centerpieces of his successful campaign, in a special session he called this finally got the Legislature to pass much more stringent standards in acceptable practices and disclosure. Subsequently, other changes got made to make more professional the adjudicatory aspect, depoliticizing it and focusing the Louisiana Board of Ethics on the prosecutorial aspect. Previously, the Board had been all of judge, jury, and executioner, which gave inordinate power the small coterie of staff members and allowed politics to creep into judgments with the political appointees of the Board determining whether to follow staff recommendations on prosecution, guilt or innocence, and in punishment.

In fact, the majority of power was concentrated in the hands of the ethics administrator, then long-time employee Gray Sexton. However, the year before the sweeping changes occurred, a law was enacted that prohibited the administrator from essentially operating his own private practice on the side and mandating financial disclosure of the administrator. Rather than follow these guidelines, he quit, saying this change constituted some kind of vendetta against him by disgruntled politicians whom had faced the Board, and then gathered further negative publicity when he and the Board tried to get around the new law with a contractual arrangement for his services that got scuttled.

Concept vehicle's benefits to LA more wishful than likely

The good news is, state taxpayers won’t be on the hook for much on this one. The bad news is, whether it will come to anything is very much an open question and if it doesn’t Caddo Parish taxpayers may be out a sizable chunk of change.

The Elio Motors hybrid car/motorcycle is coming to the shuttered former General Motors plant in southwest Shreveport. The three-wheeled vehicle is like an enclosed motorcycle, two seats one right behind the other with basic operating conveniences. It looks odd, but its founder and its private sector venture capitalist, the latter actually providing the majority of resources to purchase the old facility and also opening up the building to other tenants, hope it will succeed on gas mileage figures at least a third higher than any other current automobile and a price half of any of them.

The state’s contribution comes from incentive and tax abatement programs that may or may not actually return more money to the state than is forgone, but at least won’t be triggered until there is actual production and targets to be reached. Caddo Parish’s is in the form of backing $1 million of $10 million worth of industrial development bonds, with the potential to lose it all if the enterprise goes belly-up and saddled with owning an idle property.

To date mythical, coming college cuts demand real changes

With a revenue gap now forecast to top over $1 billion for fiscal year 2014, once again higher education in Louisiana finds itself on the front lines in any budget balancing exercise. And this time, tinkering at the margins, the past response to a largely nonexistent perceived calamitous situation, probably won’t be good enough.

One drumbeat of opinion that relentlessly will be propagated by some in the upcoming debate is that Louisiana higher education has suffered horribly as result of fiscal retrenchment in recent years, necessitating that existing levels of funding be maintained, if not increasing them that require additional revenues on way or the other. This view ignores the facts surrounding actual higher education spending in Louisiana.

Six months after Gov. Kathleen Blanco took office, in that fiscal year the state spent about $2.342 billion on higher education, serving (by the fall headcount) 214,144 students, of which 29 percent was self-generated (most of this being tuition and fees), or a per-student cost of $10,937 ($7,765 to taxpayers). Four years later, a half-year after Gov. Bobby Jindal recited the oath of office for the first time, $2.878 billion was spent (25.9 percent self-generated) on 207,760 students, or a per-student cost of $13,853 ($10,265 to taxpayers). Then, last completed fiscal year, $3.012 billion (37.5 percent self-generated) paid for 225,835 students, or a per-student cost of $13,337 ($8,336 to taxpayers).

Continued Landry political career likely with wise choosing

Whether one finds his political preferences congenial, give outgoing Rep. Jeff Landry credit for WYSIWYG until the very end of his single term in Congress, a characteristic that will affect both ways chances of any political future he might have.

Republican Landry showed he had a political potential when in 2007 he almost knocked off a very established Democrat state House incumbent for a state Senate seat in his first foray for elective office, after having worked as a staffer in that body. By 2010, with the Democrat incumbent of his Congressional district, which was rumored to disappear in two years due to redistricting, making a hopeless escape for a U.S. Senate seat, he waxed the field to pick it up, joining a large number of freshmen fiscal conservatives in the body.

Events did conspire to eliminate the district, forcing him into a district with another sitting and more senior Republican member, Rep. Charles Boustany, so his entire congressional career operated in the shadow of having to face a popular incumbent. Therefore, no separation ever occurred between his bombastic campaign rhetoric and that of his governing.

New Year's Day, 2013

This column publishes usually every Sunday through Thursday after noon (sometimes even before; maybe even after sundown on busy days) U.S. Central Time except whenever a significant national holiday falls on the Monday through Friday associated with the otherwise-usual publication on the previous day (unless it is Independence Day or Christmas or New Year's when it is the day on which the holiday is observed by the U.S. government). In my opinion, there are six of these: New Year's Day, Memorial Day, Independence Day, Veterans' Day, Thanksgiving Day, and Christmas.

With Tuesday, Jan. 1 being New Year's Day, I invite you to explore this link.